1999 Swift 010.c Indycar

Swift Engineering, formerly Swift Cars, was founded by David Bruns, Axles Cross, R.K. Smith, and Paul White in 1983. The company's first car was a Formula Ford 1600 named the DB-1, which won the SCCA National Championship in its debut race. The company later built cars for many open-wheel racing series, including CART, Formula Atlantic, Sports 2000, Formula Nippon, and Formula Ford 2000. The chassis they built were very competitive and successful, winning the Atlantic Championship from 1989 to 1992 and British Formula Renault in 1990. A year later, they were acquired by Panasonic executive and Indycar racing driver Hiro Matsushita who renamed the firm Swift Engineering.

From 1997 to 2000, Swift built chassis for the CART World Series, with two cars entered by the Newman/Haas Racing team and driven by Michael Andretti and Christian Fittipaldi. Again, Swift proved completive, earning 24 podiums from 182 race entries. After just six weeks of testing the Swift/Ford-Cosworth combination, Michael Andretti set the fastest lap and captured the checkered flag in Swift 007, in the initial race of the season at Homestead. Swift may have been a newcomer to the CART circuit, but Andretti's stretched back to 1983 when he made his CART debut. During the 1991 season, he won eight of the 17 races while taking eight pole positions, and won the CART PPG Indy Car World Series for Newman/Haas Racing.

The Newman/Haas Racing was formed in 1983 by Carl Haas and actor Paul Newman. They won their first CART title with Mario Andretti in 1984.

The Carl A. Haas Auto Imports was founded in Lincolnshire, Illinois, in 1960. Since 1967, Haas was the exclusive American importer of Lola Cars. Over the years, the Lola chassis proved its ability to succeed in all motorsports outside of Formula One. One of their rivals was Reynard who entered CART in 1994 and eventually nearly completely displaced Lola from the market. By 1998 only the Davis Racing team was using the Lola chassis. Penske Racing was building its own chassis, Newman/Haas Racing had the new Swift chassis, and all other teams were running Reynards. In 1999, Penske Racing abandoned its proprietary chassis and replaced it with a Lola chassis for the rear of that season. In 2000 and 2001, they used a Reynard. Chip Ganassi Racing and Newman/Haas switched to Lolas the following year. By 2001 the field was evenly split between Lola and Reynard.

One of the reasons the Newman/Haas team had selected the Swift chassis was because they were the only client, which meant development and future refinement would be to satisfy their needs.

With the Swift chassis, Newman/Haas scored just three more victories, two by Andretti and one by Christian Fittipaldi. Newman/Haas went back to Lola for its chassis for 2000, while Swift's CART chassis survived another year without much effect before disappearing from the very competitive series. Swift's career in the CART series included building chassis for the Newman/Haas, Patrick Racing, Gordon Racing, and Della Penna teams in 1999. Despite its withdrawal from CART, it was not through with racing; they had become the only supplier for the Toyota Atlantic Championship in 1998 and would do the same for Japan's Formula Nippon series in 2009.

by Daniel Vaughan | May 2019