PRUETT: All American Visionary

IndyCar

PRUETT: All American Visionary

Who better to ask about the past and present state of IndyCar design than Dan Gurney, one of the greatest minds the sport has known.

Marshall Pruett | Posted February 16, 2010 Oakland, CA

Dan Gurney's credentials as a driver, designer, owner, and architect of IndyCar rules gives him a unique perspective that few others have earned. (LAT)

Within seconds of listening to Dan Gurney – American motor racing icon and legendary innovator – as we discussed his IndyCar of the future, it quickly become apparent that he considers himself an ideological dinosaur.

That’s not to say his thoughts are old; it’s quite the opposite, actually. In an era where most things in motor racing lean towards sameness, Gurney keeps both feet firmly (and proudly) planted in a time when creativity, not cost control, ruled the landscape.

From his multitude of winning Eagle Indy and F1 racers to the White Paper that sparked the breakaway CART series to his revolutionary IMSA GTO and GTP cars, the patriarch of All American Racers never gave in to the scourge of spec-thinking, which as he paints it, “has ruined what IndyCar racing used to stand for.”

With the IndyCar Series expected to announce their new car specifications before the end of 2009, I spoke with Gurney about his vision of what the next generation IndyCar should represent. As the announcement was delayed and the Delta Wing group emerged, our interview from last October sat in a holding pattern until everyone’s 2012 plans were revealed over the past two weeks.

I asked Dan to jot down some ideas for what the next IndyCar would look like if he was put in front of a drafting board. What he came up with might surprise you.

“Well Marshall, I am 78. Let me qualify that for you. Starting in ’62 I spent at least a month at Indy for the next 20 years plus, and I did that along with lots of others. But since then the way events have evolved, why, it's been 30 years of tragedy. Indy used to be considerably more powerful than NASCAR, considerably more powerful than Formula One Grand Prix racing. And the tragedy is that, to me, it's been destroyed and it's something I’m not sure will ever recover. So you're asking someone with my background and my disappointments about it all to consider its future. To try to get enthused about trying to do something to resurrect or to bring it back to the position it might have been, had it had great leadership, seems almost fruitless or silly to give it that much effort. You know what I'm saying?”

The biggest affront Gurney sees with the current version of an IndyCar is the singular thinking that goes into its design. Open competition has become a thing of the past, but as Gurney tells it, if it is embraced once again, the fans will come back with it.

Gurney's Eagles were a popular, albeit brief addition to F1, but his IndyCar designs spanned four decades. (IMS)

“I'm not a spec formula kind of person. I can only tell you what my own perspective is. And I think most of the fans, and I include myself as a fan of what used to be IndyCar racing, we were excited because we didn't have any idea whether somebody was going to come up with something new each year that would change the sport. And that was a big element of the unknown that I think fans still want to look forward to. What you have now is a racing tradition of socialism or if Karl Marx were going to do it, it would end up looking about like it does now. That turns me off big time and I think it turns a lot of fans off, all this stuff of having a bureaucrat to tell you when you can sneeze or not and so forth. It's like going to prison. So you need to have as few rules as you possibly can and open it up for the innovation and clever thinking and all kinds of good stuff can happen.”

(Dan helped me to stumble onto something. Maybe we need to flood popular radio and TV host Glenn Beck, arguably the leading anti-socialism voice in America, with emails about the current Marxist state of IndyCar rules. Not only would IndyCar be the hot topic of every Beck imitator on cable, he’d send thousands of Tea Party members to 16th & Georgetown and demand for capitalism to be reinstated. I believe we have a winner here...who will send the first email?)

With Gurney’s interest in unbinding the hands of IndyCar designers and engineers, his first thoughts on the future car hit a target last October that few people, including Delta Wing designer Ben Bowlby, could have expected.

“When [AAR manager] Kathy [Weida] came to me and said you wanted to talk about new IndyCar design rules, I did two things. I treated it seriously and I didn’t try to come up with more rules…I didn’t like that very much and the more rules you have, the more police you have to have that are enforcing the rules. But I think one, not too facetious but probably not a really palatable thing would be: how about doing away with wings?”

Only a man that raced the Speedway without wings could fathom returning the cars to a state where those pass prohibiting devices are relegated to the trash bin. As the march of technology has ground to a halt, Gurney couldn’t help but imagine a time when the Indianapolis Motor Speedway held more purpose than to simply provide entertainment.

“I wrote down a few more things here. When the Indy 500 circuit was first laid out it was intended to be a testing ground for the motor car industry. Later it became a racing circuit. Times have changed. Maybe it would now be time to return to the original idea. And I think, frankly, open-wheel single-seater racing may have become somewhat less relevant in this day and age. Now, that's not a very nice thing to say about something you want to try to pump back up but it does come to mind. And one of the things I started to think was not to change everything or abandon the racing, but let's add a new challenge.

Bobby Unser's victory at the 1975 Indy 500 represented the third and final win at the Speedway for Gurney's AAR Eagles. (IMS)

“When I was a kid – don't laugh at me – the Mobil Gas Economy Run was a big deal,” Gurney continued. “And today people are awfully interested in efficiency or should be. I was thinking, well, why not have an event that would be an efficiency competition for cars. You could have it be a 48-hour race there and you could have one driver for 12 hours, another in there for 12 hours, and so on to get to the 48 hours. Everybody gets the same amount of fuel and ballast the weight for people so they’re all the same, and then just see who goes the longest distance with their different cars and engines? Imagine the country looking at Indianapolis again for being more than just a race.”

Gurney admitted that ideas for new IndyCars that offered more and more freedom were easy to come by, but his limited faith in the pre-Randy Bernard IndyCar administration to allow such adventurous thought prevented him from letting his mind wander too far.

“Well, I couldn't do the full assignment you gave me but I at least gave it some thought! I couldn't bring myself to come up with a set of rules other than taking the wings off! What it ends of being I can’t say, but I'd like to see a contest that was more real. We don't know today what a really efficient road car will be in the years to come, but racing should reflect the future. If you could cut everybody loose, whether it's the tire company or the wheel bearing company or the aerodynamic guys or the light weight structures guy, and used all those things, would 40 miles to the gallon at the Indianapolis 500 not be wonderful?”

Gurney's final Eagle, seen here piloted by Alex Barron in 1999, failed to rekindle the magic of the previous AAR IndyCars, but the chassis wasn't lacking in fresh ideas. (LAT)

Gurney was concerned that the more he spoke of the past or of open-minded technical regulations, the more his views would be dismissed as outdated. But he couldn’t have known that his calls for a ban on wings, for lighter and more efficient cars, and an emphasis on miserly fuel consumption would form the basis for the 2012 plan outlined by the Delta Wing group and the IndyCar Series after we spoke. Even as his 79th birthday beckons, the All American Racer is still an All American Visionary.

“I think that efficiency and relevance is a very, very good goal to try to reach, or maybe I'm just a bitter old man…that's part of growing old,” he said a deep, hearty laugh. “I love the idea of being able to reach for that sort of thing. That would be a benefit to the car industry and to the Average Joe. I see all kinds of old black-and-white photos and brown photos of times that were different and full of passion for things. And with a lot of it, you look at the old IndyCar stuff when there was a lot more freedom, and it's pretty enticing. It would be good to go there again.”

After listening to a pillar of the open-wheel community like Gurney preach on about the need for Indy to lead the charge for technical innovation, all I can say is “Amen, Brother Dan. Amen.”

Marshall Pruett is SPEEDtv.com’s Auto Racing Editor, and also covers IndyCar and sportscar racing for the site. Pruett grew up at ‘Pruett's Olde English Garage,’ his father's shelter for abused foreign cars, and spent his childhood being dragged across the West Coast to help with his dad's amateur racing exploits.

Pruett spent 20 years working in the IRL, CART, IMSA, and most of the known open-wheel feeder series before retiring from active duty in 2001. And in case you were wondering, no, he isn’t related to Scott Pruett.

Marshall lives in Northern California with his wife Shabral.