Dan Gurney
Daniel Sexton Gurney was an American racing driver, engineer and motorsport executive, who competed in Formula One from to. Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of motorsport, Gurney won four Formula One Grands Prix across 11 seasons. In endurance racing, Gurney won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in with Ford, as well as the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1959 with Ferrari.
Born in Long Island, Gurney was the son of bass-baritone John R. Gurney and born into a family of engineers. Interested by California hot rod culture, Gurney built his first car aged 19 and became an amateur drag racer. After serving in the United States Army as an artillery mechanic during the Korean War, Gurney entered the 1957 Riverside Grand Prix, beating numerous established drivers including Phil Hill and attracting the attention of Luigi Chinetti, who organised his professional debut at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in with NART. His performance at Le Mans prompted Ferrari to sign Gurney for the season, making his Formula One debut at the after winning the 12 Hours of Sebring with the team two months prior. After achieving two podiums in only four races at Ferrari, Gurney joined BRM in. Following a non-classified championship finish with BRM, Gurney moved to Porsche, where he scored frequent podiums and finished fourth in the 1961 World Drivers' Championship. He took his maiden win at the 1962 French Grand Prix, which remains Porsche's only victory as a constructor in Formula One.
Gurney moved to Brabham in as their first-ever driver, taking multiple wins in three seasons at the team, including another fourth-placed championship finish in. Alongside Carroll Shelby, Gurney had founded All American Racing in 1964, entering Formula One with Gurney at the wheel in under the chassis name Eagle. Despite struggling for reliability with the Len Terry-designed Eagle T1, Gurney took his final victory at the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix, before leaving the sport at the end of. He returned at three Grands Prix in for McLaren, following the death of Bruce McLaren. Gurney achieved four wins, three pole positions, six fastest laps and 19 podiums in Formula One, amongst winning the non-championship 1967 Race of Champions.
Outside of Formula One, Gurney entered ten editions of the 24 Hours of Le Mans from to, winning the latter alongside A.J. Foyt in the Ford GT40 Mk IV. His celebration upon winning Le Mans—spraying champagne on the podium—has since become a custom throughout global motorsport. Gurney was a record five-time winner of the Winston Western 500 in the NASCAR Grand National Series and, in American open-wheel racing, was a six-time race winner in USAC Championship Car and twice runner-up in the Indianapolis 500 in 1968 and 1969. He was also a race-winner in the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, the Trans-Am Series and the British Saloon Car Championship. In aerodynamics, he is remembered for his invention of the Gurney flap, and became the first Formula One driver to wear a full-face helmet at the 1968 German Grand Prix. His All American Racers team won 78 official races, including the Indianapolis 500 and the 24 Hours of Daytona. Gurney was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1990.
Early life
Gurney was born to John R. "Jack" Gurney and Roma Sexton. His father was a graduate of Harvard Business School with a master's degree. Dan's three uncles were each MIT engineers. His grandfather was F.W. Gurney who was responsible for the invention of the Gurney Ball Bearing. He had one sister, Celisssa. Jack was discovered to have a beautiful voice after taking voice lessons in Paris and changed his career path to become lead basso with the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York, eventually retiring in 1947. Jack moved his family to Riverside, California, when Dan was a teenager and had just graduated from Manhasset High School. Young Dan quickly became caught up in the California hot rod culture. At age 19, he built and raced a car that went 138 miles per hour at the Bonneville Salt Flats. He later studied at Menlo Junior College, a feeder school for Stanford University. He then became an amateur drag racer and sports car racer. He served in the United States Army for two years as an artillery mechanic during the Korean War.Formula One career
Driver
Gurney's first major break occurred in the fall of 1957 when he was invited to test Frank Arciero's Arciero Special. It was powered by a 4.2-litre reworked Maserati engine with Ferrari running gear, and a Sports Car Engineering Mistral body. This ill-handling brute of a car was very fast, but even top drivers like Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles had found it difficult to handle. He finished second in the inaugural Riverside Grand Prix, beating established stars like Masten Gregory, Walt Hansgen and Phil Hill. This attracted the attention of famed Ferrari North American importer Luigi Chinetti, who arranged for a factory ride for the young driver at Le Mans in 1958. Gurney, teamed with fellow Californian Bruce Kessler, had worked the car up to fifth overall and handed over to Kessler, who was then caught up in an accident. This performance and others earned him 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 factory-prepared BRM. At the Dutch Grand Prix, at Zandvoort, a brake system failure on the BRM caused the most serious accident of his career, breaking his arm, killing a young spectator and instilling in him a longstanding distrust of engineers. The accident also 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 for, Formula 2 cars became Formula 1, which put the Porsche 718 former sportscar into the single-seater World Championship. As works drivers, Gurney teamed with Jo Bonnier for the first full season of the factory Porsche team, scoring three second places with the overweight underpowered car. He came very close to scoring a maiden victory at Reims, France, in 1961, but his reluctance to block Ferrari driver Giancarlo Baghetti allowed Baghetti in the faster Ferrari 156 to pass him at the finish line for the win. After Porsche introduced the better Porsche 804 car in with an 8-cylinder engine, and a German worker strike causing Porsche to remain absent from the Belgian round, 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, and the only GP win with an air-cooled engine. One week later, he repeated the success in a non-Championship F1 race in front of Porsche's home crowd at Stuttgart's Solitude Racetrack. Due to the high costs of racing in F1, Porsche did not continue after the 1962 season. While with Porsche, Gurney met the factory's 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. Brabham scored the maiden victory for his car at the 1963 Solitude race, but Gurney took the team's first win in a championship race in 1964 at Rouen. In all, he earned two wins and ten podiums for Brabham before leaving to start his own team. With his victory in the Eagle-Weslake at the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix, Gurney earned a distinction as the only driver in history to score maiden Grand Prix victories for three different manufacturers: Porsche, Brabham and Anglo-American Racers.
Due to his popularity, Car and Driver magazine promoted the idea that Gurney run for President of the United States in 1964. This effort was abandoned only when it was "discovered" that he was too young to qualify as a candidate. The campaign was periodically resurrected by his friends and fans.
Gurney developed a new kind of motorcycle called "Alligator", which featured an extremely low seat position. While Gurney did not achieve his goal of getting the design licensed for manufacture and sale by a major motorcycle manufacturer, the initial production run of 36 Alligator motorcycles quickly sold out and are now prized collector's items.
Gurney's tall height, unusual for a race driver, caused constant problems during his career. During the 1.5-litre era of Formula 1, Gurney's head and shoulders extended high into the windstream compared to his shorter competitors, giving him an aerodynamic disadvantage in the tiny, underpowered cars. At nearly, 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—now known as a "Gurney bubble". In a fortunate error, the Italian coachbuilder who 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.
Manufacturer
In 1962, Gurney and Carroll Shelby began dreaming of building an American racing car to compete with the best European makes. Shelby convinced Goodyear, which wanted to challenge Firestone's domination of American racing at the time, to sponsor the team. 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. Because Gurney's first love was road racing, especially in Europe, he wanted to win the Formula One World Championship while driving an American Grand Prix 'Eagle'. It has often been claimed that a Formula One car was built in Britain; in later interviews, Gurney was clear that the car was designed and built by crew members based in Santa Ana, California. 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-litre Coventry-Climax engines for their first appearance in the second race of the year in Belgium. This was the race of the sudden torrential downpour captured in the feature film Grand Prix. Although Gurney completed the race in seventh place, he was unclassified. Gurney scored the team's first Championship points three weeks later 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 1967 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 poor start left Gurney deep in the field at the end of the first lap. Throughout the race, Gurney's Weslake V-12 suffered a high-speed misfire, but he was able to continue racing. Jim 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.
At this race, Gurney achieved the first "all-American" victory in a Grand Prix since Jimmy Murphy´s triumph with Duesenberg at the 1921 French Grand Prix. Excluding the Indianapolis 500, this is also the only win for a USA-built car as well as one of only two wins of an American-licensed constructor in Formula One. He also became one of only three drivers to win a Formula One race in a car of his own construction.
The win in Belgium came just a week after his surprise victory with A. J. Foyt at the 1967 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 Ferraris and the other Ford GT40 teams. Gurney said later that he took great satisfaction in proving wrong the critics who predicted the two great drivers, normally heated rivals, would break their car in an effort to show each other up.
Unfortunately, the victory in Belgium was the high point for AAR as engine problems continued to plague the Eagle. Despite the antiquated engine tooling used by the Weslake factory, failures rarely stemmed from the engine design itself, but more often from unreliable peripheral systems like fuel pumps, fuel injection and the oil delivery system. He led the 1967 German Grand Prix 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.