Eagle-Weslake

When the first car appeared in Zandvoort at the Dutch Grand Prix in 1967, it received a lot of admiring stares from the public and the experts and was showered with publicity. It was, and remains, an aesthetically beautiful racing machine. The nose shape, which is probably the single most identifying aspect of the car, was something that my dad worked out with Len Terry, our chief designer. Of course it says ‘Eagle’; it is the vestigial beak of an Eagle. This was something that caught the fancy of the motorsports designers and the public. The car was both light and strong, the magnesium chassis with its titanium exhaust system was as light as any 12-cylinder car. It incorporated the lineage of an Indy car, had a good fuel capacity, a very good aerodynamic shape and was trouble free. "The best racing car" according to Colin Chapman "would fall apart in the last lap as it crossed the finish line". Well, Colin Chapman lived to regret that statement because a good racing car has to withstand all the rigors of the season, (not all of which can be predicted) and this car did that while still right on the weight limit. It also had a high top speed for a limited amount of horsepower and was, in fact, on the cutting edge of the existing technology of the day. The car was designed, constructed and assembled in Santa Ana, California by my company, All American Racers, which I had founded in 1965 with Carroll Shelby as my partner. (I subsequently bought Shelby out and have been sole owner of AAR for more than 30 years). Sometimes I read that the car was built in England by AAR's European subsidiary Anglo American Racers. This is not true. Anglo American Racers represented the racing team traveling with the car to the circuits and maintaining and preparing the car at our shop in Rye, Kent. We had no manufacturing facilities over there and never intended to build the car anywhere else but at home in Santa Ana, California. In addition to our chief designer Len Terry, Pete Wilkins, an exceptionally talented craftsman built the exhaust system which ranks on a par with the best systems I have ever seen. It worked flawlessly every time we ran. It was made of titanium and in terms of its artistic beauty had no equal. It was done by pounding dry sand into the straight tubing, then applying heat and bending it with the sand inside in order to retain the round shape (a dying art in fabrication). The idea for our V-12 engine was created at a time when the 2-valve per cylinder era of G.P. racing was coming to an end and the 4-valve per cylinder era was beginning. Ours was a 4-valve per cylinder double overhead cam 12-cylinder 3-liter engine built by the Weslake Company in the ancient pirate town of Rye in Southern England. Most of the pencil drawings were done by Aubrey Wood who was a friend of mine, I had known him from my career at BRM. Aubrey was a disciple of Peter Berthin and Raymond Mays who were the originators of the BRM racing team, in fact he had done a lot of the drawings of the successful 1.5 liter V-8 BRM racing engine. Harry Weslake was the head of the Weslake Company together with his stepson, Michael Daniels who did the day-to-day running of the company. They both had experience with a Shell Research Project which delved into high-speed combustion. They had a 375cc twin Shell research engine 4-valves per cylinder, which made excellent power, and this project gave us the courage to go ahead and make a 12-cylinder 3.0 liter engine 250cc per cylinder which was the same size as a 500cc twin Shell research engine. I got Aubrey involved with the Weslakes and he designed a 12-cylinder engine, which was excellent. Like all such things, it was not perfect but structurally very sound. It did not have mechanical failures; most of our engine related difficulties were caused by little things like fuel pumps, drive belts or other relatively inexpensive parts. The engine was basically very strong, yet small and light and quite powerful. If anything, the least favorite aspect of the engine was the oil scavenging system which meant that it was less efficient than it should have been and therefore at the beginning of a race it would have really good power for one to three laps then would lose a portion as the engine sort of 'drowned' in its own oil. It did not stop the engine, but often took the edge off it. Considering that much was built on surplus Royal Navy World War I machinery that did not even have veneer adjustments for the cutting tools but had to be adjusted with the tap of a hammer, they were big, solid, rugged machines. The V-12 did remarkably well, especially against the new Cosworth engine which also appeared in that year.Our total budget for 4 new engines (including the prototype) was roughly $600,000. That we even managed to get it running, setting up all the facilities including dynamometer to test it and actually setting lap records and pole positions (Brands Hatch) and winning races (Brands Hatch and Spa) was a minor miracle. Contrast this with today's motor racing scene where the development of a from-scratch formula 1 racing engine runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. We introduced our first Eagle Grand Prix car at the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa in 1966. It was then equipped with a Coventry Climax 4-cylinder 2.7-liter engine and I was fairly competitive with it, usually qualifying in the 2nd or 3rd row of the starting grid. The car was underpowered and I was looking forward to the appearance of our Gurney-Weslake V-12 which was built over the summer in Rye. It showed up in our car for the first time at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza in September and was also in our Eagle at the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, but many teething problems had to be worked out and we decided to finish the season at the Mexican Grand Prix with the old reliable Coventry Climax 4-cylinder. The Italian Grand Prix in Monza, a month later, was to be the last Grand Prix for this car. After that our budget did not allow us to continue our Formula One effort anymore. I took the Eagle out of circulation and closed down our facility in England with a heavy heart, but with the knowledge that we had put the Europeans on notice and that we had put an American Grand Prix victory in the history books for all time. Dan Gurney