INDYCAR: Rutherford, Sneva pay tribute to Tyler Alexander

Although the Boston-born Alexander was best known for his exploits on the other side of the pond – not least as one of the founding members and long-time guiding lights of the McLaren team – he also enjoyed considerable success in the US, including serving as Indy 500-winning chief mechanic for Rutherford in 1974 and 1976, and narrowly missing out on the 1984 CART title with Sneva.

"Tyler and I hit it off right away," recalled Rutherford. "One of the great things you can have in racing is communication, and we were able to communicate. I'd tell him what car was doing and he'd turn it into a fix.

"The best way put our relationship is I told my wife Betty that if I can ever find anybody that wants to go racing as badly as I did, we'd be winners. And Tyler and McLaren filled that bill. He gave me good races and good people to run them and we won a lot of races and had a lot of fun.

"The first race I drove for McLaren was at Trenton. It was the M16 and in the race I spun and hit the fence. Afterwards I'm apologizing to everybody on the team, and Tyler finally comes up, spins me around and put a hand on each shoulder, looks me in the eye and says: 'Rutherford, if you don't keep count, we won't either'. That was the attitude for the seven seasons I drove for them.

"Tyler had a good sense of humor, put things in a light that made sense when things happened. You could tell he knew what the fix was and that was it. It was good. That's what I miss most, testing and working with car and with Tyler."

Sneva won the Indy 500 the year before Mayer made one of his sporadic returns to US motorsport, and for 1984 the pair found themselves working together at Teddy Mayer's team.

Things looked good for an Indy repeat: Sneva broke the track record and started from pole, but was forced to watch Rick Mears take the win after he suffered a broken CV joint with 32 laps to go.

"Before the season, Tyler and Teddy took our March to the wind tunnel," Sneva recalled.

"We had a long-track and short-track tunnel and we found the short-track tunnel was better everywhere, so we ran it at Indy. I was on the pole and Howdy Holmes, my teammate, was next to me, and we both had short-track tunnels but nobody else had caught onto that."

Sneva rebounded from the Indy setback to mount a championship charge, but narrowly lost to Mario Andretti despite winning the season finale.

"We damn near won the title," he said. "I won the last race of the year at Vegas and Mario somehow got out of a sand trap after he spun, but it was a helluva year. It was kind of a low budget deal and we came within a whisker of winning the championship.

"[With Mayer and Alexander] it was Oscar and Felix, the odd couple, for sure. Teddy was a nervous wreck about everything and Tyler was the calming force. But they both did their homework and it was a fun year to be involved with those guys."