LM24: Ford GT40 Stories - Dan Gurney
Wednesday, 15 June 2016
Marshall Pruett / Images by Pruett, LAT
RACER looks back at the legendary Ford GT40 program that dominated the 24 Hours of Le Mans with four consecutive wins from 1966-1969 in a series of new interviews with the iconic drivers who represented the Blue Oval.
Dan Gurney made his first start at Le Mans in 1958, and by the time he joined the Ford GT40 program, "All American Dan Gurney" had grown accustomed to packing up and leaving the circuit long before the race was over. Prior to Ford, seven out of Gurney's eight trips to Le Mans ended prematurely, and he and co-driver Jerry Grant weren't immune from reliability issues on their GT40 debut in 1966. By 1967, and with a new approach in mind, Gurney and fellow great A.J. Foyt took their Ford to victory – the second consecutive win for the brand at Le Mans - and thanks to Dan's cheeky sense of humor, the tradition of spraying champagne from the podium was born that day. Dan Gurney did not drink alcohol......
On taking lessons from Le Mans driver/entrant Briggs Cunningham to Ford: "Well, I will tell you, after eight or nine times, I realized that I could drive pretty fast, and it was faster than Briggs Cunningham could drive, but Cunningham used to finish ahead of me every single time. And I thought to myself, dang bust it, that is trying to tell me something. At that time, it was much more of an endurance race than a race. Briggs could do a very good job of not beating up on the car. I had adopted the Briggs Cunningham method of running at Le Mans. In the end, you have to decide whether you a driver that wants to beat your teammate by going fast, or collaborate and try and win the race. I was in a transitional stage at that time."
On applying those lessons en route to victory in 1967: "Really, the thing that I got from Cunningham was the fact that I spoke to my good friend AJ Foyt for '67 in that story, and he was receptive enough that we both ended up driving the car carefully like that. We ended up upping the average speed for the whole race, we had a trouble-free race, and Briggs would have been happy."
On setting a careful tone of saving the car with Foyt from the moment practice began: "I never ran the car within four seconds of what it would have done if you wanted to go for it. I spent a lot of time with AJ, who was at the peak of his international fame at the time, really; I don't think he really believed me at first, of me talking about how Cunningham ran.
"Bravery doesn't enter into it but skill and lap time does. If you do go for it and all of the sudden it is hard for the teammate to match it or equal it, or whatever it would be, all of the sudden he's going to start breaking the rules that we were trying to live by to try and go faster. And that is just normal with many drivers or teammates."
On the internecine rivalry between the two camps running GT40s for Ford: "Well, when you drive for Ford Motor Company and there are competing factions – some of the cars are entered by Carroll Shelby, or Shelby American, the others are from Holman Moody – and there are lots of different combination of IndyCar drivers and other drivers, some of which don't have a whole lot of road race experience, not to mention endurance racing, that was a politically volatile situation to be in."
On Ford's expectation for the Foyt/Gurney GT40, and their differing (and ultimately successful) agenda: "I think AJ and I were expected to be the rabbits in this fight. I got the car dialed in a little bit before AJ came and I wanted to get it where it had the right balance too, aerodynamically. Once I did, why, he was happy with it. But when we went to qualify, I think we qualified seventh or eighth. He came in, said "What's going on? What is wrong with the car?" That kind of stuff. I said, "The car's great. Don't worry about it." [Ford] just didn't want to hear that. To them it was a 24-hour race. And to us it was finally emulating [Briggs] Cunningham, and this was my 10th attempt, so I wasn't going to let that [call to be the rabbit] cloud the vision.
"You wouldn't expect something to go haywire if you were not abusing the car. You try to say, well, wait a minute, [after] 10 years, you ought to [learn and] apply something.
Marshall Pruett / Image by LAT Dan Gurney, the 85-year-old American icon and winner of the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans, at the great French endurance race that started in 1958, the lessons he learned and indelible memories that came from 10 visits, and what it was like racing and winning for Ford with A.J. Foyt in the legendary GT40 Mk IV.