Daniel Sexton Gurney, 1931–2018

“Motor racing has been very kind to me,” wrote Dan Gurney for the New York Times sports pages in 1975. “It has exposed me and those around me to a wide spectrum of experiences, from utter tragedy to intoxicating joy and happiness. Tears at both ends—and a very worldly and interesting in‐between.”

In an era when anything seemed possible, Daniel Sexton Gurney did everything.

His wife, Evi, has confirmed that Gurney died just before noon on January 14, 2018, at age 86, leaving behind one of most singularly impressive biographies of any sort in American history. Pretty much all the legends about him—from his brilliant driving, to his winning cars and fearless innovations­—are true.

Gurney was born April 13, 1931, in Port Jefferson on Long Island, New York, into an athletic and artistic family that was an unlikely incubator of racing talent. Gurney’s parents met at Ohio’s Oberlin College, where they were known as the college’s golden couple because of their good looks and achievements. Jack Gurney played football and captained the baseball team, while Roma Sexton was president of the Class of ’25. Jack went on to Harvard to study for his MBA, joined the Glee Club there, and by 1928 was lead bass-baritone with the American Opera Company. They married in 1929 and stayed together until first Roma and then Jack passed away in 1997.

Gurney’s family, with his father joining the Metropolitan Opera, stayed in New York long enough for Dan to graduate from Manhasset High School. But then Jack made the unusual career decision to trade opera for agriculture. So the Gurneys bought a citrus-tree orchard in Southern California and relocated in 1948—specifically, to a town called Riverside. Gurney got there just as the region roared to life as the epicenter of the postwar U.S. racing and custom-car cultures.

“I was a hot-rod guy for sure,” Gurney recounted about his first automotive stirrings to Street Rodder magazine in 2007. “It was the only thing possible to do on a shoestring, as you could put a car together from junkyard parts.” After getting too many tickets in his chopped ’32 Ford coupe, he built a lower-key ’35 Ford sedan. Thanks to the help of his mother and sister and some paint, that sedan became the Bonneville Express, which he drove to the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1950. That year, he went 130.43 mph in his friend Skip Hudson’s car.

Gurney was fast in every form of motorsport he tried, and he tried them all. Ovals, drag strips, road courses, hill-climbs . . . he was a natural, and Southern California presented him with all the opportunities. It would take a war to stop him.

That war was the one in Korea. After serving in it as an artillery mechanic, Gurney returned from the war and went to work for an aluminum company. He was easily distracted from that and in 1955 entered his first professional race, in a Triumph TR2, at Torrey Pines in San Diego County. His ascent through the racing ranks from there was meteoric.

Standing six feet four inches tall, undeniably handsome, and flashing a megawatt smile, Gurney was ridiculously charismatic: the personification of what an American race driver should be. He moved from the TR2 up to a Porsche Speedster, and others were soon having him drive for them. When Riverside International Raceway opened in 1957, he was recruited to drive Cal Bailey’s Corvette and dominated a class that included Mercedes 300SLs. Bailey worked for construction magnet Frank Arciero, who had a big 4.9-liter Ferrari, and soon Gurney was driving that, too.

As fast as Gurney was, it was his methodical nature that was his greatest leverage in competition. “Plan each day,” he wrote in his diary during 1959, according to Sports Illustrated (SI). “Accomplish everything. Do not be late. Be strong. Maintain edge, stay alert. Toughen hands. Will power over all. Be true to self and true to others.” While other drivers could be reckless, Gurney turned caution and precision into competitive advantages.

Gurney’s professional career is a daunting display of versatility. In 1958, Luigi Chinetti hired him to co-drive a Ferrari Testarossa in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. That entry dropped out after only seven hours, but by 1959 Ferrari was calling on Gurney to drive its sports cars. And soon after that Ferrari had him campaigning the Grand Prix (Formula 1) cars, too. He only ran four races for Ferrari in ’59, but he finished on the podium twice.

As Gurney came into his prime, he was racing practically everywhere. No one was better at Riverside International Raceway—it was Gurney’s home track Between 1963 and 1966, he won four straight Riverside 500 NASCAR races there, then won that race a fifth time in 1968. He won seven USAC Champ Car races and four Grand Prix races, and in 1967 he drove a Mercury Cougar to a win in an SCCA Trans-Am race as well. He could drive anything.

Perhaps his greatest year was 1967. That year, Gurney qualified second for the Indianapolis 500 and was contending for the lead when he dropped out on lap 160. The winner was A.J. Foyt, who would team with Gurney in a Shelby American–entered Ford Mark IV to win the outright victory in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It remains the only time that an American-built car driven by American drivers has won the 24 Hours outright.

What Gurney didn’t do was rack up championships. Instead, his mind was racing as fast as he was. Not just minor innovations, but whole cars sprang up from his imagination.

The rear-engine revolution at the 1963 Indianapolis 500 was Gurney inspired. “It was Gurney who conceived the idea of the Lotus-Ford,” SI reported then. “Gurney who believed in it so passionately that he paid Colin Chapman's airfare for an exploratory trip to last year's ‘500,’ Gurney who then persuaded Chapman to build the Lotus ‘500’ chassis, and Gurney who talked Ford into developing the engine for it. Finally, it was Gurney who cracked the 150-mph barrier with a Lotus-Ford prototype fully a month before the speedway opened for official practice, and thus spurred the Indianapolis drivers to their present remarkable exertions.” Gurney would never win the 500 (he did finish second twice) as a driver. But he overturned it.

Determined to put an American-made car into the Grand Prix field, in 1966 he and Carroll Shelby together founded All American Racers (AAR) to conquer the world. AAR built and entered the Eagle Mark 1, which wasn’t very quick with its obsolete Coventry Climax four-cylinder engine but was an object of utter shark-nose beauty. But when re-engined with a Weslake V-12, the Eagle became competitive. A mere week after his Le Mans victory, at the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix, Gurney drove the Eagle to victory. Not only was it the only time an American driver has won a Grand Prix/Formula 1 race while driving an American-made car, it was the only time a driver has won while driving a car he himself had designed.

Frustratingly, the Weslake engine was plagued by ancillary issues that often kept the Eagle from finishing. The Belgian win would be its only victory.

Then, in 1968, Bobby Unser used an Eagle Champ Car, derived largely from the Eagle Mark 1 and powered by a turbocharged Offenhauser inline-four, to win that year’s Indianapolis 500, slaying the mighty STP turbine cars in the process.

As a driver, Dan Gurney was the first to post wins in Grand Prix, IndyCar, NASCAR, and endurance sports cars’ top series. Only Mario Andretti and Juan Pablo Montoya have since duplicated that feat. On receiving news that Gurney had died, Andretti tweeted: “I was first inspired by him when I was in midgets dreaming of being like him. I was last inspired by him yesterday. Yes, I mean forever. He understood me better than anyone else, which is why he wrote the foreword for my book in 2001.”

Gurney’s driving career was brief, and he pursued it at a time when drivers were dying horrible deaths at a furious rate. After All American Racers’ frustrating, winless year campaigning Plymouth Barracudas in the Trans-Am series—Plymouth finished fifth of the five manufacturers competing in the over-2.0-liter championship—Gurney retired from driving in 1970. “I quit,” he explained then to SI. “I believe one of the marks of a successful race driver is that he can retire in one piece.”

Well, Gurney did have one more race in him, in November 1971. A truly legendary coast-to-coast blitz across America in a Ferrari Daytona in the first, highly illegal Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, driving alongside C/D’s Brock Yates. It was a demonstration of all that could be right and wrong with American driving.

“It was utterly stock (what could be modified?), and aside from a couple of sacks full of bread and cheese, peanuts, chocolate bars, Vitamin C tablets, Gatorade, a thermos of coffee, and some extra spark plugs, etc., no extra equipment was carried,” wrote Yates about the 275GTB/4 they drove. “A dazzling blue paint job, complete with exquisite pin-striping, plus a patchwork of sponsors' decals, made the car about as inconspicuous as Hugh Hefner's DC-9. Virtually everybody was convinced the car would be a wide favorite with law-enforcement officers.”

Averaging 80 mph across the continent, Gurney and Yates finished in 35 hours and 54 minutes. “At the time, Brock and I and the other participants had no idea that the Cannonball adventure would spawn countless caper movies and fire up the imagination of enthusiasts everywhere in the world,” wrote Gurney on his website. “I knew only a few years after our win that this whole adventure resonated big time with young and old. In kindergarten, my kids were asked whether their dad had ‘really run the Cannonball.’ Spa? Le Mans? Indy? Never heard of them! The things one becomes famous for!”

Buying out Shelby’s interest, Gurney now owned all of AAR and began developing race cars. One early innovation was the Gurney flap. During development of the soon-to-be-dominant Eagle 72 Indy car during 1971, he was looking to add additional downforce for driver Bobby Unser. With some recollection of ancient aerodynamic texts in mind, Gurney added a small, perpendicular aluminum lip to the trailing edge of the Eagle’s large rear wing. The result was increased downforce, far greater cornering speeds, and a car that customers bought so many of that some IndyCar races looked like whole flocks of Eagles. The Eagle 72 took the pole position for the 1972 Indianapolis 500 and won both the 1973 and 1975 Indianapolis 500s.

Gurney’s AAR built 20 Eagles for Formula 5000 in the 1970s, six Toyota Celicas for the IMSA GTU and GTO categories during the 1980s, and 13 Toyota-powered Eagles for IMSA GTP racing in the 1980s and 1990s. AAR is the only constructor ever to build a winning Grand Prix car, a car that won the Indianapolis 500, and a car that won endurance sports-car races. Practically every one of those cars was innovative in a fundamental way.

But it’s not the cars that Gurney built or the races that he won for which he will be remembered. It’s the character of the man. Back in 1964, with the United States embroiled in a presidential campaign, Car and Driver nominated its own candidate. “Look at him from a purely political, nonautomotive standpoint,” wrote David E. Davis Jr. in the July 1964 issue. “Say his name aloud: Daniel Sexton Gurney. President Daniel Sexton Gurney. What a sound—as though he was preordained to take the job.” He embodied everything Car and Driver stands for: intelligence, boldness, perseverance, and a hundred other virtues. That he never was elected president of the United States is a loss for the country.

Incidentally, in 1964, Gurney was 33 years old, two years shy of the Constitution’s required age of 35. It would have been worth a Constitutional amendment to get him into office.

Gurney was active well into the 21st century with projects ranging from his Alligator motorcycles to the Delta Wing proposed racer. AAR does work ranging far beyond racing, too, having become a renowned aerospace and aviation shop.

“Well, what length of life is acceptable?” Gurney concluded in that 1975 New York Times story he wrote. “Is a long life most desirable despite all other considerations? What constitutes a long life: anything after 40, 50, 60? On the other hand, is the length all-important, or is something else such as the sum of experiences accumulated in a life span? Coming up with rules or guidelines becomes quite impossible.”

Dan Gurney lived a long life that accumulated so many experiences. If one needs rules or guidelines for measuring a life, his is a worthy measure.