A saga of audacity

THE AAR EAGLE FORMULA 1 GRAND PRIX STORY
1966 to 1968  

by Dan Gurney

By 1967 I had already been racing in Europe for 7 years. Traditionally, the most ideal situation for a racing driver in international motorsports comes when he can drive a car which represents his own country, at least this was the sentiment at the time. It went out of fashion in the last two decades, but is now making a big comeback prompted by the engine manufacturers. I grew up reading about the silver cars from Germany, the red cars from Italy, the green cars from England and the white and blue cars from the United States. This was the era where drivers like Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren and John Surtees were building their own racing cars (like race driver Enzo Ferrari had done decades earlier). The opportunity to start this effort mostly came through Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company who asked Carroll Shelby and me to build Indianapolis cars in their effort to compete against the then dominating Firestone tire in the Indy 500. As part of the bargain, they gave us the go ahead to build an F1 car to represent the U.S.A. in the international motor racing theater. Mobil and Castrol helped to fund us, as did numerous individual Americans who sent one, two, five and ten dollar checks to support this U.S. effort. Their enthusiasm was a constant source of inspiration for all of us involved during the difficult years ahead. With the benefit of hindsight and 33 years of experience, it seems even more of a monumental task now than it seemed to be then. By 1967, no American driver/car combination had won a Grand Prix since 1921 and no American driver had ever done it with his own construction.

It was a moment in time, where a dedicated group of people and I thought we could undertake such a task and succeed. The difference between dreamer and genius, between lunatic and visionary is very thin, and with our limited budget and our unlimited passion we constantly walked a tightrope.

When the first car appeared in Zandvoort at the Dutch Grand Prix in 1967, it received a lot of admiring stares from the public and the experts and was showered with publicity. It was, and remains, an aesthetically beautiful racing machine. The nose shape, which is probably the single most identifying aspect of the car, was something that I worked out with Len Terry, our chief designer. Of course it says 'Eagle', it is the vestigial beak of an Eagle. This was something that caught the fancy of the motorsports designers and the public. The car was both light and strong, the magnesium chassis with its titanium exhaust system was as light as any 12-cylinder car. It incorporated the lineage of an Indy car, had a good fuel capacity, a very good aerodynamic shape and was trouble free. "The best racing car" according to Colin Chapman "would fall apart in the last lap as it crossed the finish line". Well, Colin Chapman lived to regret that statement because a good racing car has to withstand all the rigors of the season, (not all of which can be predicted) and this car did that while still right on the weight limit. It also had a high top speed for a limited amount of horsepower and was, in fact, on the cutting edge of the existing technology of the day.

The car was designed, constructed and assembled in Santa Ana, California by my company, All American Racers, which I had founded in 1965 with Carroll Shelby as my partner. ( I subsequently bought Shelby out and have been sole owner of AAR for more than 30 years). Sometimes I read that the car was built in England by AAR's European subsidiary Anglo American Racers. This is not true. Anglo American Racers represented the racing team traveling with the car to the circuits and maintaining and preparing the car at our shop in Rye, Kent. We had no manufacturing facilities over there and never intended to build the car anywhere else but at home in Santa Ana, California. In addition to our chief designer Len Terry, Pete Wilkins, an exceptionally talented craftsman built the exhaust system which ranks on a par with the best systems I have ever seen. It worked flawlessly every time we ran. It was made of titanium and in terms of its artistic beauty had no equal. It was done by pounding dry sand into the straight tubing, then applying heat and bending it with the sand inside in order to retain the round shape (a dying art in fabrication).

The idea for our V-12 engine was created at a time when the 2-valve per cylinder era of G.P. racing had come to an end and the 4-valve per cylinder era was beginning. Ours was a 4-valve per cylinder double overhead cam 12-cylinder 3-liter engine built by the Weslake Company in the ancient pirate town of Rye in Southern England. Most of the pencil drawings were done by Aubrey Wood who was a friend of mine, I had known him from my career at BRM. Aubrey was a disciple of Peter Berthin and Raymond Mays who were the originators of the BRM racing team, in fact he had done a lot of the drawings of the successful 1.5 liter V-8 BRM racing engine. Harry Weslake was the head of the Weslake Company together with his stepson, Michael Daniels who did the day-to-day running of the company. They both had experience with a Shell Research Project which delved into high-speed combustion. They had a 375cc twin Shell research engine 4-valves per cylinder, which made excellent power, and this project gave us the courage to go ahead and make a 12-cylinder 3.0 liter engine 250cc per cylinder which was the same size as the 500cc twin.

I got Aubrey involved with the Weslakes and he designed a 12-cylinder engine, which was excellent. Like all such things, it was not perfect but structurally very sound. It did not have mechanical failures; most of our engine related difficulties were caused by little things like fuel pumps, drive belts or other relatively inexpensive parts. The engine was basically very strong, yet small and light and quite powerful. If anything, the least favorite aspect of the engine was the oil scavenging system which meant that it was less efficient than it should have been and therefore at the beginning of a race it would have really good power for one to three laps then would lose a portion as the engine sort of 'drowned' in its own oil. It did not stop the engine, but often took the edge off it. Considering that much was built on surplus Royal Navy World War I machinery that did not even have veneer adjustments for the cutting tools but had to be adjusted with the tap of a hammer, they were big, solid, rugged machines. The V-12 did remarkably well, especially against the new Cosworth engine which also appeared in that year.

Our total budget for 4 new engines (including the prototype) was roughly $600,000. That we even managed to get it running, setting up all the facilities including dynamometer to test it and actually setting lap records and pole positions (Brands Hatch) and winning races (Brands Hatch and Spa) was a minor miracle. Contrast this with today's motor racing scene where the development of a from-scratch formula 1 racing engine runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

We introduced our first Eagle Grand Prix car at the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa in 1966. It was then equipped with a Coventry Climax 4-cylinder 2.7-liter engine and I was fairly competitive with it, usually qualifying in the 2^nd or 3^rd row of the starting grid. The car was underpowered and I was looking forward to the appearance of our Gurney-Weslake V-12 which was built over the summer in Rye. It showed up in our car for the first time at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza in September and was also in our Eagle at the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, but many teething problems had to be worked out and we decided to finish the season at the Mexican Grand Prix with the old reliable Coventry Climax 4-cylinder.

We started the 1967 season with the same car/engine combination in South Africa and worked during the few remaining months until the beginning of that season on our V-12 engine as well as on a lighter version of our car. When I got the pole position and won the Formula One race at Brands Hatch in April (non-championship event) with the new V-12 engine, it gave us an enormous sense of accomplishment. We knew then that we were on the right track. We went to Monaco with the V-12 and appeared with our beautiful 'titanium car' (as it was often referred to in the press) for the first time at the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort, where it caused a sensation. I qualified 2nd (behind Graham Hill in the debut of his new Lotus Cosworth) but dropped out with fuel injection problems, something that would haunt us on and off all season. In Spa, everything finally came together. I qualified 2^nd again next to Jimmy Clark and won the race ahead of Jackie Stewart with a new race record and a new lap record, putting this Grand Prix into the history books as the fastest 'grande epreuve' ever run on a road course (see article in Car & Driver 1988 by Brock Yates). The Americans in Europe lots of G.I.s stationed over there, went wild. After the race, I was flown by helicopter to a stadium 40 miles away, it was full, they all came to see the winner of the Belgian Grand Prix.

We continued to be competitive throughout the 1967 season, qualifying usually in the first or second row of the starting field and my battles on the track with Jimmy Clark , Graham Hill, Jochen Rindt and John Surtees during that memorable year are, they tell me, the stuff of legend. At various races AAR campaigned a second car driven at the beginning of the season by Ritchie Ginther and later by Bruce McLaren with good results. The race that stands out most in my mind apart from Spa is the German Grand Prix, executed at the fabulous Nuerburgring in the Eifel mountains. Starting from the front row again, I was leading the race by 42 seconds over Dennis Hulme, when a broken universal joint put me out of the race 2 laps before the finish. This was a tremendous disappointment for me and my team. However, I established a new lap record at this 14.2 mile course, an accomplishment which, at that time, was the goal of every driver and it meant a lot to me.

The 1968 season, overshadowed by Jimmy Clark's death in April, proved to be very difficult with a dwindling budget, but we managed to hold on for a little while longer and participate in 5 races, finishing only one which ironically I consider one of the best drives of my entire career. It again happened at the German Grand Prix at the Nuerbrugring in August under the most appalling weather conditions. Heavy rain, fog and poor visibility made that race a standout forever. It was the perfect time to try out for the first time, my full-face Bell helmet, which I had introduced in Indianapolis 2 months earlier. It was soon adopted by the whole European F1 community. Initially, I was running third right on top of the leaders when I cut a tire on an earth bank inside a slow turn. I had to drive back 7 miles to the pits with a flat tire and re-entered the race in 19^th position in last place. My pit crew told me that I subsequently drove some laps faster than the leader (who happened to be Jackie Stewart) who won in a Cosworth Tyrell. He considers it one of his all-time great races. My car worked terrifically well and on the cool-off lap at t he Suedkehre, a 180 degree wide curve, I put the car in an opposite lock and held on with one hand driving and with the other hand waving to the crowd who popped their umbrellas in the rain, acknowledging the fact that it had been a good drive, a fact that is not reflected in the history books because I only finished 9th. But what a great moment!

The Italian Grand Prix in Monza, a month later, was to be the last Grand Prix for this car. After that our budget did not allow us to continue our Formula One effort anymore. I took the Eagle out of circulation and closed down our facility in England with a heavy heart, but with the knowledge that we had put the Europeans on notice and that we had put an American Grand Prix victory in the history books for all time.

The car has found a home in the Miles Collier museum in Florida, a fact I am very happy about. Due to the enormous escalation of costs and the way formula 1 racing has developed over the last three decades, it is getting more and more unlikely that an American driver will ever be able again to build his own Formula One car and drive it to victory himself. No '36' hopefully will enable future racing enthusiasts to briefly delve back into the era of the Sixties, a very special time in motor racing, when idealistic individuals, without a fortune, could still make an impact. It will forever be an inspiring and humbling thought to me that companies like Goodyear, Castrol and Mobil, as well as many Eagle fans in America took a chance to support this effort based on nothing more than the belief in me and my people's abilities.

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