Dan Gurney's path to team ownership began during his years as a works driver for Brabham, where he observed that Jack Brabham and Bruce McLaren had successfully entered Formula One as constructor-entrants. Together with Carroll Shelby and backed financially by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company — which sought a vehicle to challenge Firestone's long-standing dominance of American open-wheel racing — Gurney founded All American Racers in 1964. Goodyear's involvement proved crucial, providing the resource base that enabled AAR to mount simultaneous campaigns in both American and international racing.
Because the engineering infrastructure for Formula One was concentrated in Britain, Gurney established a subsidiary operation in Rye, East Sussex, named Anglo American Racers. The British base placed the team adjacent to Harry Weslake's engine development plant and close to Elva Cars, facilitating the technical relationships that would define the early Eagle programme. Cars were physically constructed in Santa Ana, California.
Gurney hired former Lotus designer Len Terry, fresh from producing the 1965 Indianapolis 500-winning Lotus 38, to create a dual-purpose chassis suitable for both F1 road circuits and American oval tracks. The resulting Eagle Mk1 (designated T1G in common usage, though Gurney never officially used the alphanumeric) debuted at the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix powered by an interim 2.7-litre Coventry Climax inline-four while its intended powerplant was completed.
That powerplant was a new 3.0-litre V12 developed by Aubrey Woods at Weslake Engineering, which gave the car its Eagle-Weslake identity from the 1966 Italian Grand Prix onward. When running, the engine was fast — eventually exceeding 400 bhp and capable of qualifying in the front rows — but construction on obsolete machine tools meant reliability was chronically poor. The team participated in 25 Grands Prix across the 1966, 1967, and 1968 seasons, entering a total of 34 cars.
The defining result of the Formula One programme came at the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, where Gurney won outright in the advanced titanium-and-magnesium-panelled chassis 104, the lightest of four Mk1s built. The victory was the first American triumph in a Grand Prix since Jimmy Murphy's Duesenberg win at the 1921 French Grand Prix. As of 2024, it stands as the only World Championship win for a USA-built car and one of only two wins for an American-licensed constructor in Formula One history, the other being Penske at the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix.
By 1968, funds were tight. Development of a successor, the projected Mk6, consumed what little budget remained, and the Mk1 appeared for the first half of the season before AAR purchased a McLaren M7A to complete the year. At season's end, Anglo American Racers closed its Formula One operations, and AAR turned its full attention to American competition.
The Champ Car programme proved far more fruitful than the F1 campaign, establishing Eagle as one of the premier constructors of American single-seater racing in the late 1960s and 1970s. Eagle chassis won 51 Champ Car races across that era. Highlights included the 1968 and 1975 Indianapolis 500 victories for Bobby Unser, and the 1973 race win for Gordon Johncock. Unser was closely identified with the Eagle marque for much of his career, accumulating 22 wins and 52 podiums in Eagle cars.
After Unser's departure to Team Penske, AAR's Champ Car fortunes declined. Driver Mike Mosley delivered occasional wins before leaving at the end of 1982, and a two-year merger with Mike Curb's organisation as Curb-All American Racers produced no significant results. The team withdrew from single-seater competition after 1986, returning in 1996 with new Eagle chassis powered by Toyota engines. The comeback was unsuccessful — the cars were largely untested before the season and never won a race — and AAR ceased active Champ Car participation after the 1999 CART season.
After exiting Formula One, AAR diversified into sports car competition. A contract with Toyota beginning in 1983 brought the team into the IMSA GT Championship with modified Toyota Celicas. The programme escalated in 1988 when AAR moved to the GTP prototype category, fielding a modified Toyota 88C alongside a purpose-built team-designed Eagle HF89.
The team's most dominant period came with the Eagle MkIII, introduced for 1991 and powered by a turbocharged 2.1-litre Toyota inline-four producing up to 800 horsepower and generating 10,000 pounds of downforce at 200 mph. The MkIII won 21 of the 27 races it entered — a dominance so total that it was cited as a contributing factor in the collapse of the GTP category.
In the 2010s, AAR was associated with the Ben Bowlby-designed DeltaWing project, an unconventional low-drag, low-downforce single-seater concept run by Highcroft Racing at the 2012 24 Hours of Le Mans. The project demonstrated that AAR's appetite for innovation remained alive decades after the Eagle's Formula One days.
All American Racers occupies a distinctive place in motorsport history as the most successful American-licensed constructor of the postwar era in terms of outright championship wins across multiple categories. The Formula One Eagle, built in California and raced to victory at Spa in an era when American constructors competed on equal terms with the established European teams, stands as both a technical and symbolic achievement. The team's subsequent IMSA dominance in the 1990s confirmed that the organisation's engineering ambitions extended well beyond that single Grand Prix victory.