Gurney Grand Prix
Yes, it is time! It is time that high level corporate sponsor’s line-up behind both the new US Grand Prix team started by Ken Anderson and Peter Winsor, as well as a GP team effort from Dan Gurney!
Dan Gurney is one of only a select handful of people that I truly admire! In addition to first my father, I hold a certain number of people very near and dear to my heart, men such as Ayrton Senna, Mario Andretti, Achille Parrilla, Enzo Ferrari, Joe Kubert, Colin Chapman, Roger Penske, Henry Ford, Paul Newman and a few select others, but high on my list is the great Dan Gurney. For many years the patriarch of All American Racers and he probably still is, this man achieved many great auto racing feats, including to first American to win a GP in a car and engine of his own manufacture and also winning at Le Mans in a Ford GT40. With a sufficient budget, this great man could propose miracle racing machines and certainly building a F1 team to race in the International Grand Prix circus.
Dan Gurney deserves the money to go F1 racing with American spirit and pride. Gurney deserves American sponsors to put their sponsorship dollars with him and USf1 as they are brave pioneers in automobile competition technologies. I would hope that if that idea were to come to fruition, that it would be called “Gurney Grand Prix”, and not AAR! Why you might ask? Well, that name deserves to live on forever and to never be forgotten in the annals of automobile racing history, whereas “AAR” can also live forever but the facts of who was there will never be fully appreciated and accounted for as it should, lessons have seriously taught us. The many cars that bore the moniker “Eagle” were brilliant machines but maybe that time has passed and it is appropriate to bear the name of the man himself now.
Names like Ferrari, McLaren and Lamborghini live on as the spirit of what those men started and forever lives on as well, racing at the world’s greatest venues. Already destined to join those ranks is probably Brawn GP, as their leader Ross has engineered many a recent World Championship for both Ferrari and now his own team.
A Gurney GP car could also very easily be powered by the returning Cosworth Engineering F1spec V-8 engine, as is for sure the USF1 effort’s bet. One of the founders of Cosworth Engineering is another of those names on my special list, Keith Duckworth. He was designer of the DFV engine that carried Jim Clark to a debut victory way back in 1967 in the Dutch Grand Prix and went on to many-many more victories in a variety of different GP chassis.
Maybe the American automobile manufacturers are faltering because they are not competing against the world’s best in GP racing, therefore increasing their technology and keeping abreast of where their foreign competition is at. Racing in NASCAR has probably bred the continuance of bulky unrefined and antiquated cars that are always behind the rest in innovative features.
There is rumor that the co-founder of YouTube is signing on the sponsor USF1 and I hope that is indeed true, but let’s also get behind Gurney! Dan, we are behind you and hope American sponsors can find you and bring wheel barrels of cash! Phil would have liked that too…!