Scottish race team owner Tom Walkinshaw passed away on December 12th due to cancer. He was 64 years old.

Walkinshaw began racing at 22, appearing mainly in formula car races. Afterwards, while participating in touring car events, in 1975 he established TWR (Tom Walkinshaw Racing) as his own team in the town of Kidlington in central England. In the 1980 British Saloon Car Championship, the TWR-built RX-7 G1 won 9 races out of 10 and driver Win Percy was champion. Building on that momentum they also entered the Total 24 Hours of Spa. In 1981 in the same race, Walkinshaw himself, in tandem with Pierre Dieudonn?, took the overall victory in an RX-7. In 1981 and '82 he formed a cooperative relationship with Mazdaspeed, and appeared in the Silverstone 6 Hour Race and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He drove in the 1982 WEC event in Japan, the Fuji 1000km Race, in a Mazda RX-7 254 alongside Takashi Yorino and Masanori Sekiya. They took 6th overall and were victors in the IMSA GTX Class.

After that he began to focus on his work as a team owner, leading the Jaguar Works' Team during group C's golden age, garnering countless accolades. His competitiveness was still fierce. In the 1991 running of Le Mans with Mazda as a rival he issued a written protest saying "the Mazda Rotary injects oil as well as fuel into the engine for combustion, meaning it uses a greater amount of fuel than stipulated by the Regulations" after learning of the Mazda Rotary's unique quality. However once the race was over he congratulated Mazdaspeed Director Takashi Ohashi from the bottom of his heart.

In his later years he gained a bad reputation in the F1 side of the business, and TWR, which had at one time owned an airline and Silverstone Circuit, went bankrupt and Walkinshaw lost everything. In recent years he was chairman of the British Rugby Association, working towards developing the association as owner of the Gloucester team.