'Daniel Sexton Gurney' (born
April 13,
1931) is one of the most important figures in the history of
American auto racing.
The son of a
Metropolitan Opera star,
[1] he was born in
Port Jefferson, New York, but moved to
California as a teenager. He has been a driver, a car manufacturer, and a team owner at racing's highest levels since
1958. He is one of only four US-born drivers (
Richie Ginther,
Phil Hill,
Peter Revson, and himself) to win a
Formula One Grand Prix, and the only one to win in a car of his own manufacture.
Gurney also won races in the
Indy Car,
NASCAR,
Can-Am, and
Trans-Am Series. Gurney is the first driver to win races in Formula One (1962), NASCAR (1963), and Indy Car (1967). The other two are Mario Andretti and Juan Pablo Montoya. In 1967, after winning the
24 hours of Le Mans together with
A.J. Foyt, he spontaneously sprayed
champagne while celebrating on the podium. Apart from starting this tradition, he also was the first to put a simple extension on the upper end of the rear wing. This device, called a
Gurney flap, increases downforce with minimal airflow disturbance.
Formula One Career
Driver
After driving a Ferrari at Le Mans in 1958, Gurney was invited to take a test run in a works
Ferrari, and his Formula One career began with the team in
1959. In just four races that first year, he earned two podium finishes, but the team's strict management style did not suit him. In
1960 he had six non-finishes in seven races behind the wheel of a privately-entered
BRM. At one race, the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, a brake system failure on the poorly-prepared BRM caused the most serious accident of his career and a longstanding distrust of engineers. Ironically, the accident caused him to make a change in his driving style that later paid dividends: his tendency to use his brakes more sparingly than his rivals meant that they lasted longer, especially in endurance races.
After rules changes came in effect in , he teamed with
Jo Bonnier for the first full season of the factory
Porsche team, scoring three second places. After Porsche introduced a better car in with an 8 cylinder engine, Gurney broke through at the
French Grand Prix at
Rouen-Les-Essarts with his first World Championship victory - the only GP win for Porsche as an F1 constructor. One week later, he repeated the success in a non-Championship F1 race in front of Porsche's home crowd at
Stuttgart's
Solitude race track. Due to the high costs of racing in F1,
Porsche did not continue after the 1962 season, though. While with Porsche, Gurney met a team public relations executive named Evi Butz, and they married several years later.
Gurney was the first driver hired by
Jack Brabham to drive with him for the
Brabham Racing Organisation. While Brabham himself scored the maiden victory for his car at the 1963 Solitude race, it was Gurney again who took the team's first win in a championship race, in 1964, again at Rouen. In all, he earned two wins (in
1964) and ten podiums (including five consecutive in
1965) for Brabham before leaving to start his own team.
Manufacturer
An '
Eagle T2G', the USAC variant of the first Eagle chassis. Almost identical to its Formula One sister model the '
T1G'.
In 1962, Gurney and
Carroll Shelby began dreaming of building an American racing car to compete with the best European makes. Shelby convinced
Goodyear, who wanted to challenge
Firestone's domination of American racing at the time, to sponsor the team, and Goodyear's president Victor Holt suggested the name, "All American Racers", and the team was formed in 1965. Gurney was not comfortable with the name at first, fearing it sounded somewhat jingoistic, but felt compelled to agree to his benefactor's suggestion.
Their initial focus was
Indianapolis and Goodyear's battle with Firestone, but Gurney's first love was road racing, especially in Europe, and he wanted to win the Formula One World Championship while driving an American Grand Prix 'Eagle'. Partnered with British engine maker
Weslake, the Formula One effort was called "
Anglo American Racers." The
Weslake V12 engine was not ready for the
1966 Grand Prix season, so the team used outdated four-cylinder 2.7-liter Coventry-Climax engines and made their first appearance in the second race of the year in Belgium. Gurney scored the team's first Championship points by finishing fifth in the French Grand Prix at Reims.
The next season, the team failed to finish any of the first three races, but on
June 18,
1967, Gurney took a historic victory in the
Belgian Grand Prix. Starting in the middle of the first row, Gurney initially followed
Jim Clark's
Lotus and the BRM of
Jackie Stewart. A muffed start left Gurney deep in the field at the end of the first lap. Clark encountered problems on Lap 12 that dropped him down to ninth position. Having moved up to second spot, Gurney set the fastest lap of the race on Lap 19. Two laps later, he and his Eagle took the lead and came home over a minute ahead of Stewart.
This win came just a week after his surprise victory with
A.J. Foyt at
24 hours of Le Mans, where Gurney spontaneously began the now-familiar winner's tradition of spraying
champagne from the podium to celebrate the unexpected win against the other
Ford GT40 teams.
Unfortunately, the victory in Belgium was the high point for AAR as engine problems continued to plague the Eagle. He led the 1967 German GP at the
Nürburgring when a driveshaft failed two laps from the end with a 42-second lead in hand. After a third place finish in
Canada that year, the car would finish only one more race. By the end of the
1968 season, Gurney was driving a
McLaren-
Ford. His last Formula One race was the
1970 British Grand Prix.
Complete F1 World Championship Results
() (Races in 'bold' indicate pole position)
Legacy
Among American drivers, his 86 Grand Prix starts ranks third, and his total of four GP wins is second only to
Mario Andretti. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Gurney's driving ability, however, was paid by the father of Scottish World Champion
Jim Clark when he took Gurney aside at his son's funeral in
1968 and told Gurney that he was the only driver Clark had ever feared on the track. (Horton, 1999).
American Championship Car
While competing in Formula One, Gurney also raced each year in the
Indianapolis 500 from 1962-1970. The last 3 years, he finished 2nd, 2nd, and 3rd, respectively. In 1969, he did not race in Formula One, instead racing in the
USAC Championship Car series and also in
CanAm. He started a total of 28 Champ Car races, winning 7 times among his 18 top tens. In 1969, he finished 4th in total points, despite starting half the races of most top drivers. In 1968, he finished 7th with only 5 starts.
Indy 500 results
NASCAR Career
Gurney's first career start was in 1962. Gurney was nearly unbeatable in a NASCAR Grand National car at the old
Riverside International Raceway in
Riverside, California. Four of his five victories came with the famed Wood Brothers. NASCAR so resented Gurney's dominance of this event (and his resultant "stealing" of prize money from and embarrassment of the NASCAR good-old boys) that they docked him a lap for a minor infraction during the 1967 race, forcing Gurney to run hard enough to ruin his engine and breaking his streak of victories. However, the race was won by
Parnelli Jones, another open wheel and road racing driver making a one-off appearance. Gurney's last start came in 1980.
Full-Time Team Owner
Gurney and his protege
Swede Savage drove identical factory-sponsored
Plymouth Barracudas in the 1970
Trans-Am Series.
Upon his retirement from Formula One, Gurney devoted himself full-time to his role as car maker and team owner. He has been the sole owner, Chairman and CEO of All American Racers since
1970. The team won 78 races (including the
Indianapolis 500, the
12 Hours of Sebring, and the
24 Hours of Daytona) and eight championships, while Gurney's Eagle race car customers also won three Indianapolis 500 races and three championships. In 1978, Gurney wrote an open memo to other race car owners with what is now known as the "White Letter" in which Gurney called for a series controlled more by the owners or "actual participants" than under the USAC banner. After much debate, CART was formed with Gurney and other owners like Roger Penske, Pat Patrick, and Bob Fletcher. CART began its first full season of competition in March, 1979 and thus the first split in open wheel racing began.
AAR withdrew from the CART series in
1986, but enjoyed tremendous success with
Toyota in the IMSA GTP series, where in
1992 and
1993 Toyota Eagles won 17 consecutive races, back-to-back Drivers' and Manufacturers' Championships, and wins in the endurance classics of Daytona and Sebring. The team returned to CART as the factory Toyota team in
1996, but left again after the
1999 season when Goodyear withdrew from the series and Toyota ended their relationship with the team. In 2000, Dan campaigned a
Toyota Atlantic car for his son,
Alex Gurney under the AAR banner.
In
1990, Gurney was inducted into the
International Motorsports Hall of Fame. He is also a member of the
Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, the Sebring International Raceway Hall of Fame, and the West Coast Stock Car Hall of Fame.
Trivia
★ He played the catalytic role in bringing together a major American manufacturer - Ford - and European designer and Lotus founder Colin Chapman, resulting in the Lotus-Ford effort at Indianapolis. This followed the earlier Indianapolis 500 entry of Jack Brabham and his Cooper-Climax, and helped usher in the "rear-engine" revolution in American open-wheel racing.
★ In
1971, he won the second
Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, by driving a
Ferrari Daytona from New York to Los Angeles in just under 36 hours together with
Car and Driver magazine editor
Brock Yates. This inspired the series of movies with
Burt Reynolds and others.
★ Gurney developed a new kind of motorcycle called Alligator, which features an extremely low seat position.
★ Gurney's unusual height for a race driver caused him constant problems during his career. During the 1.5-liter era of Formula 1, Gurney's head and shoulders extended high into the windstream compared to his shorter competitors, giving him (he felt) an aerodynamic disadvantage in the tiny, underpowered cars. At nearly 6' 3", Gurney struggled to fit into the tight Ford GT40 cockpit, so master fabricator Phil Remington installed a roof bubble over the driver's seat to allow space for Gurney's helmet. In a fortunate error, the Italian coachbuilder which built the body for the 1964 Le Mans class-winning closed-cockpit Cobra Daytona GT coupe driven by Gurney and Bob Bondurant mistakenly made the cockpit "greenhouse" two inches too tall -- the only thing that permitted Gurney to fit in the car comfortably.
[2]
External links
★
Dan Gurney Photos
★
Dan Gurney's All-American Racers
★
Gurney's Career NASCAR Starts
Notes
1. [1] All American Racers bio
2. Road & Track July 2005. On the Road:
Fast friends and fast cars.
References
★
Eagle-eye. ''Dan Gurney's All American Racers''.
★
Dan Gurney. ''GP Encyclopedia''. The Motorsport Company.
★ Blinkhorn, Robert.
Dan Gurney. ''Grand Prix Racing -- The Whole Story''.
★ David, Dennis.
Dan Gurney. ''Grand Prix History''.
★ Horton, Roger (1999).
Remember Jim Clark. ''Atlas Formula One Journal''.
★
The Gurney Flap.''All American Racers - Gurney Flap''.
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