Dan Gurney: A Hero You Had to Meet

I was born too late to fully appreciate Dan Gurney growing up. My introduction to the world of motorsport was in the mid to late 1990’s, my only first-person memory of Dan’s extraordinary AAR organization is watching the Castrol-sponsored Eagle CART cars at Laguna Seca in what would be one of the storied racing outfit’s final acts. Unbeknownst to me (and I’d submit most everyone else) at the time, mainstream motorsport was undergoing a transformation that would change its shape significantly during this era. We can now see that the rate of technology’s advancement had hit a critical incline that backed motorsport as a whole into a corner — innovation in the pursuit of outright performance and speed was no longer a sustainable platform for it to operate on. With its North Star obscured, the reasonable short-term solution was to design more restrictive regulations. In my lifetime, we haven’t come up with anything else. My entire racing career has been spent with the days of Dan Gurney seeming to be further and further in the rearview mirror.

I was fortunate, however, to have a lifeline to days gone by in my old man. Never a racer in the professional sense but certainly one at heart, he worked 9–5 by day on big-account audits in San Francisco but could occasionally be found at 2AM in the garage with his brother setting the timing on his ’68 Camaro racecar for an upcoming SVRA event. Our Sausalito neighbors really appreciated the open headers. While we’d attend any of the big pro races that came to either Sears Point or Laguna, I must have gone to five or eight vintage races a year for most of my childhood.

Vintage races have a unique (and I’d argue untapped) ability to let you peer into racing’s past. They can inform you of why things are the way they are, educate you about how racing evolved, about how legends were made. Living, breathing history is all around you, and whether you entirely understand it from being there or not, it provides context for what has come before that you just can’t get from watching YouTube videos or browsing photo archives. Still imprinted on my memory like nothing else I’ve ever experienced is a snapshot of sight, sound, and amazement watching Parnelli Jones manhandle his championship-winning Bud Moore Boss 302 through Turn 4 at the Monterey Historics some 15+ years ago. There is normally a gentleman’s agreement to put on a bit of a race in the Trans Am group, but Parnelli appeared to only have one speed; lap after lap he came through the corner with the car keeled over and backfiring on the way in, exiting wide-open in a four-wheel drift with a handful of opposite lock as he hammered down the backstraight. He absolutely dusted the entire field (which included an ex-teammate of his). Modern cars don’t look like that when they’re being driven, they don’t sound like that either; you begin to understand that there might actually have been something more primal to motorsport passion in the past that doesn’t really exist today (whether it could or not).

As far as that primal essence is concerned, the attraction and brutality of raw, unrefined machinery is accompanied by the diversity and ingenuity that much of it so evidently reflects. There was a time when development was not as much a function of computing speed as it was of brain power and innovative thinking. There was a time when the motorsport landscape was less specialized into commercial silos, and overlap among drivers, teams, and manufacturers was aplenty. There was a time when dominance was tolerated, and in turn, heroes born and legends made. There was a time when, frankly, racing was more simple and pure, because it could be. Motorsport showcased the best people had to offer as both thinkers and doers on a scale that was clear to the untrained eye, and Dan Gurney arrived to the party at its catalytic point.

Jim Hall’s Chaparrals were the first cars I became truly fascinated by. So simple yet so complex all at once. All the same tone of creamy white, most of them demarked with the well-known “66” number-type, for all the differences from the 2A to the 2J there was a clear lineage of design. When I look at those cars even today I feel a soreness in my brain thinking about how difficult the problem set was to come up with such extraordinary new ideas. The simulation program was all in your head! Like Kelley Johnson designing the Mach 3 SR-71 by hand on paper, it’s a different type of engineering exercise than we go through these days. With my interest sufficiently piqued, these kinds of special cars and the people who designed and built them began standing out — and I began paying attention.

I appreciated Gurney first for the incredible innovation and success of AAR, strange as that may sound coming from a racing driver. I’d see an Eagle Formula 5000 car, then the Swede Savage AAR Trans Am ‘Cuda, then maybe an Eagle-Offy at a museum somewhere. The more I paid attention, the more that distinctive AAR logo seemed to be on the sometimes bizarre, often beautiful and widely successful racecars I found myself attracted to. I always drove the Westlake Eagle when I played Grand Prix Legends on my computer (still the hardest racing game ever), just because I liked it best out of all the cars in the game. As I got older I was turned on to a wider breadth of racing and cars from different eras and high-flying Eagles were everywhere; the early Eagle Indy cars, the McLEagle Can-Am car, the BLAT-endowed, stock-block Pepsi Challenger, and of course the incredible GTU and GTP Toyotas. In Penske there is a sustained iterative genius where everything is always improving, a little faster than everyone else. In AAR it became clear from its track record and portfolio of vehicles that, while methodical and highly effective, it existed to think outside the box — and when possible — seek and destroy. Just thinking about that attitude always gives me a little bump of adrenaline.

As I began driving myself, the full scope of Dan Gurney’s accomplishments came into focus. Yes, he built and drove his own racecars, but even the fact that he won the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix while doing so is an entirely insufficient characterization of just how good he was; I think it actually distracts us from the fact that he’d be talked about in the same conversation as AJ, Mario, Parnelli and the rest of the group in spite of it. He was dominant when he raced stock cars, he was heralded by Jimmy Clark as his most talented rival in open wheel with multiple victories across the F1 and USAC spectrum, and nearly won Indy more than once. He won in Can-Am, Trans-Am, and endurance sports cars. Ignoring the fact that he won the F1 race in his own car, the fact that he was on the front row at the Indy 500 (*also in his own car!!*), won Le Mans with AJ in the Ford GT MkIV, then won the Belgian Grand Prix from May to June of 1967 is almost incomprehensible. Think about that.

I didn’t really grow up with racing heroes. Dale Earnhardt certainly came close, but much of what I admired about him even as a little kid was his anti-hero nature. It took me a number of years to really know and understand who Dan was and all that he had done, but once it sunk in he became one of the people I admired and respected most. I’ve been lucky to meet Dan, to be in the same room with Dan, on multiple occasions since. I’ve often found myself wondering, “What would Dan think of this?” which I think, in a strange way, is among the greatest compliments one can bestow.

I had the chance last year to ask Dan just that. Curious about the future of the sport, a few friends and I were able to block off some time and ask him what he thought. What immediately stood out was both how amazingly sharp he was and, more impressively, how much fire he still had inside him after so many years. One of us was in person on speaker with Dan in his office, I led the call one the other side. I introduced us all and gave some background to our query. Each time I paused thinking we might all join in conversation I heard nothing from the other line, so continued sort of rambling on… With an eventual text from my pal at the office — “STOP TALKING” — I discovered that either the speaker wasn’t working on their side or the call-line wasn’t picking up their sound, but that Dan had been angrily banging his cane against the speaker trying to get a word in since shortly after we began! Fired up, to say the least.

We finally dug in, gaining infinite wisdom from the man that had not only seen it all but had done it himself. You could tell this was a topic he’d spent plenty of time thinking about on his own — he had a sheet full of thoughts and questions already penned in preparation for our call. What was said that day will stay between the lot of us, but he impressed each of us beyond our inescapably high expectations.

For me, Dan represents a true all-American icon not because he wore the stars and stripes on his sleeve, but because he embodied the tenacious grit and ingenuity that distinctly encapsulates the American spirit. The fierceness of his drive, the incessant and unstoppable will to come up with something new and better, the vision and commitment to reach new heights; Dan had it all. While there will never be anyone to do quite what Dan did, I’d submit that we should aspire to create an environment where the essence of his legacy can live on. Racing was not just a strategic competition to Dan, it was a place of many dimensions where doing exceptionally hard things was worth doing well.

They say never to meet your heroes, and usually I’d agree. Reality doesn’t tend to match the inflated picture you have in your head of people you look up to. But we’re talking about Dan Gurney here, and I don’t think anyone who viewed him as such was ever disappointed.