Graceful Winners: Dan Gurney and His Eagles

Sam Smith's Road & Track appreciation of race driver and car constructor Dan Gurney after his death in January quoted him posing the question, "If you have the chance to make something beautiful, and you don't, well, what does that say about you?" Of all the many tributes that appeared in the press after Gurney's passing, this one offers perhaps the most visceral way of understanding the cars that he built.  Gurney was still racing after piling up an enviable record of success in sports cars and Formula One (his first Grand Prix win at the 1962 French GP stands as Porsche's only F1 victory) when he decided in the mid-1960s to build an American entry for the new 3 liter Formula One that would appear in 1966. Motivation to develop his own car may have been rooted in experiences ranging from disappointment to disaster with other builder's designs. The worst of these was a case of complete brake failure while driving for the BRM team at the 1960 Dutch GP.  The resulting accident, which killed a spectator who was in a prohibited area and broke Gurney's arm, prompted a changed driving style with more emphasis on saving the brakes, a rigorous emphasis on testing, and also in Gurney's healthy skepticism when evaluating the work of engineers. Before a race at Riverside in California in the mid-1960s, a reporter asked him about the Lotus 40 he would be driving.  Without hesitation, Gurney replied that a Lotus 40 was essentially "a Lotus 30 with ten more mistakes."

Designer Len Terry, the creator of Jim Clark's 1965 Indy-winning Lotus 38, would lay out the chassis for Gurney's new F1 project, while engineering the entirely new V12 engine was entrusted to Aubrey Woods, with construction by Harry Weslake's English engineering firm. Weslake had been involved in all Jaguar engines from that firm's beginning.  Gurney's All American Racers introduced their Eagle Mark 1 GP car during the 1966 season.  For the first few races a stopgap Climax 2.7 liter four powered the car until the Weslake was ready. The new 60 degree, 4-cam, 48-valve V12 produced 360 hp at first and eventually 400, but reliability was compromised by loose tolerances resulting from employing World War 1 era tooling (it was surplus; this was a budget project) and problems with the dry-sump oiling system that reduced power after the first few laps. Still, the car's handling and speed showed promise, and its visual design was universally admired. The low snout with oval air intake, vee-shaped in plan and outlined in white, recalled a beak to some, while the slim profile of the double-skinned alloy monocoque shell, deeply curved in section and with air extractor slots behind the front-mounted radiator, seemed organic and sharklike.  A similar design scheme was applied to the Eagle Mk. 2 Indy cars, and the 4-cam Ford V8 engines were ready for those before the V12 appeared in the Mark 1...

AAR entered five Mk. 2s with Ford V8s in the 1966 Indy 500, but the new cars suffered from teething problems.  Ultimately 6 cars would be built, and in the 1967 Indy Gurney would pilot an Eagle to 2nd place.  A.J. Foyt was so impressed he bought the car. 

In March of 1967, as a kickoff to the GP season, Gurney won the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch in England, which despite the name did not count towards the World Championship.  It did, however, show that the Eagle with the Weslake V12 was going to be competitive. That, and the 2nd place at Indy proved to be a sign that AAR and Gurney himself were about to have a memorable year.  Less than two weeks later, Gurney and A.J. Foyt shared a Ford GT Mk. IV to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans after leading for 22 hours.  A week after that, driving the last of 4 Eagle GP cars built, Gurney won the Belgian Grand Prix.  It was the first and only time that an American driver won a Formula 1 race in a car of his own manufacture.  Today, the Eagle Mk. I is considered by many designers and collectors to be the most beautiful racing car ever built...     

Gurney also finished 3rd at the Canadian GP and led the German GP until a driveshaft failure a couple of laps from the end.  That 1967 win at Spa in Belgium proved to be the last win for Gurney, as well as the Eagle, in F1 racing, but the AAR effort with the Eagle Mk. 2 would win a USAC National Championship.  Racing in this series would ultimately yield 22 wins and 33 pole positions and numerous championships; 7 of the 22 wins would belong to Dan Gurney himself.  

In 1971 Dan Gurney had the idea of adding a small vertical tab to the trailing edge of the rear airfoils during tests with Eagle team driver Bobby Unser, and this was found to increase downforce so much that the car began understeering.  When Unser suggested adding a similar vertical projection at the top trailing edge of the front airfoil, lap times came down noticeably.  The device was named the Gurney flap by aerodynamics staff during tests at Douglas Aircraft, and was the first example of a device developed in automobile racing to be adapted to aeronautical use.  The flaps were employed in a new Eagle design the next year, when Jerry Grant drove the turbocharged Offenhauser-powered Eagle shown above to capture one of racing's holy grails, the first-ever 200 mph lap certified by the USAC, while practicing for the California 500.  This 1972 Eagle design was successful enough that at the 1973 Indy race, 20 of the 33 starters would be Eagles. The '72 wedge with airfoils had a fairly long life for a racing car; Bobby Unser's winning Eagle at the 1975 Indy 500 was very similar.  By the late 1970s, Eagle Indy cars had appeared with the Cosworth DFX V8 shown below, and these were in use into the 1980s, along with V8s from Chevrolet.

Designer Pete Brock* met and worked with several legendary car constructors and found nearly all of them to be remarkably egocentric and inconsiderate, but discovered Gurney to be an exception to that rule.  In noting that exception, he said, "He doesn't seem to know he's Dan Gurney," and commended Gurney's sense of fairness in dealing with everyone, regardless of their station in life. In an era when we receive daily reminders that nice guys don't always win or even place, it's somehow reassuring to know that someone could reach the top of a profession while adhering to this ethic. "If you have the chance to make something beautiful and you don't…what does that say about you?"  In our era, this might be a good question to keep in mind for everyone from architects and engineers to city planners and politicians...

Photo Credits:

Top 3: Eagle Mark 1 Weslake V12 photographed by Paul Anderson at the Revs Institute.

4th & 5th:  Eagle Mark 2, by Ian Avery-DeWitt

6th:  All American Racers

7th & 8th:  Paul Anderson

9th:  Wikimedia

Special thanks to old friends Paul and Ian for shooting so many pictures after my batteries gave out at the Revs Institute Collier Collection, which has an impressive array of Formula 1 cars and Indy racers.

*Footnote:  The Road & Track Gurney article was featured in the March-April 2018 issue.   Designer Pete Brock's career and designs were surveyed in these posts for January 16, 2017, under the title "Unsung Genius:  Pete Brock, Car Designer."