1968 Gurney AAR Eagle

One of the stars of the recent Vintage Motor Racing exhibit with a special tribute to Dan Gurney at the Lyon Air Museum was Dan Gurney’s own 1968 Eagle race car.

The 1968 Eagle chassis designed by former Lola engineer Tony Southgate featured a lower flatter nose due to the use of outboard suspension assemblies. The car’s main tub was also lower in profile, with a laid-back windscreen and a body/engine cover which ended with a squared off tail section instead of the earlier rounded tail used in the 1966 and 1967 Eagle designs.

There were five 1968 Eagles built by All American Racers on Santa Ana California in the 33-car starting field for the 1968 Indianapolis 500-mile race,  First was the featured car owned by Gurney’s primary sponsor Oscar L “Ozzie” Olson of the Olsonite Corporation, manufacturer of molded one-piece plastic toilet seats. 

Gurney’s entry was powered by a 303-cubic inch stock-block Ford V-8 engine fitted with Gurney-Weslake Mark Four cylinder heads. For qualifying with the addition of nitromethane to the alcohol fuel the Gurney-Weslake engine could develop 525 horsepower.

1968 was the height of innovation at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway which was reflected in the variety of powerplants fitted to the other AAR Eagles that were entered. Roger McCluskey drove an Eagle owned by Atlanta sportsman Lindsey Hopkins that was powered by a 159-cubic inch 4-cylinder Offenhauser engine fitted with a turbocharger which was sponsored by G C Murphy stores. 

Bobby Unser drove a similar chassis and engine combination owned by Bob Wilke’s Leader Card Racers with sponsorship from Rislone oil treatment. IN 1968, a turbocharged Offehauser engine could develop 625 horsepower in qualifying trim.  

Gurney’s teammate on the Olsonite team for the ‘500” would be 1967 Formula One world champion Denis Hulme who became available after his original entry, the Shelby-Wallis turbine powered machine was withdrawn. Hulme drove the #42 Olsonite AAR Eagle which was powered a conventional 255-cubic inch DOHC (double overhead camshaft) Ford V-8 engine.   

The last Eagle entry in the Indianapolis 500-mile race field was owned by PSA airline heir Tom Friedkin powered by a 159-cubic inch turbocharged DOHC Ford engine driven by Jerry Grant with sponsorship from Bardahl oil treatment. 

While it could potentially produce the highest horsepower of the available engine, at high boost levels, the Schwitzer turbocharged Ford engine suffered both head gasket and fuel distribution issues which resulted in burned pistons.

In qualifying time trials, Unser led the Eagle contingent as he started third, on the outside of the front row, with McCluskey next in seventh place. Gurney himself started the 1968 ‘500’ in tenth place, while Grant started fifteenth, and Hulme in a late-developing program started in twentieth place.

After the leading STP Lotus turbines broke with nine laps left in the race, Bobby Unser lead the final nine laps and won by 53.81 seconds over Gurney. In a stunning debut, the 1968 AAR Eagles swept three of the top five finishing positions as Hulme finished in fourth place.

Two weeks later at the mid-June 1968 two-heat ‘Telegraph Trophy 200’ at the Mosport International Raceway in Bowmanville Ontario Canada, Gurney and his Eagle swept the program. 

A new 1968 Eagle powered by a 305-cubic inch Chevrolet V-8 stock-block engine built by Traco Engineering was entered for the event by Roger Penske for sports car ace Mark Donohue which finished in the top five of both heat races. This marked Penske’s first Indianapolis type racing car entry.

Gurney started from the pole position with a 110 MPH (mile per hour) average speed around the 2.5-mile road course. At the drop of the green flag, Dan led all forty laps of the first heat as Indianapolis ‘500’ winner Bobby Unser crashed his 1968 Eagle on the first lap. In the second Mosport heat with only 15 starters, Gurney again dominated from the pole position,as he led every lap and finished the 100-mile heat race in 55 minutes.  

Gurney did not race his Eagle Indy Car again for five and half months as he next appeared at the 1968 United States Auto Club (USAC) season finale at the Riverside International Raceway for the ‘Rex Mays 300.’ 

Gurney qualified the AAR Eagle now fitted with stubby front wings on the nose and a rudimentary wing that spanned across the rear exhaust pipes, qualified for the pole position with an average speed of 118-1/2 MPH around the historic 2.6-mile road course.

Gurney led the first four laps of the race, before Mario Andretti in a tight battle for the 1968 USAC national championship led the next four circuits. Gurney surged back into the lead on lap nine and never looked back as he led the remaining 108 laps and won by a lap over Bobby Unser’s 1968 Eagle which had been repaired from its Mosport damage and fitted with a DOHC Ford engine. 

The #48 Olsonite AAR Eagle raced five times during the 1968 USAC season and scored three victories and one second place result  was displayed at the Lyon Air Museum as it appeared at its final race as a tribute to Dan Gurney who passed away on January 14 2018.  

A pair of real race cars at the Petersen

During a summertime 2017 tour of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, the author photographed a pair of nineteen seventies real race cars. 

This McLaren M8F represents what the author considers the pinnacle of American road racing, the Canadian-American Challenge Cup for group 7 race cars, basically no rules racing. In 1971, the author, then a teenager, pleaded with his father for weeks to attend the Valvoline Can-Am race in August at the Mid-Ohio sports car course. 

The author was thrilled when Denny Hulme qualified his #5 McLaren M8F powered by a 494-cubic inch Chevrolet big-block engine for the pole position, but was disappointed when the mighty McLaren broke its drive line on the pace lap and never raced. 

Hulme and his teammate Peter Revson battled Jackie Stewart in the weird box-like Lola T260 all season long, and no racer besides those three men won any of the ten Can-Am races held in 1971. Stewart won two races that included Mid-Ohio, while Hulme won three races. Peter Revson won five races and was crowned the Can-Am champion.

This McLaren M8F example part of the Museum's permanent collection was restored by Canepa Motorsports of Scotts Valley California. 

In 1976, regular race fans could watch a Formula 1 grand prix race without confusion; the Ferrari is powered by a 183-cubic inch flat 12 cylinder engine connected to a transverse mounted five-speed gearbox. There was no carbon fiber, electro-hydraulic shifted transmissions, DRS wings, or  two-way communication with the "strategist" of the modern Formula One, just drivers that drove like hell. 

This Ferrari 312T2 represents the car defending world champion Niki Lauda drove that season, thus it carried the number 1. Even casual fans know the story of the 1976 season due to the success of the motion picture Rush.  Lauda nearly burned to death in a crash in Germany but returned to action after he missed two races six weeks later at Italy and finished fourth. 

Lauda won five races to James Hunt's six and lost the World Championship to Hunt by a single point after he withdrew after three laps in the season-ending Japanese Grand Prix. Citing the danger of racing in a downpour, as Lauda later said "my life is worth more than a title."  Lauda returned with the 312T2  in 1977 and won the second of his three world championships.    

This Ferrari  312T2 is part of the exhibit "Seeing Red: 70 years of Ferrari" in the Bruce Meyer gallery through April 2018.   

Photos by the author 

The historic1967 LeMans winner

 

Deservedly the centerpiece of the Ford Motor Company exhibit  at the 2017 SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association) show was the 1967 24 Heures du Mans (24 hours of LeMans) winning Ford GT40 Mark IV chassis  number J-5.

 

 

This car represented the ultimate development of the Ford GT40 series which first appeared at LeMans in 1964, as Henry Ford II was driven to beat the Italian Ferrari team. The initial Ford Advanced Vehicles Limited effort with British built chassis originally designed by Lola Cars powered by Ford’s 260 cubic inch V-8 engines managed by John Wyer did not perform well, and for 1965 management of the program moved to Carrol Shelby’s Shelby American Racing Team.

In 1965 Shelby American was still pushing its Cobra Daytona coupe program and after a difficult 1965 LeMans appearance in which both the Mark IIs entered retired with transmission failure, in 1966 the Shelby American GT40 Mark IIs powered by Ford 427 engines dominated at LeMans. 

The 1966 finish was botched as Ford tried to stage the 1-2-3 finish and the team of Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon were declared the winners of race over the team of Ken Miles and Denis Hulme.  The next iteration of the GT40 known as the “J-car” (chassis J-2) was destroyed in testing and killed Ken Miles and Ford dropped its development.  GT40 Mark III were cars built for road use.

Six (6) GT40 Mark IV chassis were built at Kar Kraft Inc. in Detroit powered by the mighty 427 Ford V-8 engine with cast iron block and aluminum cylinder heads fed by a pair of Holley four barrel carburetors that developed an estimated 530 horsepower and carried the Mark IV to terminal speeds of 212 miles per hour on the 3-1/2 mile long Mulsanne Straight. Lessons learned from the deaths of Walter Hangsen and Ken Miles meant the Mark IVs were more stoutly built with a steel roll cage.

 

 

 

Four Mark IV chassis were entered for the 1967 LeMans 24 hour race, two cars by Shelby American on Goodyear tires consisted of the driver team of three-time Indianapolis 500-race winner AJ Foyt and Dan Gurney in the red #1 car and the other team of 1966 LeMans winner Bruce McLaren and Mark Donohue in the yellow #2 car.

The other two Ford GT 40 Mark IVs were entered by the Holman Moody team shod with Firestone tires driven by teams of Lucien Bianchi and Mario Andretti in the bronze #3 car and the other by Denis Hulme and Lloyd Ruby in the dark blue #4 car.  The red #1 car chassis J-5 was visually different from the other entries because of the “Gurney Bubble” over the driver’s seat to accommodate Dan Gurney’s 6-foot-3 inch height.

The car #2 of Donohue and McLaren finished fourth while the #3 car assigned to Bianchi and Andretti and the #4 car of Hulme and Ruby were both eliminated in accidents during the 19th hour.   Foyt and Gurney in the #1 car led the race for the last 23 ½ hours and completed 388 laps (3251 miles) at a record breaking average of 135.48 miles per hours and won by four laps over the Ferrari 330 P4 driven by Ludovico Scarfiotti and Michael Parks.

 

The car that crossed the finish line on June 11 1967 was truly “all American”- car built in Detroit powered by an American-built Ford engine riding on American Goodyear tires driven by a pair American drivers.  This car chassis J-5 only ran one race and today the conserved car is part of the collection of the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan.

To learn more about Ford Motor Company’s racing program at LeMans in 1967 and view historic photographs visit https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/expert-sets/101482