TORRANCE, Calif. — Parnelli Jones, winner of the 1963 Indianapolis 500 and founder of Parnelli Jones Tire, died June 4 in Torrance at age 90.
Born Rufus Parnell Jones on Aug. 12, 1933, in Texarkana, Ark., Jones parlayed his auto-racing fame into a successful business career that included Parnelli Jones Tire, a retail dealership with 47 outlets in the western U.S. at its height in the 1980s.
Tied heavily to the Firestone brand throughout his racing career, Jones also was the Firestone race tire distributor in a dozen western U.S. states and was a partner in a venture that marketed a line of Parnelli Jones-branded tires as well as in U.S. Mags, a custom wheel company.
After a relatively brief career in IndyCar racing —only about eight years — Jones and longtime business partner Vel Miletich founded a racing team that won the Indy 500 in 1970 and 1971 with Al Unser driving the team's in-house-built Colt chassis. Unser won the United States Auto Club National Championship in 1970, and driver Joe Leonard — a former motorcycle racer — took home the titles in 1971 and 1972 for the Jones-Miletich team.
At about the same time, Jones ventured into various road-racing and off-road racing venues, winning the SCCA Trans-Am championship in 1970 in a Ford Mustang and the Baja 500 and Baja 1000 twice each in a race-prepped Ford Bronco, sponsored by Olympia Beer and which was nicknamed "Big Oly."
It was the off-roading aspect of Jones' career that later spawned the Parnelli Jones tire brand, skewed heavily toward the off-highway sector, initially distributed by Progressive Custom Wheel in Riverside, Calif., and then later by Dirt Gripz Inc. of Akron. The brand debuted, however, in the mid-1970s as a line under the Firestone brand.
He was inducted into the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1978 and the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1990.
Jones and Miletich also were partners in Parnelli Jones Inc./RPJ Tire Co., founded in southern California in the mid-1960s and which grew to as many as 47 retail stores in four Western States by the 1980s.
In 1993 Jones merged operations with Dob's Tire & Auto Centers, which boosted the business to over 90 retail stores and four wholesale locations. The merger brought in another partner as well — Continental General Tire Inc. — and eventually "significant" debt owed to CGT led to the business being split up and eventually liquidated.
The Parnelli Jones private-brand tire line was distributed for the better part of three decades, eventually fading away in 2010 after then manufacturing partner Denman Tire Corp. filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations, forcing Dirt Gripz — a company set up in 2000 by tire and wheel industry veteran William Eaton and his wife Bonnie in Akron — out of business.
Jones is survived by his wife of nearly 57 years, Judy, and sons PJ and Page, both of whom had professional racing careers.
More details about Jones' racing career can be found at Firestone Racing's website.
