, which killed a young spectator , a defining moment in his life
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 (behind Shelby), 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 (a move Gurney regarded as dangerous and unsportsmanlike, especially in open wheelers) 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 (in 1964) and ten podiums (including five consecutive in 1965) 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 (usually every four years) 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 (he felt) 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 . This car is the early, four-cylinder Climax-engined T1F, later replaced by the V12-engined T1G cars. The car wears the
Imperial blue paint, the
national racing colour of the United States. 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 (along with
Jack Brabham and
Bruce McLaren) 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 (including some members of the Ford team) 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 (dating from World War I), 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.
Legacy Among
American Formula One 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. The elder Clark took Gurney aside at his son's funeral in 1968 and confided that he was the only driver Clark had ever feared on the track. (Horton, 1999). Gurney was particularly noted for an exceptionally fluid driving style. On rare occasions, as when his car fell behind with minor mechanical troubles and he felt he had nothing to lose, he would abandon his classic technique and adopt a more aggressive (and riskier) style. This circumstance produced what many observers consider the finest driving performance of his career, when a punctured tire put him nearly two laps down halfway through the 1967
Rex Mays 300 Indycar race at
Riverside, California. He produced an inspired effort, made up the deficit and won the race with a dramatic last-lap pass of runner-up
Bobby Unser. The 2010
Monterey Motorsports Reunion (formerly the Monterey Historic Automobile Races) was held in honor of Gurney. A 2016 academic paper reported a mathematical modeling study that assessed the relative influence of driver and machine. Gurney was ranked the 14th-best Formula One driver of all time. ==American Championship Car==