PRUETT: Farewell to one of racing's great minds

Bill Mitchell was hard to miss. He was seemingly as wide as he was tall, yet his talents as a technical writer, race reporter and computer software guru dwarfed the oversized frame that carried those gifts.

Mitchell, whose death in January was announced today, was a staple in Indy car, sports car and stock car paddocks while I was growing up in the sport, and was a staple in the Bay Area racing scene. He'd become synonymous with the SCCA Trans-Am series before shifting his attention to NASCAR where he was the closest thing to Einstein as teams began to embrace modern technology.

He was a celebrated "racing tech geek" whose insights about the latest cars and technologies graced the pages of numerous magazines (including SportsCar, where he wrote the "Beyond Round and Black" series that was very popular feature with SCCA racers. -Ed.) and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to have a passion for the nuts and bolts side of auto racing fed by Mitchell's words and photos.

His WinGeo software (LEFT) was a revelation for many teams throughout the world. As one of the very first commercially available programs that allowed engineers and designers to try different suspension geometries, Mitchell's products were a beacon of improvement and enlightenment in the 1990s. He'd add more helpful engineering items, many of which were used from the heights of pro racing to the amateur ranks. If you were designing or engineering a racing car when computers entered the fray, it's likely Bill's software was installed on everything with a hard drive.

About 20 years ago, a younger Marshall Pruett and Kyle Brannan (who went on to become an Indy car and sports car engineer) spent many hours at Sears Point trying to figure out how to come up with the money to buy Mitchell's software, but on our salaries as junior mechanics, it just wasn't possible. I finally bought Bill's full software suite in 2005 and felt like I'd actually made something of myself when I called to place the order.

Bill's face was seen less often in the crowd at road racing events, and I'm sure his name isn't known by many fans and drivers these days, which is a shame. He's owed a thank you by all of us – he made the sport smarter, made cars go faster and through his keyboard – in print or through coding – helped foster many of the tools used by engineers today.

His obituary, which is posted below, offers more depth to his contributions to the sport than I can manage and is worth reading:On January 17, 2014, William C. Mitchell passed away suddenly at his home in Mooresville, NC. He was known to his friends as Bill. He was graduated from CalTech in 1967 with a degree in mathematics specializing in numerical analysis, or how to perform difficult calculations. This was followed with a Masters from Stanford University in 1969. Bill spent his working life developing design and analysis software for the automotive and motorsports industry. Bill is generally considered to be the first programmer to begin the development of serious data acquisition software (Debrief3) designed specifically for the motorsports industry. In fact, many of the screen graphics and methods of analyzing data originally developed by Bill are still being used by virtually all of the current data acquisition software developers. This includes the basic algorithms used to construct an accurate track map.Bill's greatest contribution to the motorsports and automotive industry was the development of his kinematics (geometry analysis) software packages known as WinGeo3. Bill pioneered this type of software which allowed the user to study how a suspension system would move under dynamic conditions. Bill's Premier/Data WinGeo3 version allows the race engineer to download track data directly into the program, allowing the engineer to look at step-by-step suspension motion throughout each portion of the track. Bill was a visionary in that the development of this type of software was years ahead of any other kinematics software system.Sadly, at the time of his death, Bill no longer had any living relatives.  However, through the years, he built his own close-knit family of friends. He was dearly thought of and will be greatly missed by all who knew him.  He will be remembered for his brilliance, gentleness and generosity……rest in peace.