VEL’S PARNELLI JONES VPJ-4
You could drive past 20555 Earl Street, Torrance without any inkling of the site’s previous life. Once the hub of one of US racing’s most dynamic and ambitious operations, it’s now just another anonymous low-rise office complex in the greater Los Angeles urban sprawl.
In the early 1970s Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing juggled successful IndyCar campaigns with Formula 5000, NHRA Top Fuel and Funny Car and USAC dirt racing, earning itself the somewhat unimaginative sobriquet of “the Superteam”. When VPJ hired Lotus 72 co-designer Maurice Phillippe in late 1971, Formula 1’s addition to that portfolio seemed inevitable.
Like many drivers who needed to conceal their racing activities from their families, Rufus Parnell Jones took on his thinly veiled pseudonym ‘Parnelli’ when he began to dabble in jalopy racing at the age of 17, below the legal minimum in his adopted home state of California. The Jones family had left their native Arkansas during the Great Depression, when Parnelli was two years old, and settled in Torrance, the hotbed of SoCal car culture. Jones developed into an astoundingly successful racer
