International Race of Champions
auto racing championship held in the United States
International Race of Champions (IROC) was a North American auto racing competition, created by David Lockton, Les Richter, Roger Penske and Mike Phelps, promoted as an American-motorsports equivalent of an all-star game. Despite its name, IROC was primarily associated with North American oval track racing.
Drivers raced identically-prepared stock cars set up by a single team of mechanics in an effort to make the race purely a test of driver ability. It was run with a small field of 12 invited drivers. It was created and developed in 1972 by David Lockton, the developer of the Ontario Motor Speedway, launched in 1973, with Mark Donohue being the first driver to win the championship, in 1974. The cars used that year were Porsche Carrera RSRs. Donohue's win in the fourth and last race of that season was his last win, as he died in a Formula One crash at the Österreichring in practice for the 1975 Austrian Grand Prix. The series was not run in 1981, 1982, or 1983.
In 2007, IROC could not find a sponsor and postponed the first two races, at Daytona and Texas. IROC went on hiatus in 2007 hoping to return with a sponsor in 2008, which did not happen.
“International Race of Champions” enters the record as auto racing championship held in the United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what International, Race and Champions can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1666840. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “International Race of Champions” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.