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Written by:
Marshall Pruett
05/15/2008 - 12:43 PM
Oakland, CA
The mighty All-American Racer's Toyota Eagle MKIII. (Photo: Mulsanne's Corner/John Brooks) » More Photos
Our latest IMSA Memories video features the aggressive inter-team battle between Toyota Eagle teammates Juan-Manuel Fangio II and PJ Jones, incredible in-car footage from Price Cobb’s Spice-Chevy, a rear wing camera on Wayne Taylor’s Chevrolet GTP (the chassis formerly known as ‘Intrepid’), the debut of the freakish Allard J2X, the UFO-esque Comptech Acura, and previews of the historically despised IMSA WSC cars of 1994.
Add into the mix that Price Cobb can be seen driving his ’93 Chevy-powered Spice while wearing his ’92 Mazda firesuit, and it becomes all the more clear that IMSA GTP in 1993 is in a state of transition.
Some of the cars, like Dan Gurney’s Toyota’s, are even faster than they’d been in ‘92, but with the GTP cars preparing to be phased out in ’94, the ’93 season will go down in history as a year where grids were small, proper GTP cars were few, and early iterations of the low tech/low cost/lower speed WSC cars litter the field.
But despite the turbulent times at hand, the glorious Eagle MKIII’s put on a raw display of prototype engineering prowess and speeds that fifteen years later, still hold lap records at a number of tracks. To get an idea of the ’93 GTP era and the incredible cars he fielded, I spent some time talking with Dan gurney earlier in the week.
To start, understand that Dan Gurney is a fighter. Not a fighter in the boxing sense of the word, but in his attitude and approach to building his own race cars and besting the competition with them. After decades of holding the post as one of America’s premier international racing car drivers, and as the owner of the prestigious All-American Racers formula and sportscar racing teams, Gurney is well deserving of a life of relaxation and retirement. But that’s not his style.
“Hi Kathy, it’s Marshall—is Dan available to talk for a few minutes?” I asked AAR’s longtime manager, Kathy Wieda. “Well, he’s at the dyno right now and I promised not to interrupt unless it was an absolute emergency…can we try for later today?…”
Not only is Gurney still busy with various aspects of AAR business, but the fighting spirit that fueled the design and implementation of his various Eagles is just as vibrant today as it was when his cars blitzed the opposition from 1991 to 1993.
’93 would be the sunset of the mighty GTP era, but in the winter of ’92, when Gurney’s team were deep into developing a faster car for the coming season, they had no idea they’d find themselves without major competition to battle.
“Well, at the time no one knew that it was going to be the last year of IMSA. So when you’re in our position, the perspective that we have..umm, you never knew who was going to all of a sudden leapfrog you in terms of technology and in terms of performance. So I had witnessed some other people who had some advantages in performance and I think they started easing up a little bit and coasting and that was one of the reasons we were able to catch them. I didn’t want to get in to that situation under any circumstances so we just kept going as though it was as serious and as important as ever to do whatever
One of the keys to Gurney’s success in GTP racing was a driver lineup that matched or exceeded the lineup other teams assembled. For ’93, Gurney turned Fangio and Jones loose to settle the driver’s championship amongst themselves—a rarity in a factory team back then. Jones would make a name for himself with spirited drives against a champion of Fangio’s caliber.
“PJ was always quick just like his dad Parnelli, and he was aggressive and particularly very good under braking in those days which was incredibly difficult because these cars we had to have enormous brakes and enormous amounts of down force and they had great stability. But you can’t believe how difficult it was…I can say how difficult it was because I drove one of those cars on two different occasions just a little bit. And to come close to getting the most out of braking with one of those cars, is just very very hard to even discuss. It’s just plain miraculous they could do it. But if you are on team with Fangio or if you were on a team with PJ, your teammate was the standard which you were compared with, and that brought out the best in both of them. And you can see it when other drivers came into the team. They ratcheted each other up; they were, at that time, very very hard for the opposition to live with.”
Every aspect of the Eagle came from Dan Gurney's SoCal AAR operation. (Photo: Mulsanne's Corner/Ryan Hicks) » More Photos
In an era where all the prototypes of importance are built in Europe, Gurney’s Toyota Eagles, while funded by Toyota, we’re a complete product of Southern California ingenuity.
“We designed, built, manufactured, tested and campaigned them…that was 100% our car. That was an Eagle. The engine work was done here in Costa Mesa by Drino Miller. The engine that we started out with was only 1.4 liters. That was the ‘this is the only engine we have, can you win with it?,’ engine Toyota offered us to start developing, and of course, we said ‘yes!’. There was a huge amount of work done here in the States on that and the engine design from there on.”
Asking Dan how proud they were to build the most dominant GTP car during its lifespan returned a clssic Gurney response. “Is the Pope Catholic? We are tremendously proud. I remember once going to a get together with a bunch of the Porsche people down in Daytona -- there were some of their young engineers there, and I said ‘you know guys, we still hold the lap record at the 24 hour circuit here,’ which by the way is still true. None of the ALMS cars have come close to that record, that in this case, PJ set that qualifying record. They said ‘oh well the track has been modified since then’, and I said, yeah, ‘it’s a little faster now since they’ve opened up the chicane…’ and they refused to believe me! And I believe we still hold the lap record at Lime Rock as well. The record from ‘93 still stands and no one has come within 3 seconds of it. If GTP had continued into ‘94, we expected to be even quicker. It’s something we have enormous pride in.”
Click Here to watch all six parts of the 1993 Laguna Seca IMSA GTP race.
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