Michael T. Lynch: Goodbye Dan Gurney

By Michael T. Lynch

Dan Gurney (April 13, 1931 – January 14, 2018) has left us, and we have lost one of the most charismatic American race drivers of any era. As the son of an opera singer on Long Island, he got the racing bug early, watching the midgets at Freeport Stadium. His hero of the day was midget driver Ted Tappet, whose real name was Phil Walters. Walters would go on to be the first great American postwar road racer, putting America on the international racing map with Briggs Cunningham’s cars.

After his father’s retirement, the family moved to Riverside, California, and Dan, who already had an interest in hot rodding, was now living in its epicenter. He modified a car for Bonneville that ran 136 mph. His resources were limited, and one person owned the engine and the other, the car. Hot rodding at the time was looked down upon and Sports Illustrated once wrote of Dan that he was “the living assurance to every worried mom that hot-rodders do not all grow up bad.”

When he scraped together enough money to buy a sports car, he progressed from a Triumph TR2 to a Porsche Speedster that carried him to his first victory in 1956. He made an almost immediate impression around the pits as a handsome, tall Army veteran, with impeccable manners. By the next year, he won in a Corvette and closed out the season when he herded a reluctant 4.9-liter Ferrari to a victory at Paramount Ranch.

Soon, with the help of Luigi Chinetti Sr., he was a member of the Ferrari factory team. When Dan arrived in Europe, he made it clear, that the pioneers like Phil Walters, Phil Hill, Carroll Shelby and Masten Gregory were just the beginning. Americans would continue to cross the big pond, and continue to win. Between 1959 and 1970, he would drive in Formula One for Ferrari, BRM, Porsche, Lotus, his own Eagle team and McLaren.

Road racing was his forte, but he made just as big an impression in other disciplines in the sport. His racing record was unique and he became the first person to win in the four major divisions – Formula One, World Sports Car Championship, Indy Car and NASCAR. In the latter, he won five of his 16 starts for an over 32% win rate. All of his NASCAR wins came at his home track of Riverside. As a result, nonpareil racing PR man, Doug Stokes named Riverside, “The House that Gurney Built”, a reference to the saying that Yankee Stadium was “The House that Ruth Built.”

Perhaps the apogee of his career came on two consecutive weekends in June, 1967. At Le Mans on the 10th and 11th, he and A. J. Foyt drove a Ford Mk IV to victory, the first for an American make, driven by Americans, a feat not replicated since. The next weekend he was in the Belgium Grand Prix, where he drove an Eagle made in his own shop to another first. It is the only time an American driver, in a car built by Americans, would win a World Championship Grand Prix.

He was a pioneer in many facets of racing. After Jack Brabham proved there was a future for rear-engine cars at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1961, Dan was the only rear-engine starter at Indianapolis the next year in a Thompson-Buick. Recognizing the potential of the new design, he brought Ford together with Colin Chapman and by 1965, Chapman’s Lotus-Ford would win the 500. There were other singular achievements like winning the only World Championship F1 race that Porsche has ever won as a manufacturer. He was also the first to wear a full-face helmet in Formula One.

His racing record was exemplary, and it was done in Dan’s typical gentlemanly way. Even the unimpressible A. J. Foyt said that, “He was always very clean. He would have won more races if he had been a little dirty, but Dan was not a dirty race car driver. They couldn’t hold a candle to Dan in road racing and neither could I. I respect him because he built his own car, built his own engine and won in Formula One the same as I did in the Indianapolis 500.”

One of the nicest compliments Dan received was unfortunately at two-time World Champion Jimmy Clark’s funeral. Clark’s father took Dan aside and told him he was the driver his son feared the most.

Dan will always be remembered for starting what is now an enduring Formula One racing tradition – spraying the crowd with Champagne. After his Le Mans victory with Foyt in 1967, he shook a magnum offered to him and sprayed those crowded around the podium. His sense of diplomacy with sponsors was well developed and he made sure that he barely grazed Henry and Christina Ford, who were nearby.

Dan’s father had earned an MBA from Harvard before his opera days and Dan had three uncles who were MIT graduates. His grandfather, Frederick, was a pioneer in ball bearing design and made them in his factory in Jamestown, New York, so technical innovation and business acumen were in Dan’s genes. He came to a point in his career when he wanted to control his destiny in terms of what he drove, so he and Carroll Shelby, backed with Goodyear money, created All American Racers in Santa Ana in 1964, where he could build cars based on his own concepts. As the company grew, Dan bought out Shelby’s share in 1970.

The company concentrated on Indianapolis cars, although they also took part in other forms of racing, and even built a limited production motorcycle. Dan never won the Indianapolis 500 as a driver, but he did win as an entrant in 1968, with Bobby Unser behind the wheel of an Eagle. As an example of AAR’s innovative engineering and aerodynamic sophistication, Unser’s Eagle qualified in 1972, an astonishing 17 mph faster than the previous year’s pole time. Part of the trick setup of the car was something known as the “Gurney Flap”, a reshaping of the car’s wings on the trailing edge. The flap has since spread to the aviation industry. An Eagle won its first Indycar race in 1966, and its last in 1981. In that span, Eagles won 49 Indycar races. Cars built in the AAR shop also won in the Can Am, IMSA GTP, GTO and GTU, Formula A and Formula Ford.

As racing wound down, Dan described the activity at the shop in an email to Luigi Chinetti, Jr., dated March 24, 2015. “All is well with us. Our company, All American is thriving. We are more or less out of racing as far as business is concerned, we are now a first rate carbon composite manufacturing company (160 employees) doing interesting engineering projects for the motorcycle, military and automotive industries. Our son Justin is running the day to day business as CEO, I have matured into Chairman of the Board.”

Car and motorcycle projects still excited Dan. One was the Delta Wing race car, which was built by AAR, but entered by another team from 2012 through 2016. Another was the radical four-stroke, “moment cancelling” engine, patented in 2015, and most suited to motorcycles.

It is doubtful that we will ever see a driver of Dan’s ability, who could also create the legacy of innovation and workmanship that he left behind.

One can’t refer to Dan’s achievements without mentioning his wife, Evi. A model and journalist, Dan met her when she was working with Huschke von Hanstein in the Porsche PR office. They say, behind every great man, there’s a great woman, and never was the epigram more true than with Dan and Evi.

In closing, Car and Driver had a Gurney for President campaign in 1964, complete with pins and bumper stickers. There was a catch. He wasn’t old enough to be President. Let’s make up for that by all writing our Congressmen to lobby for a Dan Gurney Post Office stamp. What could be more American than that?

VeloceToday and the entire automotive industry send our condolences to Evi, her and Dan’s sons, Justin and Alex, as well as Dan’s children from an earlier marriage, John, James, Danny and Lyndee Gurney Prazak.