What If a Single Car Could Change the Greatest Spectacle in Racing?

When Dan Gurney entered his second Indianapolis 500 in 1963, he was already a hero in the world of auto racing even though some of his greatest achievements—as a driver, car builder, and team owner—were ahead of him. After his qualifying run, he was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The headline read: “Insurrection at Indy.”

Gurney did not win that year, but the media praised him as a champion nonetheless because he was one of the primary visionaries behind an astonishing innovation in Indy: the race’s first lightweight, rear-engine, Formula One-style car. Among his fans was editor-in-chief of Car and Driver magazine, David E. Davis Jr., who in 1964 launched a campaign to elect Gurney to the White House. “Who could possibly be better suited to champion our cause than Daniel Sexton Gurney?” Davis wrote. “He goes like the wind. He can drive anything better than most anybody. He has the enduring love of 300,000 fans at Indianapolis. His name inspires countless stock car partisans in the Southeast. He is the patron saint of American sports car racing. European (Grand Prix) aficionados speak his name in the most reverent tones imaginable. He has become a legend in his own time.”

Davis was famous for his wit. Still, it was a sign of Gurney’s fame as a driver and his reputation as a consummate diplomat that the campaign gained significant media attention. Bumper stickers were printed, button badges sold. Another young racing celebrity, Formula One World Champion Jimmy Clark, even wore one. “If he gets elected,” Clark said at the time, “he won’t have time to come to Europe and run against me.”

It would take two more years after Gurney's 1963 race before the first rear-engine car triumphed at Indy. The road to success involved many racing pioneers, both drivers and designers, and significant corporate sponsorship from the Ford Motor Company. But the credit for starting and propelling what was to become a revolution at America’s most popular single-day sporting event—“The Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” as Indy is often called—belongs to Gurney. “He wasn’t the only person to recognize the potential for this style of car,” says Matt Anderson, Curator of Transportation at The Henry Ford. “But he was the life force behind it.”

It was clear from Gurney’s 1963 qualifying trials that this lightweight chassis — created by the lead designer of Britain’s Team Lotus, Colin Chapman — with a Ford V8 engine located behind the driver was a superior performer to the traditional front-engine roadsters that had competed on the famous Speedway for years. The smaller, rear-engine Lotus-Ford could go faster and hold the road better in the sweeping turns.

Gurney made a strong showing during the race, finishing seventh, but a pair of tire changes knocked him out of contention. The young Scot Jimmy Clark, driving the only other rear-engine car that year, turned in an impressive performance, leading 28 of the 200 laps before dropping to second, behind driver Parnelli Jones. In the final laps, Jones’ car developed an oil leak from a cracked overflow tank. Wanting to avoid a crash on the slick surface, Clark backed away from challenging for the title. “We’ve come this far,” Clark said after the race. “It’s bloody silly to pile into the wall in the last 20 laps.”

To appreciate the long journey Gurney, Chapman, Clark, and others on the Lotus-Ford team made before the first rear-engine car finally won at Indy in 1965 — an odyssey that presented many unexpected ordeals and opposing forces, including the giant challenge of breaking from Indy tradition — we have to go back to the first running of the Indianapolis 500.

Started in 1911, the 500-mile race around an oval track was an opportunity for emerging American auto manufacturers to test performance and design innovations. The inaugural event attracted 60,000 spectators, including Henry Ford (a racer himself, he considered entering a car two years later but balked at rules requiring him to make it heavier). It also offered a sizable purse to the winner. The first Indy champion, Ray Harroun, won $14,250, which was $4,250 more than the annual salary for baseball’s highest-paid player, the Detroit Tigers’ Ty Cobb. For decades, the Indy 500 was the only auto race most Americans knew anything about.

But by the early 1960s, Indy was lagging behind the technological times. It remained tied to heavy front-engine roadsters that had not fundamentally changed in a decade. Over in Europe and around the world, lithe, rear-engine cars lit up Formula One circuits. Gurney had seen these racers while in Europe and he was convinced that a big American engine mounted in one could revolutionize Indianapolis. No chassis designer impressed him more than Chapman — his Lotus cars were winning Grand Prix events everywhere in the spring of 1962. Gurney acted quickly. He invited Chapman to attend the next running of the Indianapolis 500 and used his own personal funds to pay for Chapman’s airline ticket.

Unknown to Gurney and Chapman, a Ford Motor Company executive named Don Frey was also at the 1962 race looking for an opportunity that could help Ford elevate its performance reputation with consumers. Guided by Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca, Ford had kicked off a “Total Performance” campaign that ultimately yielded wins in sports cars, stock cars, drag racers and rally cars. But Ford hadn’t yet won Indy, the greatest prize of all. Frey believed that a Ford racing engine was the company’s best chance to make its mark at Indy.

Frey and Ford Motor Company had an engine, but no chassis. Gurney and Chapman had the chassis, but no engine. Gurney and Chapman showed up on Ford’s doorstep that July. They made their pitch, arguing that a light rear-engine car could take faster turns and, being more fuel-efficient and easier on tires, spend less time in the pits. The pair found a receptive audience. Chapman negotiated a generous deal that had Ford picking up nearly all of the expenses. There was one other important condition: while Gurney would, of course, drive one of the proposed Lotus-Ford cars, Chapman insisted on adding Team Lotus’s own star driver to the project, the gifted Jimmy Clark.

Although initially uninterested in Indianapolis, Clark came to relish the challenge, perhaps in part because of the skeptical way in which certain Americans viewed him and his Lotus car. The environment was charged, on and off the track. As Ford racing historian Leo Levine noted in his book Ford: The Dust and the Glory, Indy traditionalists “were used to doing things their own way—widely advertised, naturally, as the best way—and the Establishment didn’t take to this sudden invasion of the premises by a large corporation, a revolutionary design and a bunch of foreigners with strange accents. Even the color of Clark’s car was abhorrent. It was painted the Lotus shade of British Racing Green—and green had for years been a strictly bad-luck color in American oval-track competition.”

As if by fate, the Lotus-Ford team ran into some bad luck. There was the oil incident in 1963. And then the following year—as any Indy race fan knows—seven cars crashed just two laps into the race, tragically killing two drivers. When the race resumed, Gurney and Clark ran with the leaders but both encountered tire problems and withdrew. Then the following May, in 1965, Clark—powered by a 495-horsepower Ford V8 engine—at long last sped under the checkered flag in his Lotus-Ford Type 38. Almost two minutes ahead of his nearest competitor, he set a new average speed record for the race at 150.686 miles per hour and became the first foreigner to win the Indianapolis 500 in half a century.

The rear engine had triumphed. The Formula One-style Lotus-Ford car at once shattered Indianapolis tradition while restoring Indy’s reputation for innovation. Ford Motor Company added a crown jewel to its growing list of racing prizes, helping to fuel the success of its “Total Performance” campaign, which, by 1965, was taking off with the introduction of the widely popular Ford Mustang. Although Gurney was not the winning driver—in fact, in 1965, he had left Team Lotus to race under his own All-American Racers—he was as central to the victory as Clark, Chapman, and Ford.

Gurney never won at Indy, but he went on to become one of the most decorated American race car drivers, winning seven Formula One races (including four Grand Prix World Championship events), seven USAC/Indy road races, five NASCAR races, and two runner-up finishes at the Indianapolis 500. After he retired as a driver, he went on to become a celebrated designer and team owner. He is the only U.S. citizen to win a World Championship Grand Prix in a car of his own construction.

Looking back on his career—as he did when he was awarded the Edison-Ford Medal for Innovation at The Henry Ford in 2014—Gurney singles out adaptability and responsiveness as keys to his success as an innovator. “When you start out you do not pencil out an exact road map stipulating where you are planning to go,” he wrote in the forward to John Zimmerman’s history of Gurney’s All-American Racers. “It’s not like Patton sitting in front of a map sticking pins into the places of attack. In motorsports you are propelled by sudden opportunities, by events, and by schedules outside of your influence. In the relentless rush to beat your competition you hardly ever take a breath, there is no pause to reflect. Even the afterglow of a win is short lived, barely out of victory circle you think of the next race. It is a merry-go-round without season, challenging, demanding, and very exciting.”