senor honda

Dane Cameron took advantage of the break for the Prototype class in IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship competition between Road America and Circuit of The Americas to do a bit of time travelling.


Stepping out of the No. 31 Action Express Racing Whelen Engineering/Team Fox Corvette Daytona Prototype that he races in today’s IMSA, Cameron had the rare opportunity to shake down one of the greatest cars from the IMSA Camel GTP era – the Toyota Eagle Mk III that Juan Fangio II drove to the 1992 and 1993 IMSA championships.


Dane joined his father Rick (an engineer for Visit Florida Racing) at Buttonwillow Raceway Park near Bakersfield, California to drive a few laps in the championship Eagle that was recently purchased from the Fangio estate by Charles Nearburg.
“It was certainly a real neat experience to a chance to get behind the wheel of the Mk III Eagle,” Cameron said. “It’s an incredibly historically significant car; it dominated in its time.”
When Dan Gurney’s All American Racers debuted the Toyota Eagle Mk III in 1991, it joined a fantastic lineup of cars that included factory entries from Jaguar and Nissan, in addition to the venerable Porsche 962 and other prototypes. The Eagle went on to win 21 of the 27 races in which it was entered – including the final 17 – with Fangio winning 16 of them. PJ Jones set a lap record that still stands in qualifying for the 1993 Rolex 24 At Daytona, a race Jones went on to win.
Cameron found major differences between the Eagle and his Corvette DP.
“They are so different, but it was really very special to get behind the wheel of that car,” he said. “Our Corvette DP has a big, thumping Chevy V-8 at the heart of it. You can compare that to the Eagle, which has just over a two-liter, highly stressed turbocharged engine, so they drive totally different, plus the Eagle has over 20 years old turbo technology. I would describe the GTP as a brute, a monster car more than anything, that’s probably the best way to describe it.”


Sitting in the cockpit, Cameron found he had to turn back the clock to steer and shift the Eagle.
“It’s got a big steering wheel, and a manual five-speed H-pattern gearbox, compared to the six-speed paddle shift boxes that we have now,” he said. “Shifting is pretty easy in a modern prototype, you just click to change gears as opposed to actually having to think about it and force the H-pattern gear changes. It definitely highlights how times have changed. I only did a handful of laps, but I had a blister on my thumb after about five laps from the force of changing gears. That’s how soft the drivers are these days with our paddle-shifters and that type of thing!”
Cameron wasn’t looking at the stopwatch during his brief time behind the wheel.


“I would have loved to have done a few more laps,” he said. “We were running a fairly conservative boost setting, probably making a similar amount – or a little more – power than what the Daytona Prototypes are at, just under 700 HP. It would have been a crazy experience to see what those things were like in true qualifying trim like they were back in the day when they were well over 1,000 horsepower. That must have been pretty amazing to try to wrestle one of those monsters. I was just starting to get a taste of the brutal sense of what it must have been like to drive a massive horsepower prototype 20 years ago compared to what we have now. It almost makes our new cars seem pretty tame.”
Nearburg, a friend of the Cameron family, drove the car in the prestigious Monterey Motorsports Reunion. This is what FoxSports.com reported: “Perhaps the single most impressive car in the entry was Charlie Nearburg’s recently acquired Toyota-Eagle Mk III. Virtually invincible in period, this Dan Gurney-built GTP racer proved very quick in its first post restoration outing …”
Cameron didn’t make it to Monterey, but he hopes to have another chance driving the legendary car in the future.


“Charles has plans to put plenty of miles on the car in the near future, so hopefully I’ll get another chance to drive it again at an historic event if I get lucky,” he said.
Photo courtesy of Mark Windecker