Back in the day, Spa was a winding 15km thread of street tarmac that cut a triangular swath between the villages of Francorchamps, Malmedy and Stavelot; a flat-out blast through the countryside and pine forests that tested the bravest of the brave and definitely separated the men from the boys.
In June 1967, two weeks after Jim Clark gave the Cosworth DFV its first Grand Prix triumph at Zandvoort, the F1 community assembled at Spa for the fourth round of the ’67 World Championship.
At the time, Denny Hulme in his Brabham was enjoying a clear lead in the driver’s standings and Clark, a four time winner at Spa himself, lost no time marking a territory he considered his own. He secured pole during qualifying with a three-second advantage over Dan Gurney in his Eagle. The Californian was on a high though, fresh from his victory at Le Mans the previous weekend.
The astonishingly beautiful dark-blue Eagle F1 car, sporting its distinctive bill-like nose had seen major upgrades for the 1967 season. Former Lotus engineer Len Terry had relied on the aerospace industry to supply magnesium and titanium to lighten the AAR T1G’s chassis. It worked too, with clear proof in Gurney’s winning the non-championship “Race of Champions” the previous March at Brands Hatch.
When the flag dropped for the start of the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix, Gurney was immediately swamped by half of the field, his car failing to engage in first gear. Clark blazed off the line, closely followed by Jochen Rindt, with Jackie Stewart and Mike Parkes in hot pursuit. Towards the end of the first lap at the daunting Blanchimont sweep, Parkes’ Ferrari slid on some oil from Stewart’s BRM and crashed heavily, suffering injuries which ended his F1 career.
As the race progressed Rindt faded, leaving Stewart to chase Clark while a recovering Gurney had steadily climbed up to third. To the crowd’s astonishment, Clark pulled in to the pits on lap 12 with Dan’s Eagle in tow. The Lotus’ stop was prolonged while Clark’s mechanics tended to the car’s engine, eventually changing its plugs. Gurney had only made a brief stop, complaining of low fuel pressure and a misfire but was waved on.
Back on track, Gurney set out to regain lost ground to Stewart’s leading BRM. The gap between the two closed and then stabilized when the Scot encountered gear-lever problems, forcing him to hold the lever with one hand and steer with the other, a challenging prospect while storming through the Masta kink at over 250 km/h.
On lap 21 the Eagle caught the BRM and both cars raced down towards Eau Rouge side-by-side. Gurney sailed into a commanding lead on the run up the hill to Les Combes and there was no looking back, the Eagle V12 looking and sounding beautiful. That is, until oil started spraying out of the catch tank onto the exhaust pipes producing an ominous blue smoke. In the end though, everything held together and Gurney took a resounding victory at a record breaking pace over Jackie Stewart and Chris Amon.
“I even ended up getting the lap record,” Gurney recalls. “I have to admit though, I wasn’t that confident up front. Because of the misfire I was expecting the Weslake [V12 engine] to expire at any moment so I just gassed it and hoped for the best.”
Gurney’s triumph put him in a league of his own, as the only American ever to win a Grand Prix in a car of his own making. And this cemented his legacy of taking maiden World Championship race wins for three different constructors – Porsche, Brabham and Eagle. It was a tremendous achievement for Dan Gurney and the entire AAR team.
The accompanying photos display how I’ll always remember Dan. Part and parcel of all of his amazing accomplishments and well deserved accolades, he was a happy person and a good man.
