I sit here pondering: “How do you say something about Dan Gurney that hasn’t already been said?” It’s tough. Few, if any, across motor sport history have had the breadth of success and experience that Gurney has enjoyed. Sure, many have won Grands Prix, or Le Mans, or NASCAR races, or Indycar races, or sports car races, but how many have enjoyed success in all those disciplines and then went on to build championship-winning racecars in a variety of categories?
Since this issue is devoted to the full expanse of Dan’s incredible career and his being honored at the Rolex Monterey Motorsport Reunion, you’ll read all about his many achievements in the various articles and columns that we’ve crafted here. But in my column I wanted somehow to provide a different insight into Dan—beyond his racing record.
Dan has been a big fan and supporter of Vintage Racecar, right from its beginning in 1998, so over the years I’ve been fortunate to get to spend a fair bit of time talking with him about cars and his career. In one of the first interviews I ever did with him, I asked him how the son of an opera singer and an artist goes on to become a racing legend. In going back and relistening to his response, I’m struck both by his unusual answer and the almost child-like, wide-eyed enthusiasm that these memories from his first exposure to motorsport seem to elicit. Even after some 60 years, his vivid memories for this early experience, I think, speak volumes about who he is as a man and what he achieved as a driver.
According to Dan:
“Well, ya know, opera includes sound! And the sound of engines…well, I was never a great fan of opera, and I wasn’t into show business.
“But, one of the things that does have a connection, one of my first passionate racing fan experiences, was at a little track in Freeport, Long Island. It was a little one-fifth-mile paved track. At one end the turn was totally flat, and the other had a little tiny bit of banking on it. Because it was paved, the cars shined, and it was nighttime racing with lights. They would bring the cars out with John Phillips Sousa’s marching music and baton twirlers like cheerleaders, then roll these midgets out to do battle. These were the days when it wasn’t just one kind of engine. It was probably, on any given race, you had five different brands, different sounds. Among other things, there were huge, standing–room-only crowds, and we had a driver from our town in Manhasset named Phil Walters, who raced there as Ted Tappett. It couldn’t have been…it was like going to heaven every week when we’d go to this thing. At the end of that event, usually there was one section outside the grandstands where the motorcycles would park. So afterward they’d fire these cycles up, everybody getting ready to leave. And, of course, they had open exhausts and everything else, so that was an additional entrée to the racing. So the sounds of racing engines…and the smells, you know, Castor Oil was used a lot in those days. Those were all…that isn’t opera, but there’s more to it, I think.”
I went on to ask Dan, “So it was the sound more than the speed that grabbed you in the beginning?”
He replied, “Yeah, it wasn’t speed so much, but there was a lot of danger involved and a lot of skill, and a lot of—without even realizing it—technology. Why does one engine sound different than the other? Why does one guy get down the straightaway a little bit better, and how come some people can work their way through traffic without hitting other people when other guys can’t? How do you choose up sides about who’s your favorite…it was all part of it.”
As our conversation progressed, I came to learn that, like his fellow countryman Phil Hill, Dan was a very intelligent, “thinking” driver who really brought a much broader perspective to his racing and his relationship with cars. Perhaps, like Hill, that is the attribute that enabled him to achieve so much in a career that spans six decades…and counting!
Congrats Dan, on being only the second individual to be honored at the Monterey Historics/Monterey Motorsports Reunion.
