He May Look Soft, but He Drives Hard

The thing about Dan Gurney is, he never looked like a race driver. Until he got in the car.

He had these collar-ad good looks, a dimpled smile, all his teeth and hair. If you knew he was a sportsman, you might guess tennis.

You wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he was born on Long Island and that Dad was with the Metropolitan Opera and Mom was involved in Junior League charities. If you knew there was a vehicle involved in what he did, you’d guess sailboat. Nobody in the Gurney family ever had a wrench in his hand before Dan.

They didn’t make the machine Dan Gurney couldn’t race. You name it, motorcycle, sports car, stock car, Indy car, off-road truck. Oval at Indy, the streets of Monte Carlo or in the rain at night through the trees of LeMans or hairpin turns in the Pyrenees, Gurney went fast--and often first. You may have noticed in the recent story on the late, great Jimmy Clark that the driver Jimmy most feared to see in his rear-view mirror was Dan Gurney.

Clark was not alone. A whole generation of racers grew up to curse under their breath and stand on the gas pedal when Gurney’s car showed up.

He was more than just a chauffeur. Gurney understood as well as any mechanic the complex explosions of the automobile engine and the delicate machineries of handling and tuning.

He was as American as iced tea, but the racing Establishment was always surprised that he spoke English and didn’t wear a monocle because he was so identified with Continental racing.

Gurney actually learned to drive in the hilly roadways around Riverside but went to Europe where he was so successful so early that the great Enzo Ferrari himself signed him up.

If it had wheels, Gurney could win with it--the Belgian Grand Prix, the French Grand Prix twice, the Mexican Grand Prix, Brand’s Hatch. He won the first Grand Prix ever won by Porsche. He drove Jaguars, Cobras, Lotuses. He won at LeMans with A. J. Foyt.

European Grand Prix racers usually steered clear of Indianapolis. The brutish, claustrophobic, recklessly competitive 500 miles there were a far cry from a champagne-and-silk-scarf run around the French Riviera or the Black Forest. Some great foreign drivers, notably Juan Fangio had taken one look at Indy’s turns and gone gladly back to Mille Miglias.

Gurney not only teed it up at Indy with the best and toughest of American drivers, he was in a large sense responsible for the rear-engine revolution there.

The circumstances were that Gurney not only drove in the 1962 race, he paid the fare for the English designer, Colin Chapman, to go to the Speedway and investigate the possibility of putting a Ford power plant in a Lotus chassis.

They made history. The next year, Chapman returned with two Lotus-Fords. Gurney piloted one and Clark the other. Clark finished second, Gurney seventh, and Indy racing was never the same again.

“It didn’t take Einstein to realize engines should be in the rear,” Gurney says with a shrug. “Indy just didn’t want to do it.”

Gurney is one of only five drivers who finished second two years in a row at Indy and the only one who finished second, second, third and then retired.

He didn’t leave the pits, just the track. He never won there in the cockpit, but the Eagle cars he designed and built won three times.

The trouble with Gurney is, he still has the look of the All-American boy on his way to football practice. They’ve never had to peel Dan Gurney off a wall or cut him out of charred wreckage. In his 50s, he doesn’t look markedly different from the kid who used to drag on I-5 and the Newhall grade in the ‘50s.

He’ll climb into a race car again Saturday at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach in an 11-turn, 10-lap pro-celebrity race competition in which a dozen of America’s brand names from football fields to TV sitcoms will find out what it’s like out there in cars with full roll cages, window nets, on-board fire extinguishers and competition springs.

Unless Robert Redford shows up, the one who looks most like a movie star will probably be Gurney. It’s not till they drop the flag and head for the corners that Dan looks like a race driver. Then he looks like what he was: one of the best, if not the best, ever.