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The
men who make history are not always the ones
remembered as the principal actors. Every car nut
knows that Carroll Shelby cajoled Ford into supplying
engines for a car built by AC Bristol that Shelby
named the Cobra.
But how many people know that Dan Gurney set the
hook that brought the innovative genius of Colin
Chapman together with the corporate might of Ford to
create the world-beating Lotus-Ford, the car that
ended the front-engine roadster era at Indianapolis?
To do that, Gurney first had to sell Chapman on
the idea of winning the Indy 500. That meant, in
Gurney’s book, inviting Chapman to see for himself,
watching the race in 1962 as Gurney’s guest.
Dan Gurney was not in need of work at the time.
Nor was he short on luster as a world-renowned driver.
He had been a factory Formula one driver for Ferrari,
BRM and Porsche. He had won Sebring, Nurburgring, the
3 Hours, Daytona, and the French Grand Prix at Rouen,
giving Porsche its first GP win. Gurney had set track
records at Riverside and Laguna Seca. He was the man
to beat almost everywhere. |
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READY TO DO BATTLE
Dan Gurney gets serious just prior to
his qualifying attempt at Indy '63.
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Gurney
had been driving rear-engine F1 cars in Europe and
he already knew that the future of racing was rear-engine
power. One year earlier, World Champion Jack Brabham had
come to take on the Offys at Indy in a F1 Cooper-Climax. He
had qualified ninth, and, with a tiny engine compared to the
Offys, shown impressive speed through the turns.
Impressive to Gurney and a few others. The old guard
establishment of oval track racing, derided the tiny,
skate-like Cooper. Supposedly representing the leading edge
of new technology, it couldn’t do better than ninth.
Ninth? Excuse me?
"The US guys kind of made small of it,"
Gurney remembers, "saying, ‘is that all he’s got?
"And the press played it that way, too."
Gurney knew that if Brabham could go that fast at
Indy, with so little horsepower, he could beat the Offys
with more. Gurney believed he could move the pieces together
to make it happen. The plan he devised did not involve Jack
Brabham.
"I said, I can’t do it with Jack. I was at
Porsche at the time. And I thought: if I had my druthers,
who would be the likely guy to design an Indy-car that
included the F1 technology of the time?"
To Gurney, the answer was obvious: Colin Chapman, the
most innovative, bold, brash, and forward-thinking race car
designer and entrepreneur of the age. The man who pioneered
lightness as a major integer of race car construction. As
much as any one person, Colin Chapman oversaw the transition
from the pre-WWII technology that dominated into the ‘50s,
to the radically lighter, ultimately monocoque, mid-engine
designs of the ‘60s. To Gurney, there was no question
about who to ask as the male mid-wife of the trans-Atlantic
Indy-car.
"The answer right away would be Colin
Chapman," Gurney says. "Not to fool around, I got
in touch with Chapman and invited him to watch the ’62
race as my guest. I said I’ll pay for your ticket."
Chapman agreed to come to Indy as Gurney’s guest and
Gurney got busy pulling strings to set the ground for
meetings that would get Chapman together with Ford. The next
chapter of racing history had just begun.
It was a time of ferment in American motor racing,
with secret projects running in all directions at both Ford
and General Motors. Soon there would be the Cobra, the
Corvette Grand Sport, the Chaparral, the Lola GT (later to
become the Ford GT40), and now the hatching of a Lotus-Ford
plot.
Gurney had invited Chapman to watch, and that’s what
Chapman did at Indy in 1962. If there were any protocols of
secrecy or propriety to be observed (and there were plenty,
in Europe), Chapman was oblivious to them.
Chapman stayed busy stealthily going around eyeballing
things, taking stock of things. He didn’t require a lot of
attending to.’
"He sized things up," Gurney says of Chapman,
a debonair genius who could have been played either by Alec
Guinness or David Niven. "He wasn’t embarrassed a bit
to get down and look at cars from underneath at a race. He
was always observing. And he was enthused. It didn’t take
him too long to say, 'Yes, I can do something here.'"
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GETTING UP TO SPEED
Gurney debriefs chief mechanic Bill Fowler
after spinning in Turn1 and pranging the Lotus.
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But first, The Rookie
Test
It was good that Chapman was such a
self-sufficient guest, because Gurney was not able to
play full-time host at the Indy 500 party. He wound up
driving one of three mid-engined cars designed by
Englishman John Crostwaite for Mickey Thompson, who
powered them with aluminum Buick V8s as the Harvey
Aluminum Specials. Thompson, like Gurney, had seen the
future in the Cooper Brabham drove in ‘61, and he
was there with a team the year after Brabham’s
pioneering run in the Cooper.
Before he could drive, Gurney, like any
first-time Indy driver, had to take and pass his
rookie test. The car he drove for that test was,
ironically, an Offy, John Zink’s "Trackburner
Special". It was his first drive in an Offy and
his first drive on an oval track.
"I had never driven a lap on an oval track
before," Gurney says, "or on those old, very
hard, narrow-tread Firestone tires, that were
essentially built for rigid-axle cars."
"The rookie test was not a slam-dunk
affair," Gurney says. "There was no
guarantee you were going to be able to get the car up
to the speed you needed to go to qualify for the
Speedway."
Gurney managed. He says the difference in feel
between the Offy and the mid-engined monocoque was not
as vast as one might think.
"There wasn’t that much difference in the
steering effort of the front-engined Offy and the
rear-engined Lotus I drove the following year,"
Gurney says. The thing that impressed him was the
track itself.
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"There
were not many tracks in the world that had 90 degree turns
that went on for a long period of time, that were relatively
quick. Each turn was different."
Having successfully completed his rookie test, Gurney
was able to enjoy getting the most he could out of the car
he was driving for Mickey Thompson.
"It was an excellent car," Gurney says of
Thompson’s ’62 Indy car. "I qualified ninth, after
only being in it a day and a half. It looked good and it was
good. But we weren’t even close to being ready."
Gurney says the Thompson Indy team effort was carried
out like the drag races that Thompson excelled at.
"They’d have the engine completely apart every
night," Gurney says. "They had a great spirit –
the drag-racing spirit I love – a total can-do attitude:
No matter, what, we’ll get it done."
Unfortunately, that didn’t afford the Thompson team
a well-sorted engine. "It was rumbling and surging
right from the very beginning. But nobody was complaining.
It was a lot of fun working with Mickey. It was a big thrill
to be part of it.’’
There was a bigger thrill coming, and that was being
part of the Lotus-Ford that was aborning. The Ford-Lotus
collaboration became done deal shortly after that race.
"Next thing we know, we had something that was a going
project.’’
Chapman had come and seen. He would come back to
conquer. The next year, he would return with a Ford-powered
Lotus for Jim Clark and a second car for Gurney. The project
represented a major corporate commitment by Ford, and
everyone involved knew they were playing a big game.
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"It was part of what was going to become
history," Gurney says. "It was the end of one era,
and the return of Ford Motor Co. to Indy. It sort of
legitimized racing from the state standpoint. In a very big
way. Globally. When an outfit like that decides to do
something, the reverberations reach far and wide."
As a Cobra team driver, in addition to F1 driving for
Porsche, Gurney was involved in the test development of the
aluminum small-block Ford V8 that became the Indy-car
engine. It was essentially an aluminum version of the
Fairlane 260 V8, sleeved down to 256 or 255 cubic inches
(depending on whom you ask), drinking in its fuel-air mix
through four Weber side-draft carburetors. The engine
weighed 360 pounds and put out about 370 horsepower in race
trim.
"We were involved in testing some of the
prototype engines," Gurney says. "We ran
reliability tests on the aluminum 255, which we ran at
Daytona in a Cobra, where I recall that I was instrumented
like an astronaut. They were monitoring my heart rate, and
measuring all kinds of things. We also ran tests at Kingman,
Arizona, and at the Speedway a couple of times, just to see
how it was gonna’ measure up."
Chapman, Gurney says, arranged for Clark to run a
Lotus F1 around the Speedway with the 1.5-liter Climax
engine in the fall of ’62. It was just after Clark had won
the USGP at Watkins Glen. "I paid very close attention
to how fast he went. My recollection is that he ran about
143 MPH." Very quick indeed for an engine one-third the
size of the Offys. |
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GETTING UP TO SPEED
Gurney confers with Ford's Bill Gay
while Bill Fowler (left) and Art Chrisman
attend to details.
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The Indy car that Chapman built as a Lotus-Ford was
similar to the Lotus 25 F1 car, but bigger and heftier.
Weighing 1130 pounds, it was five inches longer than the
Lotus 25, with a three-inch wider track and heavier gauge
wishbones and radius rods. The Indy-car wheels were high
tensile magnesium/zirconium alloy fitted with larger
diameter Girling disc brakes than the Lotus 25. The Indy
Lotus had alternative chassis mounting points in for the
rear wishbones, providing for an offset to allow the jacking
of car weight to the left, in conjunction with longer links
on the right front wishbone. The Indy Lotus had a ZF 4-speed
with all four gears working, for maximum acceleration out of
the pits.
No Red Carpet
In May 1963, the Lotus-Ford team arrived at Indy,
along with Gurney. His British teammates had as
condescending an attitude towards Indy cars as the Indy-car
teams had shown toward the Cooper team in 1961.
"We pulled up to Georgetown and 16th,
where the real entrance to the speedway was," Gurney
says, "to the wooden arch over the entrance and a
slogan that said something like: World Capitol of Motor
Racing."
World capitol? Sez who, asked the Brits?
"Immediately, all the Brits reacted," Gurney
says, "saying ‘Where do they get off, calling it
that?’ And I had to kind of stay mum, at that time."
Gurney had brought Ford and Lotus together in the
belief that a Lotus-Ford could beat the front-motor Offys.
But he knew it would not be a cakewalk. The Lotus team saw
that soon enough.
The greater sophistication and potentially faster race
speeds of the Lotus-Fords notwithstanding, neither Clark nor
Gurney could go faster than the fastest Offys. Parnelli
Jones qualified the AJ Watson-built front-engine Offy
roadster called Calhoun almost 1.5 mph faster than Jim Clark
in the Lotus-Ford. A speed of 1.5 mph is an eternity in any
race qualifying speed, on any track. Gurney’s qualifying
session was problematic, and he qualified a full notch
slower than Clark. Gurney was 1.5 mph slower than AJ Foyt in
a Trevis-Offy. Of course both A.J. and Parnelli had years of
experience at the Speedway.
"Before very far into practice and
qualifying," Gurney says, "they all-realized that
the so-called dinosaurs of track racing – the Watsons, the
Lesovskys and the Kuzmas , the various roadsters with the
long, illustrious lineage, – were not the pushovers they
might have expected."
The intricately plotted and researched graphs which
showed the lighter, more agile and more fuel-efficient
rear-engine English capability of winning the race were not
based on the cars necessarily going faster than the Offys,
although they would soon do that, too. The Lotus was not
touted as being capable of higher lap speeds than the Offys.
Practice and qualifying would show that no one – no car
– could go faster than Parnelli Jones in the Agajanian
Watson Offy.
But the heavy Watson Offey generated so much more tire
load in cornering forces and used so much more fuel to
accomplish its speed that the Lotus-Ford would beat it on
pits stops, if not speed. Chapman figured Jones Offy would
need three pit stops to the Lotus-Ford team’s two.
That was once the race started. Before that was the
month of practice and qualifying, with Gurney, a new member
of a team that had been working together for some time.
"Colin and Jimmy were a team that was very
close," Gurney says. "They could almost read each
other’s thoughts. They were a very successful team that
way. By the same token, Chapman was very fine with me."
With Chapman, Gurney says, "You were aware that
you were on a team headed by a genuine creative
genius." In his era, he was the guy. There were many
other excellent creative people, but Colin had a special
element about him.
"He loved the challenge. He was enthused about
it. He used to write notes to himself, when you’re on an
airplane, and he’d write them so small that nobody could
read them over his shoulder."
"There was a special feeling about Chapman. All
the people around him had absolute faith in his ability to
outsmart the next guy. It was a very special group of
people."
"We hadn’t done much testing before we got
there. The attitude was, we were going to be there for a
month, and we’d test what we had to there."
A very noticeable aspect of the Indy Lotus-Ford to
Gurney was how noisy the car was to drive.
"An open cockpit at those speeds vibrates and
blasts you around," Gurney says. "It’s not
quiet. But you’ve got other things to think, and you
somehow learn to tolerate it. If it’s buffeting so hard
that your vision is affected, you have to fool around and
improve it."
"Chapman came up with sort of an air scoop on the
front edge, a two-inch opening that would be funneled up, to
sort of blow a bit of air over your head. It was an attempt
to make it quieter."
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WORKING AS A TEAM
In addition to wheel problems,
Gurney had an engine that wasn't up to snuff.
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Gurney considered the Lotus Indy-car a good
racecar." The car was excellent, considering the era.
You just got in into high, and kept it there.
Gurney had learned what he knew about oval-track
driving from Troy Ruttman, one of the masters. and the
youngest driver to win the 500 at the time. "I had
talked a lot to my friend Troy Ruttman," Gurney says,
"one of the most gifted Indy-car drivers of all time. I
had met him in Europe, when he was over there for the Race
of Two Worlds. He gave me a lot of insight into Indy."
"He suggested that a loose car wasn’t going to
be very good. And, in the end, a pushing car wasn’t
either. Of course, that’s true of all racing. Troy said,
‘You need to have a little bit of push in the car. A
little bit of under steer, to get settled."
Gurney says that he and Clark, despite being
competitors, were good friends at Indy in ’63. Their lap
times were close during practice. "I got to where I was
very close with Jimmy. I admired him a great deal, and we
remained close after Indy. We had sort of an understanding,
a special relationship."
Then the month of testing ended and qualifying began.
By that day, the Lotus-Ford team was having a problem with
cracking wheels. The wheels for the Lotus Indy cars were
new, and they were cracking. By qualifying day there was
only one intact set.
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"They told me, ‘we only have one set of wheels,
so, Dan, you’re going to have to qualify on Jimmy’s
wheels and tires."
Gurney was a realist, in addition to being a good
racing politician. "I said, okay. But shouldn’t I at
least get a couple laps of practice?"
Lotus granted Gurney four laps. Just enough for him to
get the car up to speed.
"What I didn’t take into consideration was that
Jimmy’s camber setting was different from mine. He was
running slightly more negative camber than I was, and the
tires were already kinda’ fully seated in. And when I put
on Jimmy’s tires and wheels, the outside of the tire was
more on the ground than the inside. It wasn’t much, but it
contributed to the thing."
The ‘’thing’’ was a spinout, which at Indy is
a major occurrence.
"I did my first lap and it felt okay. Then I did
the next one to get a real feel for it, doing my best not to
be second-fastest."
"I knew a bit more about it later," Gurney
says. What he found was that Bobby Unser and other racers
had notice that his car was visibly twitching through the
turns.
"Unser told me he and some other guys had been
watching me get into Turn 1 I had a big twitch in the car
that I was just ignoring. They were taking bets on how long
before I spun. I ignored the twitch. I was squeezing it a
bit harder. Nobody had to tell me, you better fix your
setup, and get in there a little smoother."
"It was
my mistake. I was trying to feel it out, and go as fast as I
could, because my next appearance on the track was gonna’
be qualifying. Well, I was trying to be the fastest Lotus.
If you’re determined to be fast, and you’re unaware of
how close to the edge you’re running, and then you add a
few more things, plus trying to extract the maximum under
constraints, in four laps total…What are you gonna' say?
You’re gonna’ give it a try. And,-oh,- you’re going
backwards. I guess they call that exercising judgment. In
that case, it was not good judgment."
"I was able to catch it each time before,"
Gurney said of the twitch, "and I wasn’t aware that
other people were down there betting to see when it was
gonna’ happen."
Then the car broke loose. "The next thing I know
I was in Turn 1 going backwards. It was my own fault. It was
probably an hour before qualifying was to begin."
Chapman, Gurney said, was cool about it. "He knew
that we were trying too hard, under awkward
circumstances."
Gurney’s car was pranged, so the team back-up car
was hastily assembled and that evening, still smarting from
his collision with the wall that morning, Gurney got in
three laps. Then he aborted the first tryout session when
his foot got tangled in a safety strap.
"I had taken off a strap that had been fastened
over the throttle, to use as an emergency pullback in case
you had a situation where the throttle was stuck,"
Gurney said. There were other changes that had to be made.
"I ended up having to have a higher windscreen than
Clark. I was crammed into the car, and it was tight. Tighter
than Jack’s hat band, as we used to say."
Their differences in physical size notwithstanding,
Gurney and Clark were personally close. They also were close
in terms of the lap speeds they were cutting at Indy, until
carburetion day. Then the difference was marked.
"On carburetion day, the last day before the
race," Gurney says, "I felt as though my engine
wasn’t running correctly. It had one weak cylinder. And,
try as I might, I couldn’t get the engine changed."
For Gurney to say it "felt" as though his
engine wasn’t "running correctly," you know he
wasn’t some yokel. This was the man who had driven F1 for
Ferrari, for Porsche, and had won the Riverside 500, the 12
Hours of Sebring, the Daytona 3 Hour.
His complaints and requests for a new engine brought a
Ford senior engineer to the pits. "He came to the car
and said, ‘I understand you don’t think it’s running
right.’"
Gurney said, yes, he didn’t. Then the guy did
something that, as a high Ford honcho, he could do and took
the throttle and went wide open with it. "Floated the
valves." Made the engine scream, and made everyone
wince, waiting for the possible consequences. It didn’t
blow.
"Sounds fine to me,"" he said to
Gurney. Case closed.
Gurney is philosophical about it today. "It was
just the way those things go."
Still, it’s hard not to speculate what kind of
ruckus AJ or Parnelli might have raised in the same
situation. "Well, yes" Gurney agrees. "Had I
been AJ, I would have gotten it changed…But anyway, I didn’t"
Lofty Goals
Gurney had a larger goal than a win for himself at
Indy that year. The goal was a victory for the Lotus-Ford
team and in pursuit of that goal, he accepted the engine he
had. He says it occurred to him that Ford’s reluctance to
supply him a fresh engine might have been to cover up for
the fact that they didn’t have one.
Gurney knew better than most people just how big the
Ford Motor Corp. Indy racing venture was – and wasn’t.
For all the buckets of money Ford is said to have put into
the aluminum-block Ford Indy V8’s first year, Gurney was
surprised when he first visited the Indy racing division at
the factory.
"The Ford engine and foundry people had gotten
involved," Gurney says, "along with Chapman. But
when I had paid a visit to Ford, they were in the design
process of this engine, based on the 289, and I was
expecting a big elaborate – even an early computerized
design office where they would be working.
"It wasn’t," Gurney says. "It was a
large warehouse. Dark, with one desk. And some fellow from
Hungary, with a thick accent – probably in his late 60s
– doing the drawing. That’s who they wanted to design
and coordinate the foundry side of things."
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WORKING AS A TEAM
Jimmy Clark and Gurney discuss all the nuances
of getting the most out of their Lotus/Fords.
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Teammates No Longer
With the intense drama of qualifying for the world’s
biggest auto race over, it might have been expected that the
Lotus-Ford team would take the weekend off. Wrong. They flew
to Monaco (not a particularly easy trip in those days) for
the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. They arrived in that capitol of
continental high living and split up for their separate
tasks for the weekend. For Clark, Chapman and the rest of
the Lotus team, it was driving in the Monte Carlo Grand
Prix. For Gurney, it was driving against his Indy-team
mates, driving for Brabham.
How weird was that? Not very, Gurney says. "It’s
nothing like what it would be today. Formula One teams in
those days, we were more like a group of gypsies that went
around from track to track. There was a bit of camaraderie,
even among the teams – even between Brabham, Cooper and
Lotus. The conversation might not be as open and frank, but
there was pleasant conversation." And no friction at
all that Dan Gurney had flown 3500 miles with the Lotus
team, to drive against them at Monte Carlo, and then
fly 3500 miles back to Indianapolis, to drive with
them again.
"It was actually pretty interesting," Gurney
remarks. "After the race at Monaco, we were on a really
tight schedule to make the plane back to the US to get to
Indy in time. It was such a tight schedule that we realized
there was no way we could get from the track to the airport
in Nice by car, and the only way to make our flight was to
go by speedboat. So we went by speedboat, and then at the
other end, we had to get out of the boat a little way off
the shore, and wade the last few yards, because the boat
couldn’t go all the way in, then go across a runway and
climb over some rocks."
Back to Indy, Gurney did not bother himself any
further about the possible reasons for having to start with
an engine that was not running right. He would go with what
he had, and that meant starting the race with an engine that
was basically running on seven cylinders
"I started the race with one weak cylinder, and
it was interesting," Gurney says. "I think Jimmy
had decided that since he hadn’t done any racing at Indy,
he oughta tuck in behind me and see how things were gonna’
pan out. I kept waving him by, and he kept hanging behind
me."
"Down the straight, I’m sure he had to back
off, because I was essentially running on seven cylinders. I
waved him on by, but he hung on for another lap. Then he
took off.’’
Gurney followed, but his car could not deliver the
same speed Clark’s car produced. Clark, in his first
Indianapolis race, caught up with the charging Parnelli
Jones, and was challenging him for the lead when the Jones
car sprung the oil leak that made his win one of the most
controversial race wins in history.
Lap after lap, the Jones car spread oil in its wake,
causing two spins, and stunning the racing world with the
refusal of the Indy 500 stewards to black flag Jones. Clark
had to pull well back, to stay clear of the oil, and Jones
won.
The Lotus-Ford effort was not helped by the pit work
– the crew was not up to the demands of Indy pit stops.
That would change the following year, when Ford brought the
legendary Woods Brothers of NASCAR to Indianapolis for the
Lotus-Ford team. The Woods brothers sliced ten seconds off a
pit stop.
"We all felt as though we were making history at
the time," Gurney says of the ’63 race. "It was
a thrilling situation, really."
He says he knew some of the Indy-car crowd considered
him a turncoat for bringing the Brits to Indianapolis.
"Some of the old establishment people felt that I was
kind of a traitor. But there was no doubt in my mind that it
was gonna’ happen whether they liked it or not."
"If it hadn’t been me," Gurney said,
"it would have been somebody else." Gurney says
most of the people at the race enjoyed the show put on by
the Lotus team, though, some of his competitors would have
liked to lynch him.
In 1964, the Lotus-Ford team was back, with Clark and
Gurney in cars so much faster than the old guard Offys
that they might have been in two different races. But Clark’s
car broke and Foyt won.
Jim Clark’s 1965 Indy 500 victory in a Lotus/Ford ended
the era of the front-engined Offy that had dominated Indy
since the 1930s. After 1965, no front-engined car would ever
win, or even come close at Indy again. The age of the Offy
roadster was over. And it had been ushered off-stage in a
drama conceived and directed by Dan Gurney.
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THE TOLL OF 500 MILES
In the first moments following the '63 500,
Clark and Gurney show the strain of the race
Clark ran 2nd Gurney 7th.
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