Remembering the greatest American in racing history

One way and another, Jim Clark has been much in my mind of late, not least, I suppose, because this year we come to the 50th anniversary of his death. In April 1968 Clark's fellow drivers made the sorrowful journey to Chirnside for his funeral, and it was later that day that his father talked to Dan Gurney.

"You know, Dan," he said, "you were the only one Jim ever worried about." Perhaps those few words put Gurney's status as a racing driver more clearly into perspective than anything else ever said or written about him, and Dan, who had revered Jimmy, almost broke down.

Now, half a century on, it is the death of Gurney that has me, and countless others, reeling. Given that he had long been in failing health, we may not have been surprised by the news, but still we were shocked by it: the loss of Dan Gurney - pictured below, left, with Clark - is immeasurable in our sport.

If I have known many great drivers, I have known rather fewer great men: Daniel Sexton makes both lists.

Gurney came late to racing, being already 24 when he began with a Triumph TR2 in 1955, but thereafter his rise was extraordinary. By '57 he was racing Ferraris for wealthy sportsmen, and back in the day that was how an American got Enzo's attention, as Phil Hill and Richie Ginther could also attest. It rather beggars belief that when Dan went to the grid in a factory Ferrari at Reims for the '59 French Grand Prix, he was starting only his 23rd motor race.

At the end of that year, though, Gurney left Ferrari for BRM: "All I heard in Maranello was, 'The horse is supposed to be in front of the wagon', so I went with BRM, who had a rear-engined car coming, and also doubled my pay. At Ferrari - for Formula 1 and sportscars - I'd been getting $163 a month."

Dan Gurney was the greatest American racing man in the sport's history; like all who knew him, I shall miss him more than I can say

After a single season with BRM, Dan moved again, this time to Porsche, with whom he duly took his first grand prix win, at Rouen in 1962. This was always a man who excelled at the fearsome places like Spa-Francorchamps and the Nurburgring - and indeed Rouen, where he won again in '64, by now a Brabham driver.

It was odd, I said to Gurney once, that an American should have been drawn first to road racing, rather than Indianapolis, and he agreed. "It was certainly that way, but I don't know why. Indianapolis was a phenomenon, no question about it, but when I was young I'd read George Monkhouse's books about Mercedes-Benz before the war, and dream about it - I was just smitten with road racing."

Maybe so, but fundamentally Gurney could drive anything, winning races as diverse as the Nurburgring 1000Km (sharing a 'birdcage' Maserati with Stirling Moss) and the Riverside 500, which traditionally opened the NASCAR season. In 1962 he had also competed for the first time in the Indianapolis 500, and the following year persuaded Colin Chapman to take Lotus there, with two cars for Clark and himself.

In 1966, having left Brabham, Dan followed Jack's lead, becoming a constructor in his own right, both in Formula 1 and Indycars, and the year after that had the seminal week of his career, sharing the victorious Ford MkIV with AJ Foyt at Le Mans, then seven days later winning the Belgian Grand Prix in his own Eagle-Weslake, a car described by Ron Dennis as the most beautiful ever built. Appropriately, Gurney was also comfortably in the lead at the Nurburgring when a driveshaft failed with two laps to go.

By the end of 1968, though, Dan decided to give up the struggle of trying to run teams on both sides of the Atlantic, and closed down the European operation. Two years later, by now established as a highly successful builder of Indycars, he announced his retirement as a driver.

More than 30 years on, I saw Gurney drive the F1 Eagle again, this time at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. "I'd raced a Ferrari in the Tourist Trophy in 1959, and Goodwood was just as I'd remembered it - this was the start of a long love affair." Indeed it was. Gurney had been Charles March's boyhood hero, and - always an Anglophile - many times he and his wife Evi accepted invitations to return.

The first Revival meeting, run in 1998, had a profound effect on Dan, and later he wrote me a letter about it. "When I played in Lord March's cricket match, he told me the first time cricket was played on that ground was in 1702! There we were, in the same setting, on a beautiful day - and then a Spitfire came by, banking over, flying below those big old trees.

"It was completely unexpected, and incredibly moving. I'd been told that Douglas Bader flew his last mission out of Goodwood, and the sight of and sound of Spitfires, over the circuit at the weekend, brought tears to my eyes, thinking of all those young men, all those years ago."

The last time I saw Gurney was at Indy in 2015, where a wonderful selection of Eagles were demonstrated. He flew in from Los Angeles on the Thursday, but had a small cardiac 'event' en route to the track, and was rushed to hospital, where he was checked over, then released. Did it frighten him, someone asked. "No," Dan laughed, "it didn't frighten me - Spa in the rain frightened me!"

That evening I was privileged to be invited to a private dinner attended by every Indy 500 winner alive - plus Dan, who twice finished second, but never won it. "I feel like a phoney," he smiled. If ever there were a word inapplicable to Dan Gurney, it was this.

For me, he was the greatest American racing man in the sport's history; like all who knew him, I shall miss him more than I can say.