Endurance-Info is deeply honoured today. The Le Mans 1967 winners, Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt, have kindly agreed to answer a few questions for us and for Le Club des Pilotes des 24 Heures du Mans.
Both of them are two icons of motorsport with incredible records.
Dan Gurney has given to three different makes their first ever F1 win : Porsche -the only F1 win for Porsche as a constructor-, Brabham, and Eagle, his own make-. He has 86 F1 GP starts. He has also won the Sebring 12 Hours, the Nürburgring 1000 Km, has won the first World Sportscar Championship event held on the Daytona Speedway in 1962, has claimed three podiums in a row in the Indy 500, among other successes. He has founded his own company, All American Racers, which built the Eagles, successful in the Indy Series and in the CAN-AM championship as well. Dan Gurney has created a tradition, perpetuated since then : he was first to spray champagne while celebrating his Le Mans win on the podium.
AJ. Foyt has four Indy 500 wins (recordman with Al Unser Sr and Ricky Mears), has been winner twice in the Daytona 24 Hours, has won the Sebring 12 Hours, has 67 wins in the USAC and CART championships, 7 NASCAR wins and several USAC championships.
Incredibly and highly improbable currently, Dan Gurney won the Belgium F1 GP one week after his Le Mans win -with more than a minute ahead of Jackie Stewart and Chris Amon, while 12 Le Mans 67 drivers were racing at Spa-Francorchamps on June 18th, 1967
Incredibly also, A.J. Foyt has won the Indy 500 less than two weeks before his Le Mans win !
Had you been teammates before Le Mans ?
Dan Gurney : ”A.J. Foyt and I never were team mates before Le Mans but we had been competitors since 1962 on the Indianapolis circuit as well as in some sports car events. We had great fun together at a Volkswagen race in Nassau in the early 60ies.”
A.J. Foyt : ” I knew Dan – he ran a lot more sports cars, and Indy cars so he was a very good road racer. Dan was an all-around good racer.”
A.J. ,before June 1967, had you driven the Ford MkIV ?
“Not the one we raced over there, I drove one of the earlier models in Daytona but not the late one.”
Lorenzo Bandini had been quickest overall with the P4 Ferrari during the April 1967 Le Mans preliminary practices, so did you think that the Ferraris could be tough competitors for the win ?
Dan Gurney : ”Of course we thought the Ferraris would be tough competitors especially in light of their result at the Daytona 24 Hour race a few months earlier.”
A.J, you were racing for the first time at Le Mans in 1967? What did the 24 Hours of Le Mans represent for you before coming for the race? What did you hear about it?
“I’d always heard about the race and I knew a lot of drivers that went there and ran it but never had any luck. So when I had the chance, I was awful glad that Ford picked me as one of the drivers especially with the Shelby team and Dan Gurney. I couldn’t have asked for a better ride, and knowing Carroll Shelby, all he ever did was road race so he knew exactly what he was doing. The other Fords were with Holman/Moody, which they were great in the stock cars and all, but they had no real road racing experience except with stock cars, so I really happy to go with the Shelby team because that’s all they used to do was road race.”
The Mk IV were entered by Shelby American Inc. (your car) and also by Holman & Moody. Was each team master of its own strategy, or had Ford decided the strategy for all cars ?
Dan Gurney : ”Shelby American and Holman & Moody were competitors within the Ford team, both entities wanted to win, I am not aware of any overall team strategy beyond that. »
A.J. Foyt : ” “Well I think with Carroll Shelby, we had our own strategy, we were actually racing against the Holman/Moodys and we wanted to beat them as bad as they wanted to beat us. We had one of the greatest crew chiefs of all time, he’s died since then, Phil Remington and he at the time was a very brilliant guy and it was great to have somebody like that on the car and overseeing it and I think Dan would agree with me. Well the strategy for us when we went there was to try to win the race for Ford Motor Company and ourselves, so that was our strategy. Ford did not dictate to us how to run or to slow down or speed up – they were our own decisions. Well, our plan of attack – I know the newspapers kept coming out and saying we were the rabbits all night long – we were just so much faster than everybody. I mean we were fast and it was easy fast, it wasn’t something that we were having to work at so it just made it that much easier to run that fast.”
Dan, you had been racing nine times at Le Mans before 1967 and you had eight DNF, so were you however confident before the 1967 race ?
”I was always confident that I could win any race I entered but I was also a realist with experience especially at Le Mans, 24 Hours is a long time and anything can happen. ”
A.J. , while you were a rookie, did you think that you could go for the win, a couple of weeks after your Indy 500 win?
“I never went to a race I didn’t think I could win. I knew it was going to be hard because it was something I had to learn real quick and I knew with me teaming up with Dan Gurney – he had been there 3 or 4 times – that he knew the course so I knew I had one great main driver there. I knew he knew how to get around it and I was hoping I could fill my part when I got in the car and I was fortunate enough to be able to do that.”
Have you thought to the Le Mans distance record during the race ?
Dan Gurney : ”I never gave the long distance record a thought during the race, too busy concentrating.”
A.J. Foyt : ”No, we went there to try to win and the good thing about it was that we also set the record for the most miles covered per gallon and that’s where all the money was. But we didn’t know that until after the race. Usually who always won that deal over there was Renault, the littler cars, on the miles covered per gallon and for us we broke all the records.”
A.J., what did you impress -or surprise- most at Le Mans?
“The biggest thing I didn’t like about Le Mans was they had no guardrails and at night, they’d whitewash the trees I’d say 6 or 7 feet up and I was riding at over 200 mph. I was always used to running where there was walls so if you went off, you went out in the woods, so you knew if you made a bad mistake it was over, and that’s one thing I didn’t like about it because on the Mulsanne Straight we ran 230 mph and it’s a very fast course. Since then, they changed the back straight where you’re not running nearly that fast, and they’ve got walls which made it a lot safer. Back then you didn’t have any of that and it was kind of like an open road so if you went off, you were in a lot of trouble.”
Dan, one of the moments of the race -and to my point one of the greatest Le Mans moments ever- was when you stopped your Mk IV after Arnage while Mike Parkes’s Ferrrari was chasing you, even if he was some laps behind, Parkes doing the same before starting again. Could you please tell us some words about this amazing story ?
”Mike Parkes in the Ferrari a few laps behind me was trying to get me to make a mistake by flickering his lights over and over. I got so annoyed that I finally drove to the side of the road and stopped, to my utter amazement Mike stopped behind me and here we were sitting for probably 1o to 15 seconds waiting to see who would make the first move. He gave up first and drove off.”
A.J. , had you been racing at night before Le Mans?
“Yes, I ran Daytona at night but I never cared that much for night racing. Daytona wasn’t too bad. At night it rained almost all night in Daytona but I adapted pretty good so I had a little experience racing at night when I went over there but I had never raced in the fog like it was over there at 3 or 4 in the morning. It was very dangerous with people cooking and all the smoke from that, and you went down into a tunnel where there was always a kind of fog. I guess what I’m saying there is that it was pretty hairy.”
Both of you own some of the greatest records in motorsport. Dan, how do you consider your Le Mans win and record ? Is it to the same level as the first F1 victories for Porsche, Brabham and Eagle -your own make-, the Can-Am Eagle wins, the success of your company, All American Racers ?
Dan Gurney : « The Le Mans 1967 Ford win was definitely one of the greatest highlights of my career and I rank it on the same level as my Formula one wins.”
Same for you, A.J. , you have under your belt the famous endurance Triple Crown – Le Mans/Daytona/Sebring-, as only a few drivers have, you are the only one to have won the Daytona 500, the Indy 500 and Le Mans, so do you put the Le Mans win at the same level than these records or than your four Indy 500 wins ?
“Well you know to do something that nobody else has ever done, you’ve got to put it at the top because I was just at the right place at the right time and we had our luck running our way. All the other ones were great, great victories and I was first to do a lot of that, so to have something like that, well I don’t know if that record will ever be broken in my lifetime – but whoever breaks it is going to have to race like hell.”
How do you see the future of motorsport ?
Dan Gurney : « Less technology, more attention on the drivers and the human aspect, more noise. ”
A.J. Foyt : “Well I think motorsports are coming back now and the Indy Cars are better than they have been in a long time, and I like it because I’ve had such great racing and all that, so I think it’s on an uphill climb. I know the last 5 or 6 years there’s been a slump for all motorsport but I think you’re going to see it start rising again.”
We warmly thank Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt for their kindness. We tank also for their help Evi Gurney, Kathy Weida, Anne Fornoro, Kevin Kennedy, Tim Orr, Wes Duenkel, Davide Marchi and JY Helbé for his archives pictures.
