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By: Gordon Kirby / The Way It Is

Dan Gurney and his superb line of All American Racers Eagles will be celebrated at next weekend’s Monterey Historics at Laguna Seca. Many of the great Eagles - F1 cars, Can-Am cars, Indy and GTP cars - will be on hand and a reception will be held at the track on Saturday evening to raise a glass of champagne to Dan, his team and cars.

 

As far as I’m concerned, Dan’s many accomplishments as a driver, car builder and team owner place him in a class of his own as America’s greatest racing man.

Dan’s driving career spanned sixteen years from 1955-1970 and included victories in F1, Indy cars, Can-Am, Le Mans and other long-distance sports car races and NASCAR too. He started Dan Gurney Racing in 1962 and founded AAR in 1965. Over the following 34 years, through 1999, some of the word’s most beautiful, innovative and effective racing cars were conceived, designed and built at AAR in Santa Ana, California.

 

Dan made the cover of Sports Illustrated in May 1963.

 

In Dan’s driving days, the top drivers raced F1, sports cars, Indy cars and stock cars. There’s no comparison between any modern driver and the great drivers of the sixties like Dan, Jim Clark, Stirling Moss, John Surtees, Jackie Stewart, Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Parnelli Jones and Mark Donohue who raced successfully in almost every conceivable type of car.

 

In those days, the sport enjoyed immense diversity with F1 and NASCAR drivers and sometimes teams from other major leagues competing at Indianapolis as well as in the original, unlimited Can-Am series and in races like the Los Angeles Times GPs and Rex Mays races at Riverside. And at Le Mans, all the top F1, sports car, Indy car and stock car drivers converged to drive Ferraris, Porsches, Maseratis, Fords, Corvettes and gosh knows what else. Racing is much less rich today with each category - Formula 1, sports cars, IndyCar and NASCAR - strictly separated from each other and no crossover at all in drivers, teams or cars.

 

“When I look back, I’m pretty amazed at all the arenas that I competed in,” Dan acknowledges. “Now that I’m no longer with such skills, or judgment, or ability, it’s pretty surprising that you could step into damn near anything and in a relatively short period of time be running as fast as any hot-shot in that category was going to be able to do. That was a pretty good feeling.”

 

Gurney driving the Eagle Weslake in the '66 Race of Champions, Brands Hatch, England.

 

Dan has always been one to find his own path against the accepted trend. In many ways this is the essence of the man’s infectiously free spirit. “I feel that there’s a joy in being unconventional or questioning conventional wisdom,” he says. “Why are things the way they happen to be and what’s the history of how it evolved?”

 

Through AAR’s thirty-four-year run as a race car constructor, innovation was always essential to the company. “There’s a huge, gratifying feeling on the rare occasions that any of us come up with an inspiration to do something innovative,” Dan remarks. “The personal rewards, and just the feeling, is enormously good. Part of what gave us the ability to be creative is the old thing - necessity is the mother of invention - and the passion and curiosity about why things work. It’s about the ability to picture what’s going on and discuss things with other people who have thought about it longer than you have, or have a different approach.” 

 

In many ways Dan is a man whose time has passed. He was a Southern California hot-rodder who grew up in the can-do days of the forties and fifties and was party to many of racing’s great technological breakthroughs during the sixties and seventies. But over the past thirty years the prevailing view of the sport’s rules makers and powerbrokers has run antithetically to the spirit of All American Racers. 

 

Dan’s innovative ideas were not limited to four wheels. This Honda-powered “Alligator” is an original Gurney design.

 

For years any kind of major innovation has been expressly prohibited from racing’s rulebooks from CanAm through USAC, CART, IMSA, IRL, even F1. Today, in all categories, the general layout of the chassis, aerodynamics and engine are very strictly defined. There’s no room to introduce a 1963 Lotus-Ford Indy car for example, or a Gurney/Weslake V12, or an ‘81 Eagle-Chevy, least of all a turbine-powered car or a Chaparral in all its high-winged glory. 

 

“As a fan,” Dan observes, “I think the idea that you couldn’t predict how the next race was going to shape up and what new technological innovations were going to crop up was fantastic. The idea was that the rules were essentially open. You could probably put the rules on one page and I think that was a huge draw to drivers, engineers - all the people involved - plus the fans. It’s a shame to be railing against bureaucrats all the time but the idea that there was open creativity with the cars was very important.

 

 

All American Racers in Santa Ana, California, has been the site of many innovative and highly competitive race cars, in many different categories and classes.

 

“You’re not allowed to do what you want anymore,” Dan adds. “The freedom to be creative is what I liked so much about the sport and it’s just been wrung out of it by the bureaucrats. If you had the freedom to follow your passion to do things in a creative way that’s harking back to an era when a lot of things could take place in the horse and buggy business, in the automobile business, in the aviation industry, in the racing industry, and in what became Silicon Valley. To shut off that faucet is a shame.” 

 

At 79, the spirit of adventure and innovation burns brightly in Dan Gurney’s heart. Would that modern motor racing, not least America as a whole, could re-embrace Dan’s grand spirit.

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