Gurney: a Car Is Born : His Newest ‘Baby’ Will Be Unveiled in Long Beach Trials

It may not be the kind of imagery that mothers would be fond of, but it properly expresses the sentiment of race driver Dan Gurney for his own type of prodigy.

“Building a new race car is a little like having a baby,” Gurney once said. “You never know what’s going to come out.”

Gurney has certainly built enough of them. Some have come out great, some not.

The latest Gurney edition, an Eagle 85 G-C to be driven by Tom Sneva, will be unveiled next Friday when qualifying starts for the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach April 14. It bears little resemblance to the last Gurney model, which was powered by a Pontiac stock block engine.

“The old model, which first came out in 1980, was the fastest unsupercharged, naturally aspirated car on the Indy-car circuit,” Gurney said. “But Mike Curb and I felt our only chance to be competitive under the CART rules was to go with the turbocharged Cosworth.”

The late Mike Mosley put the stock block Eagle in the front row for the Indianapolis 500 in 1981 and a week later won at Milwaukee. It was the last time a stock block car won an Indy-car race. Later, the car was driven by Rocky Moran, Geoff Brabham, Michael Chandler, Kevin Cogan and Ed Pimm.

“We worked for years to prove the stock block competitive, but each time we came close it seemed like the Cosworths got another break in the rules,” Gurney said. “We finally threw in the towel and decided to join them.”

Making a change in engines necessitated a change in chassis design, so Gurney and his design team, headed by John Ward, started out last August with a blank piece of paper. The new model, which has been tested at Phoenix and Riverside, has full ground-effects features, an aluminum honeycomb tub and is slightly smaller than its British-built competitors--Marches and Lolas.

“I’m very encouraged by our progress,” said Sneva after testing Friday at Riverside on a short course created to resemble the sharp corners of Long Beach’s 1.67-mile circuit.

“One thing that is encouraging is that all the data from Gurney’s wind tunnel in Santa Ana is correlating with what we’re finding on the track. We’re getting closer to the Marches and the Lolas with every test, but we’re well aware that the opposition may be improving, too.

“We’re at a disadvantage, though, because there are a dozen or more Marches testing, and everything one team learns is passed along to the others. With only one Eagle, we don’t have that luxury.”

Actually, there are two Eagles, the Skoal Bandit Eagle No. 2 for Sneva and a Copenhagen-sponsored No. 98 for Pimm, the 1983 national Super Vee champion, who drove two races for Gurney last season.

The fact that Sneva is testing at all puts him ahead of last year at this point.

“I was still in the process of putting my deal together with Mayer Racing the week of the Long Beach race, and I did no testing at all,” he said. “We went into the race cold turkey.”

Sneva, a former Indy 500 winner and oval-track veteran, was not considered a threat on the tight Long Beach road course, but he finished third last year behind two proven road racers--Mario Andretti and Brabham.

When Mayer Racing, headed by Teddy Mayer and Tyler Alexander, decided to switch back to Formula One with multimillion-dollar sponsorship from Beatrice Foods, Sneva was left without a ride, despite having finished second in last year’s Indy-car standings.

Sneva won the final race in 1984 at Las Vegas on a road course, but Andretti took the season championship with his second-place finish.

“We were talking with Mike Curb about racing for him even before Mayer Racing quit, so I wasn’t as much at a loss as it might have looked,” said Sneva, a 36-year old former high school teacher and basketball coach.

“So far, I’m pleased with the way things are going, even though we’re kind of shooting in the dark at the moment. I think we’ll be tough at Long Beach, where the course is so tight, but Indianapolis might be another thing.

“The guys who run Gurney’s wind tunnel are projecting a qualifying lap for the Eagle at 215 m.p.h., which I’ll take. Last year, they said Gurney’s car would run 205, and that’s right where it ran.”