Dan Gurney
(C) CahierArchive
You can choose to remember Dan Gurney's career for many reasons, not least that he was a great driver who should have got more Formula One wins than he did.
To start with, you can recall that he invented the Gurney flap, a right-angled strip of metal that was fitted to the rear lip of a rear wing flap to increase its downforce. Or if you had been at Le Mans in 1967, watching the podium ceremony after he won the 24 Hour race that year, you would have witnessed the first reported sighting of a driver spraying the champagne rather than just drinking it - although you won't be surprised to hear that almost inevitably, Sir Jackie Stewart claims to be the first person to do so in Formula One, which of course he later parleyed into a directorship of Moet & Chandon! That waste of booze happened in the same year that Gurney won the Belgian Grand Prix in a car he'd built himself. And Porsche and Brabham also have Gurney the driver to thank for their maiden appearances in the Grand Prix winner's circle.
Californian Gurney was the archetypal All American Boy and the company he set up with another American motoring legend Carol Shelby was indeed called All American Racers. However, when the team moved to the UK to be nearer the heart of the Formula One world, fitting a British designed and built Weslake V12 to their car, the entrant name was changed to Anglo American Racers.
And thus we arrive at the real reason to celebrate the work of Daniel Sexton Gurney: the astounding beauty that was the Eagle F1 car. It vied for wall space in any small boy's room in the 1960s along with the Lotus 49, and you'd have to say that the blue and white paint scheme on the American car - combined with its Eagle beak nose, which really looked more like a shark nose - gave the US car the edge over the UK one.
Today, ever-inventive even in his eighties, Gurney has patented something called a Moment Cancelling Four Stroke engine, a twin crank design for motorbikes and aimed at hitting low emission targets.
