George Robertson is not a name that is widely known in the Formula 1 world, although perhaps he should be.

The primary problem is that Robertson was an American, largely forgotten today in Grand Prix racing, where he made his name several different ways.

Born in New York in 1884, he was the son of the superintendant of the Third Avenue Railroad Company, a Scottish mechanical engineer called John Robertson, who had worked his way up through the company during 33 years of service. He left the firm in 1900, when George was 15, and three years later became President of the Automobile Exchange & Storage Company, Manhattan’s first garage. Originally a sales and service depot for the Winton automobile company, it became the home of Smith & Mably, the primary importer of foreign cars into the United States.

At 18, therefore, young George was in the right place at the right time, surrounded by exotic automobiles and rich patrons, and he began racing on hillclimbs, supported by Walter Christie of the Christie Motor Company. Driving an Apperson he hit the headlines in 1906, surviving a huge crash after the car suffered a steering failure.

He raced all manner of machinery, provided by manufacturers looking for publicity. In 1908 he was the favourite the win the Vanderbilt Cup in a Locomobile, built in Connecticut. The race was held on a section of the Long Island Motor Parkway, which was opened that year. This was a private road, funded by William K Vanderbilt, who had raced successfully in Grands Prix in Europe before returning home to establish the Vanderbilt Cup.

The race was boycotted by the Europeans that year and so Robertson became the first American driver racing a car made in the United States to win a major international motor race. Two years later he was signed by Mercedes to try to win the race again but suffered serious injuries when a newspaper reporter he was giving a ride to grabbed the steering wheel in panic and the car flipped. Robertson suffered serious arm injuries that ended his racing career, but it did not stop him joining the US Army and fighting in the Mexican border campaign in 1916 and he then became the head of the US Army Signal Corps’s aviation section. In 1919 he was transferred to the American Red Cross and became its director of transportation in Europe, being appointed as a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in France, for his work helping the country to recovery from the war.

In 1921 he went home and was appointed the team manager of Duesenberg and oversaw Jimmy Murphy’s celebrated victory in the French GP at Le Mans, the first victory of an American car in a Grand Prix in Europe. He would also oversee Murphy’s Indy 500 victory in 1922 and won again two years later with Joe Boyer driving.

After that he became a Ford Motor Company executive for four years before becoming a newspaper publisher on Long Island and, in this role, he was the force behind the campaign to build Roosevelt Raceway, raising support from Willie K’s nephew, George Vanderbilt, the owner of the Boston Redskins NFL team George Preston Marshall, and from former racer, celebrated fighter pilot and industrialist Eddie Rickenbacker.

The goal was to build a racing circuit to host events so that the best Europeans could take on the best Americans. The complex near Westbury was next door to Roosevelt Field, the aerodrome from which Charles Lindbergh had departed for his celebrated transatlantic flight nine years earlier. The circuit was built from hard-packed gravel, with wooden rails and featured double-decker grandstands with seating for 50,000, a clubhouse for VIPs and permanent garages for the teams. The track had no fewer than 16 corners, curling around one another and was designed by an architect called Mark Linenthal. The Vanderbilt Cup was revived with a huge prize fund to attract the best racers from Europe, although the Mercedes and AutoUnion teams did not appear, and so victory went to the Scuderia Ferrari Alfa Romeo of Tazio Nuvolari, ahead of the factory Bugatti of Jean-Pierre Wimille and the Alfa Romeo of Antonio Brivio. Sadly, the fans did not turn up in large numbers and the race made a huge loss. It was repeated in 1937 on a faster track and was won by Bernd Rosemeyer in his Auto Union, beating Richard Seaman’s Mercedes Benz and Rex Mays in an Alfa Romeo.

The company collapsed soon afterwards and Roosevelt Raceway disappeared, although the track design was modified slightly but used for the new Interlagos circuit that was being built at the time in Brazil. It’s not the same track that is used today but the original design hosted F1 Grands Prix from 1973 until 1980. Robertson went to work for an electric razor manufacturer from 1938 until his death, at the age of 71, in 1955.