FROM SPEEDSTERS TO STUTTGART
In 1961, former Ferrari works driver, Dan Gurney, joined Porsche for two years of sports car and F1 racing. In the first instalment of a fascinating two-part feature, automotive historian, Karl Ludvigsen, looks back at events leading to the legendary racer’s time with our favourite manufacturer…
Chuck Stoddard, founder of the famous Cleveland-based Porsche parts and sales centre bearing his family name, recalled how the Speedster tempted some of his customers into a 356. “They became enchanted with the Porsche driving experience, but many began to hate how cold and leaky a Speedster could be,” he said. “They soon traded up to a ‘real quality’ Porsche coupe. The unexpected consequence of this trend was that many used 356 Speedsters became available at low cost and were snapped up by budding SCCA racers working with limited budgets. These Porsches then began showing up in quantity at weekend racing events. Needless to say, this gave Porsche tremendous exposure to the USA’S growing sports car crowd.”
In California, two friends and eager competitors saw 356 Speedsters as their way forward. Dan Gurney, the younger of the pair, bought a 1956 example, trading in his Triumph TR2 and paying $100 a month to the bank. “They probably didn’t realize what I was going to do with the car!” What he did do with it was take to local roads and race the similar Speedster bought by his buddy, Ronald ‘Skip’ Hudson. “We slammed our cars around turns, skidded them, downshifted and had ourselves many a two-man Porsche race,” Gurney said many years later, acknowledging how much the pair learned from their Porsches, as well as how their high-speed sparring opened the door to the big time, with Gurney going on to become one of America’s most celebrated racers.
His big break came in 1957, when he was invited to test a 4.2-litre Maseratipowered Arciero Special with Ferrari running gear. The car was very fast, but handled terribly. Even so, Gurney managed to push the Mistral-bodied brute to a second-place finish at the inaugural Riverside Grand Prix, a result which caught the attention of Ferrari importer and owner of North American Racing Team, Luigi Chinetti, who offered Gurney a drive in a 250 TR for the 1958 24 Hours of Le Mans. Running hard in fifth place before handing the controls to teammate, Bruce Kessler, earned an invitation to test for the Ferrari works team and, following the successful path of Phil Hill, Gurney became a Maranello man in 1959, scoring two podium finishes in four races.
EYES WIDE OPEN
In 1960, he switched to Britain’s BRM, which presented a new mid-engined Formula One car at a time when Ferrari still believed the horse had to pull the cart. “I had a front-row seat for the design contest,” said Dan. “I could see that an engine in the rear, behind the driver, was the way to go.” BRM, however, suffered what was essentially the exact opposite of the Ferrari season. “There were quite a few instances where the
cars just fell apart. Jo Bonnier, Graham Hill and I were teammates with twentyseven starts between us in 1960, but we could only manage three finishes, taking one each. One! I liked the people at BRM, especially the mechanics, but the team just couldn’t keep it together.”
Ahead was the 1961 season, with a big change in displacement from 2.5 litres to 1.5 litres for the engines of Formula One cars, equivalent to a drop from 270 to 170 horsepower for the first units to roll out. Gurney, a big man who had made his name in big cars, wasn’t a fan of the new regulations. He likened driving the resultant four-wheelers to pushing hard in a Volkswagen Beetle, keeping the pedal to the metal while rowing along with the gear lever. “They were so underpowered that you reset your hourglass and started going up through the gears!” As a getting-toknow-porsche exercise on 24th July 1960, however, Gurney raced a works single-seater, the Type 718/2, at the Solitude circuit near Stuttgart, a sinuous seven-mile road course through forested countryside. “It’s a great track. It gets your attention. It demanded a lot of finesse, very definitely.” His mount was an experimental version of the Formula Two Porsche with more angular coachwork penned by Ferdinand ‘Butzi’ Porsche. Enzo Ferrari spoiled this hometown Porsche party by sending his first rear-engined F2 car, which Wolfgang von Trips drove to an impressive victory.
FIVE ALIVE
Only Zuffenhausen’s Hans Herrmann, who was driving the F2 Porsche for the first time, gave ‘Taffy’ Trips a strong challenge, placing second. In a clump of cars half a minute behind him were the BRM trio of Bonnier, Hill and Gurney, all in Porsches. “I’ve never had to drive so hard just for fifth place!” gasped the latter when interviewed after the hardfought 142-mile race. Exhausted he may have been, but his efforts were enough to secure an offer to drive for the Porsche factory team in 1961.
He was signed by the firm’s racing director and public relations chief, Huschke von Hanstein, who had a good eye for talent. Pleasingly, unlike Gurney’s contract with BRM, the Porsche paperwork gave him the advantage of being able to compete for the works team in sports cars as well as Formula racing, just as he’d done for Ferrari. Things could have got off to a better start, though — Gurney courted controversy when, instead of piloting a Porsche, he arrived for the 1961 season in a Chevrolet Corvair he’d shipped to Europe with the intention of using the car to ferry him to and from each race. At least it was rear-engined and air-cooled!
“I thought he was just fine,” Gurney said of von Hanstein. “We had an understanding fairly early on. I caught him doing a couple of things that I wasn’t very happy about and I let him know of my dissatisfaction in a big way, in front of others. The two of us developed a certain amount of respect for one another. I remember he had a twinkle in his eye all the time and covered the whole waterfront pretty thoroughly. He knew human nature and had a great sense of humour. Importantly, he held himself to a very high standard. He was old aristocracy, in a way that was very complementary. He had links to all these great families in Europe and managed to get them thinking that it was good to be seen driving a Porsche.”
Gurney’s two seasons with Porsche — 1961 and 1962 — were fulfilling, as he told actor and automotive historian, Tim Considine. “That’s when I learned how to drive. It’s difficult to learn anything if your car keeps breaking down. You need time to get a feeling for what’s going to happen, which ensures you don’t make the kind of silly mistakes a young charger is prone to. With Porsche, here was a platform that just would hang in there. The cars weren’t terribly quick, but they were fast enough to always be a threat.”
After gearbox problems in a pre-season event at Brussels — the shift linkage to the six-speed box was fallible — Gurney enjoyed a trouble-free 1961. He had the satisfaction of scoring Porsche’s first Formula One World Championship points at Monaco, the first qualifying race of the season. Starting from the fourth row, Gurney and Swedish teammate, Bonnier, surged forward, taking third and fourth position by lap five. Gurney held fifth at the finish. It was an important result — the first six across the finish line were awarded points. Herrmann soldiered home in ninth.
FAST IN FRANCE
At season end, Gurney tied with Stirling Moss for third in World Championship points, closely behind a triumphant Hill and von Trips, both Ferrari-mounted. Gurney’s best finishes were second at the Italian (Monza) and United States (Watkins Glen) Grand Prix, as well as at the French event (Reims-gueux) after a fantastic slipstreaming battle in which he was pipped at the flag by Ferrari Dino-driving winner, Giancarlo Baghetti. Gurney was just 0.1 seconds shy of victory. “Maybe half a dozen times during the race, I tried to find out what was the best of the options I had to take the flag first,” he told Considine. “I could either come out of the last turn behind him and draught by — but not before the start-finish line — or come out ahead of him, risking him passing before the startfinish line.” Unfortunately, that’s the way it happened. “I could have been first out of the last turn and then blocked him,”
ALTHOUGH AWARE ITS RSK-DERIVED 718/2 WAS LESS THAN A FULLY-FLEDGED FORMULA ONE CAR, PORSCHE STRUGGLED TO PRODUCE A DEFINITIVE RACER
Gurney reasoned, “but in those days, guys were regularly getting killed when pulling moves like that. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hold my own against the best of them, but we were sitting in cars without a seat belt, cars with conformal fuel tanks all the way around them. Gasoline was registering at least three-hundred degrees in temperature, front, sides and back. Moreover, the seat was part of the fuel tank and was made from aluminium. It wasn’t what you’d call a fuel cell by modern standards. It’d catch fire quicker than a Ronson!”
TIGHT MARGINS
In 1961, Porsche was out in strength, as usual, for the non-championship Formula One race at Solitude, held on 23rd July. “I finished third, behind Innes Ireland and Bonnier,” Gurney recalled. “I thought I was winning — the pair tangled on the last lap. Ultimately, Ireland passed
Bonnier on grass leading into the turn at the end of the top stuff, where there was a restaurant on the right. He came down the hill on the grass. That was pretty exciting! I figured neither one of them would make it, but Ireland ended up maintaining the lead. I tried to make a pass on the outside, but it simply didn’t work.” At the flag, Bonnier was a tenth of a second behind Ireland. Gurney was just two tenths short of the Swedish speed merchant. Nail-biting stuff.
Although well aware its Rsk-derived Type 718/2 was less than a fully-fledged Formula One car, Porsche struggled to produce a definitive racer to compete under the new rules. An inducement for Gurney to sign for the works team was sight of a completely new flat-eight, the Type 753, which he witnessed in December of 1960, when the unit first ran. It was, however, painfully reluctant to produce anything approaching competitive performance. “They told me it was delivering two-hundred horsepower, but years later, I discovered the team could only extract 118 from it.” Nor was there much satisfaction from a new chassis, the Type 787, first used at Monaco in 1961 by Bonnier and Herrmann. Its longer wheelbase and parallel-wishbone front suspension were supposed to be forward steps, but delivered disappointment. At Zandvoort, eight days later, “Gurney was driving very hard indeed,” according to motorsport correspondent, Denis ‘Jenks’ Jenkinson, “lifting his inside front wheel on corners, though the spring rates fore-and-aft didn’t look right, the car developing a curious pitching motion under hard acceleration out of a bend.” Regrettably, The Type 787 was soon shelved as a failure, but a year later, at Zandvoort in 1962, the definitive F1 Porsche was ready at last. More next month.