10/13/2026
It is with a heavy heart that we share the passing of Jack Atkinson, a beloved member of our Brumos family for more than 70 years. It’s no overstatement to say Brumos would never have been what it is today without Jack Atkinson.
Jack first joined Brumos in 1955, when the name Brumos didn’t even really exist yet. He was first hired as a service manager for Brundage Motors Atlanta and his innovative solutions quickly turned him into a valued member of the team. In 1959, Jack made the move to Jacksonville to help the Brundages grow that dealership and develop the newly formed Brumos Porsche Car Corporation when the exclusive Porsche distributorship for several states was secured.
Just a year later in 1960, Jack was instrumental in the beginnings of the Brumos Racing team. While the Brundages had dabbled in various races before, this was the first concerted effort to put Brumos Racing on the map with several wins and podium finishes at Sebring, Daytona and Nassau. Jack’s previous military training on air-cooled rotary fighter plane engines made him particularly adept at sourcing and solving problems with imaginative solutions. The new Brumos team saw great successes with young drivers like Bob Holbert and Roger Penske throughout the early sixties.
After a brief stint away from Brumos, Jack rejoined in 1969 just as new Brumos owner and up-and-comer Peter Gregg started making waves in the racing circuit and met a young, then unknown Hurley Haywood. The rest is history. Bringing over a decade of racing experience at that point, both with Brumos earlier and BMW in between, Jack helped propel Peter as the team first introduced the now legendary #59.
When Hurley Haywood returned from Army service in Vietnam, the dream team started to take shape. With Jack at the helm as Crew Chief, Peter and Hurley clinched their first class victory together at Sebring in 1971 and soon after started racking up wins in the newly formed IMSA GT Championship, ultimately clinching the season title. The team repeated both feats in 1972 and marked another milestone: in the Can-Am series, the Porsche 917 was first outfitted with the wide red and blue stripes surrounding the 59, the livery that became synonymous with the Brumos name thanks to the glory years under Jack’s stewardship.
With a Trans-Am championship, two IMSA GT championships, an SCCA Championship and strong placings in the Can-Am championship in the three previous years, the Brumos team had proven to be a new force to be reckoned with by 1973. Then came Daytona of that year. After years of living in the shadow of “big teams” like Penske, Brumos would race at Daytona in the same car as Penske, a 911 RS. This would give the Brumos team the attention they deserved in the national and international motorsports media. Even if they were beaten, which everyone expected, their status would rise by association. If they managed to beat them, their status would elevate dramatically. At that point, no one even thought about an overall win.
As we all know of course, the team didn’t just beat Penske in their class, but somehow managed to win the whole thing, putting the Brumos name in the history books once and for all. One would say all the stars aligned, but from not having a car until two weeks before the race to a seagull hitting the windshield at 170mph with 7 hours to go, it’s more just to describe this as a hard-fought team victory: with two talents at the wheel and an unflappable Jack Atkinson at the helm. As Jack would say ”There's no college you can go to to learn to be a racer, not to be a driver, not to be a mechanic, not to be a crew chief — you just have to learn it by doing it”.
And learning it they did. That first win at the 24 Hours of Daytona kicked off a remarkable legacy for Brumos, and Jack guided the team to countless race wins, seven IMSA GT titles, four Trans-Am titles. Innovative, adaptive and unflappable, Jack developed his own successful racing philosophy: “We are only racing ourselves. We have to put the best car on the track every time and do the best we can do. If we get beat, we congratulate the winner. Other than that, we don't pay any attention to what anyone else is doing."
It was this racing philosophy that cemented Brumos as THE Porsche team in America and into a legacy we still celebrate today. And none of it would have been possible without Jack Atkinson. He wore many hats throughout his legendary Brumos career, but we will always remember him in the one that fit him best: the Greek fisherman’s cap he wore as he so skillfully led Brumos.
