Karl Ludvigsen on the amazing Porsche career of Dan Gurney
In 1961 Dan Gurney joined Porsche for two years of sports cars and F1 that found the company struggling to supply suitable equipment. He scored the first Porsche World Championship points and victory and his own maiden Grand Prix win
‘The Speedster tempted some customers into a Porsche,’ recalled famed Cleveland dealer Chuck Stoddard. ‘Some of them became enchanted with the Porsche driving experience but soon hated the cold and leaky Speedster. Many soon stepped up and traded for a ‘real quality’ Porsche coupe. The unexpected consequence was that many used Speedsters became available at very low prices and were snapped up by budding low-budget SCCA racers. Their Porsches began showing up in quantity in weekend events. This gave tremendous Porsche exposure to the sports car crowd.’
Two friends and eager sports car competitors in California saw Porsche Speedsters as their way forward. Dan Gurney bought a 1956, 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 it!’ What he did with it was race buddy Skip Hudson’s similar Speedster on local roads. ‘We slammed our cars around turns,’ said Dan, ‘skidded them, downshifted—and had ourselves many a two-man Porsche race. We both learned plenty.’ This opened the door to the big time for Gurney, who soon became one of America’s most celebrated racers.
Following the successful path of Phil Hill, Gurney became a works Ferrari driver in 1959. In 1960 he switched to Britain’s BRM, which had a new mid-engined Formula 1 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.’
At BRM, however, ‘It was essentially the opposite of the Ferrari season. There were quite a few instances where their stuff just fell apart. Jo Bonnier, Graham Hill and I were team-mates and combined we had 27 starts — more or less nine each and three finishes out of the
27 starts. We each had a finish. One. I liked the people. I liked the mechanics. We just couldn’t keep it together.’
Ahead was the 1961 season, with a big change downward from 2½- to 1½-litres for the engines of Formula One cars, equivalent to a drop from 270 to 170 horsepower for the first engines of 1961. Gurney, a big man who had made his name in big cars, was not a fan of the new Formula. He likened driving its cars to pushing hard in a VW Beetle, keeping the pedal to the metal while rowing the car along with the gear lever: ‘They were so underpowered that you reset your hourglass and started going up through the gears.’
As a getting-to-know-porsche exercise on 24 July 1960 Dan raced a works Porsche single-seater, the Type 718/2, at the Solitude circuit near Stuttgart, a sinuous seven-mile road course through forested countryside. Dan called it a ‘great circuit. It gets your attention. It took a lot of finesse, very definitely.’ His mount was an experimental version of the F2 Porsche with more angular coachwork by Ferdinand ‘Butzi’ Porsche. Enzo Ferrari spoiled this home-town Porsche party by sending his first rear-engined F2 car, which Wolfgang von Trips drove to victory.
Only Stuttgart’s Hans Herrmann, who was driving the F2 Porsche for the first time, gave ‘Taffy’ von Trips a strong challenge, placing second. In a clump of cars half a minute behind him were Porsche drivers Jo Bonnier, Graham Hill and Gurney. It was a successful outing for Dan after an exciting and hard-fought 142mile race. ‘I’ve never had to drive so hard in my life just for fifth place,’ said an exhausted Gurney afterwards.
The result was that Dan Gurney signed to drive for Porsche in 1961. Unlike BRM, the Porsche contract had the advantage that he could also compete for the same team in sports cars as he had in 1959 with Ferrari. He was signed by Porsche racing director and PR chief Huschke von Hanstein, who had a good eye for talent. Gurney courted controversy when he arrived for the 1961 season in a Chevrolet Corvair that he shipped to Europe to drive to the races. At least it was rearengined and air-cooled.
‘I thought he was just fine,’ Dan 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 it in a big way in front of others. We developed a certain amount of respect. He had a twinkle in his eye all the time. He covered the whole waterfront pretty thoroughly. He knew human nature and had a great sense of humour. 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.’
His two seasons with Porsche — 1961 and ‘62 — were fulfilling for Dan Gurney, he told Tim Considine: ‘That’s when I learned how to drive. It’s difficult to learn anything if your car keeps breaking down all the time. You need more time to get a feeling for what’s going to happen so you don’t make the sorts of silly mistakes that a young charger wants to make. With Porsche, here was a platform that just would hang in there. It wasn’t terribly quick but it was quick enough to always be a threat.’
Dan had the satisfaction of scoring Porsche’s first World Championship F1 points in the first qualifying
race of the season at Monaco on 14 May 1961. Starting from the fourth row, Gurney and Swedish team-mate Jo Bonnier surged forward and were third and fourth by lap five. Gurney held fifth at the finish, with the first six finishers scoring points, while Hans Herrmann soldiered home in ninth.
After gearbox problems in a pre-season event at Brussels — the shift linkage to the six-speed box was fallible — Dan had a trouble-free 1961. He tied with Stirling Moss for third in World Championship points behind Champion Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Trips, both Ferrari-mounted. Gurney’s best finishes were second in the Italian and American GPS and also at Reims after a fantastic slipstreaming battle in which he was just pipped at the flag by winner Giancarlo Baghetti’s Ferrari Dino.
‘I tried maybe half a dozen times trying to find out what was the best of the options I had to take the flag first,’ Dan told Tim 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 and he could get by me before the start-finish line. And that’s the way it happened.
‘I could have been first out of the last turn and then blocked him, Gurney added. ‘But we didn’t do that. In those days guys were getting killed all the time doing those things. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t do it with the best of them. But we were sitting in a car without a seat belt, in a car that had conformal fuel tanks all the way around it. Gasoline was at least about 300 degrees around you — front, sides and back. The seat was part of the fuel tank. And it’s just aluminium. It wasn’t a fuel cell or anything. Those things would catch on fire quicker than a Ronson.’
In 1961 Porsche was out in strength, as usual, for the non-championship F1 race at Solitude on 23 July. ‘I finished third behind Innes Ireland and Jo Bonnier,’ Gurney recalled. ‘I thought I was winning that one because they both tangled in the grass on the last lap. Innes passed Jo on the 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 think he had all four wheels on the grass — certainly all the right-side wheels were on the grass. I figured neither one of them would make it!
Innes ended up maintaining the lead. I tried to make a pass on the outside but it didn’t work.’ At the flag Bonnier was a tenth of a second behind Ireland and Gurney two tenths behind Jo.
Although well aware that its Rsk-derived Type
718/2 was not a fully-fledged F1 car, Porsche struggled to produce its definitive racer to compete under the new rules. An inducement to Gurney to sign for
Porsche was sight of a completely new flat-eight, the Type 753, in December of 1960 when it first ran. But it was painfully reluctant to produce anything like competitive power. ‘They said, “Yes, we’re producing 200 horsepower.” Years later I found out that they were making 118 at the time.’
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 parallelwishbone front suspension were supposed to be forward steps but were disappointing. At Zandvoort, eight days later, ‘Gurney was driving very hard indeed,’ said Denis Jenkinson, ‘lifting his inside front wheel on corners, though the spring rates fore-and-aft did not look right, the car developing a curious pitching motion
under hard acceleration out of a corner.’ The Type 787 was soon shelved as a failure.
A year later, at Zandvoort in 1962, the definitive F1 Porsche was ready at last. The Type 753 eight powered a new and tidier chassis, the Type 804, with torsion-bar springing and slimmer lines. All it lacked was room for its drivers. ‘I couldn’t fit in it,’ Gurney discovered. ‘I looked like a giraffe driving around in the thing. It had reasonable top-end power, okay mid-range and not-sogood low-end power.’
‘Porsche were looking worried,’ wrote Denis Jenkinson, ‘because their drivers were not satisfied with their exciting new cars. The new Porsche engines seemed fine but the drivers were far from content with the handling.’ In a banzai lap Dan muscled his car into the third row but it retired from the race with damaged shift linkage. Having pressured Ferry Porsche to enter a car for him at Monaco, Gurney justified the decision by qualifying among the three cars that tied for third-fastest practice time, showing again that the eight could aspire to success. It was shunted out of the race at the start.
‘After the Monte Carlo Grand Prix,’ wrote Gurney in Competition Press, ‘Porsche decided they had a lot of sorting out to do and that they’d be better off not going to Spa for the Belgian Grand Prix two weeks later.’ Von Hanstein wired the Belgian organisers that the entry was being withdrawn owing to ‘technical difficulties.’
Porsche put in a major effort to improve all aspects of the car. Its refinements were put to the test at the Nürburgring early in the week of June 18. As Gurney wrote:
This was pretty important to all of us on the Porsche team because Mr. Porsche had decided that we had to do a full Grand Prix distance [fifteen laps at the ‘Ring] without any failures before we’d be allowed to run in the next Grand Prix. He decided this because, up till then, we’d had various troubles that kept us from finishing.
They brought two cars and about half a dozen people from the factory. The regular factory test driver, Herbert Linge, and I did the driving. We spent a couple days on the South Circuit trying different shock absorbers and chassis settings and so forth. When we decided we had the best combination of all the ones we tried, we tried the Grand Prix distance (on the longer North Circuit).
I drove the full fifteen laps without having to stop and on the last lap turned the fastest time that’s ever been done at the ‘Ring, 8:44.4. The average lap time, even though there were some relatively slow laps due to the wet circuit at the beginning, was 8:57, which was under the old record.
The successful test won a stay of execution for the team, which brought its two cars to the Rouen-les Essarts circuit for the French Grand Prix on 8 July. ‘With
the testing we’d done at the Nürburgring, we felt that we’d be competitive. It was the first time I’d driven there,’ recalled Gurney. ‘It was very rough at Rouen, though, just shook the devil out of the cars, the steering, the gear train and everything.’
On the grid Gurney was in the third row, 1.7 seconds off the fastest time; Bonnier was in the next row 1.4 seconds slower.
‘In the race (wrote Gurney in Competition Press), by the time things settled down I was running sixth. I was right behind Jack Brabham’s Lotus and though I could have been lapping a little bit faster I couldn’t quite get by Jack because he had a little more top speed than I did. It wasn’t too long before his rear suspension broke.
‘I expect I was close to thirty seconds behind Graham Hill’s BRM and Jimmy Clark’s Lotus at that time and also had John Surtees’s Lola and Bruce Mclaren’s Cooper ahead of me. Then Bruce spun off and I passed him. In the meantime Surtees made a pit stop. Then Graham was hit from the rear while braking for a corner and Jimmy got ahead of him.
‘Shortly after that Jimmy had to stop because of broken suspension and Graham was running about 24 seconds ahead of me when he had throttle trouble and slowed down. That put me in first, over a lap ahead of the next car, Tony Maggs’s Cooper.’
Dan backed off to preserve Porsche’s first lead in a Championship GP in 1962. ‘It wasn’t a terribly thrilling race from my standpoint,’ he recalled, ‘because I wasn’t really battling anyone after Brabham dropped out. We won that race by virtue of having a trouble-free run. Nevertheless I was real happy, even though I had a nice case of the flu that day, and the Porsche people were real happy too.’
Particularly happy were the wives and girlfriends of the mechanics, who had vowed not to shave until Porsche won a Grand Prix. In fact there was scarcely a soul in racing who begrudged this first-ever victory in a Grand Prix Championship race by both Dan Gurney and Porsche.
Gurney’s Rouen victory was not one of the great triumphs in the annals of motor racing. Several faster cars had obliged him by retiring and Ferrari, which to be sure was not a factor in the 1962 season, didn’t come to Rouen. But the race itself was one of the classic events, the 48th Grand Prix of the Automobile Club de France, and if Porsche was lucky to win it, it was luck for which it had more than paid with its travails of the last several seasons.
The next weekend Dan won again in a nonchampionship race at Solitude, making a lot more Germans very happy. ‘Solitude was the biggest crowd
I’d ever seen outside of Indy,’ Dan said, recalling his victory lap after the race. ‘They said it was around 350,000. A car from Stuttgart won it, so guys were all throwing their hats in the air. The sea of hats that were in the air as we drove around went like a wave. Hats were even coming out of the forest. It was sensational, a very special experience. Something I’ll never forget.’
In the 1962 season Porsche’s drivers were ranked fifth (Gurney) and 15th (Bonnier) in World Championship standings. Its car stood equal fifth with Ferrari among the seven marques that won points in the Formula One Manufacturers’ Challenge in 1962. Although an improved car and engine were developed for 1963, Porsche’s first Formula One challenge ended abruptly — leaving Gurney hunting for a ride. He found one at Jack Brabham’s team.
Porsche gained full value from its versatile American driving star, mustering him for five drives of its sportsracing cars in 1961 and four in 1962. For the 1961 Targa Florio it teamed Gurney with Jo Bonnier in a handsome roadster, so new it was unpainted. They brought it home second behind the latest mid-engined Ferrari. That was Dan’s best sports-car finish of 1961, a season which also included Sebring, Le Mans, the ’Ring 1000 Kilometres and the Tourist Trophy at Goodwood.
Dan gained a useful result at Sebring in 1962, teaming with Bob Holbert to drive a Carrera GTL, otherwise known as the Carrera-abarth. Though headroom was in short supply for Dan in the GTL, they finished seventh overall and first in class. Hopes were high for the Targa Florio in May but a new Porschedesigned disc brake stood in the way of success. As Gurney put it dryly, ‘It was an unsuccessful idea.’
On Dan’s second lap of the Targa he came over the brow of a hill and saw, down below, a right-hand turn and a low bridge flanked by stone walls: ‘I put on the brakes, then let off the brakes but they didn’t let up, which happened fairly frequently with this Porsche. I arrived there backwards, then – bam! This wall flopped over, crashed down. The car stayed on the road.’ Dan limped to the next service depot and had a rear wheel replaced but the suspension was too badly damaged for the car to continue. His best result that year was a third place and first in the two-litre class in November’s
Puerto Rico GP.
That was Gurney’s last Porsche drive. ‘Unfortunately Porsche decided to pack it in at the end of the season,’ he recalled. The company dropped Formula One while continuing in sports car racing without Dan’s services. ‘It was a great shame. It might have been the right thing for them but it left me hunting around.
‘Those were great years,’ he recalled. ‘Porsche was not “Teutonic efficiency” and all that, not at all. They were hard-working with good camaraderie, had senses of humour and just kept going. I still cherish my days with the Porsche team.’ The feeling was mutual.