Eagle Mk1

Dan Gurney, a highly successful motor racing driver, had been driving in Formula One since the late 1950s. While driving for the Brabham works team, he joined with prominent motor racing figures and financial backers in the United States, including Carroll Shelby, to found All American Racers. This effort was largely backed by the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company to challenge Firestone's dominance of American open-wheel racing. Inspired by the performance of Jack Brabham's and Bruce McLaren's own teams, AAR decided to enter Grand Prix racing.

AAR set up a subsidiary team known as Anglo American Racers, based in Rye, East Sussex, UK and named in deference to the cars' British Weslake engines. The cars were built in Santa Ana, California, USA by the All American Racers team. To achieve AAR's dual aims of winning in both Formula One and Champ Car formulae, AAR hired ex-Lotus designer Len Terry. His brief was to create a chassis that could be used for both the twisting road course circuits of the F1 series and the broad ovals of the North American series. Terry had just completed the 1965 Indianapolis 500-winning Lotus 38 for Colin Chapman's team.

The design of the Mk1 and its Indy sister design, the Mk2, closely followed the Lotus 38, with a riveted aluminium monocoque central section carrying an unstressed engine mounted behind the driver. The Mk1 was designed around the forthcoming Aubrey Woods-designed Weslake V12 engine, while the Mk2 was designed to accept the quad-cam Ford V8 that had powered the previous year's Indy 500 winner. While driving for the British Racing Motors (BRM) Formula One team in 1960, Gurney became acquainted with BRM engineer Aubrey Woods, who then moved to Weslake Engineering. Through Woods, Gurney became aware of a Weslake engine research project funded by Shell Oil. Gurney commissioned Weslake to build a 3-liter, V12 Grand Prix engine.

While five Mk2 chassis, complete with four-cam Ford V8s, qualified for the 1966 Indianapolis 500, the Weslake V12 was not available for the start of the Formula One season. The first Mk1s took to the track with old 2.7-liter Coventry Climax FPF inline-4 engines in their place. The V12 had been constructed using surplus machine tools dating from World War I, so tolerances and parts interchangeability were poor. Nevertheless, when running, the Weslake developed 360bhp even in its earliest development phase. By the end of the 1967 season, this figure was over 400 bhp, easily competing with the Ferrari and Honda V12s, and the newly introduced Cosworth DFV V8. One mechanical flaw involved a design mistake in the oil scavenging system, causing oil to pool in the engine's sump, slightly reducing power. Beatrice Shilling was brought in to help solve the oil problem.

Three Mk1 chassis were produced with original aluminium construction, but the fourth, chassis number 104, incorporated advanced and exotic metal alloys, including extensive use of titanium and a high percentage of magnesium sheet in the monocoque panelwork. Owing to its novel construction materials, this car was referred to as the Ti-Mag Car. Gurney was aware of the risks involved in driving a car made from such flammable materials. After witnessing Jo Schlesser's death in a magnesium-fuelled fireball during the 1968 French Grand Prix, Gurney compared racing in 104 to "driving a Ronson cigarette lighter".

The Eagle Mk1 made its race debut at the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix, with a single car entered for Dan Gurney. The car, despite its good looks, failed to finish. For the introduction of the new V12 engine at the 1966 Italian Grand Prix, Gurney took the wheel of the new car, and was joined by compatriot Phil Hill in the older Eagle-Climax. Hill failed to qualify, and Gurney retired during the race. Gurney did score points during the season, at both the French and Mexican events, but on both occasions this was with the Climax-powered car.

For the 1967 Formula One season, the Climax-engined chassis 101 was sold to Canadian driver Al Pease, and all AAR chassis ran as Eagle-Weslake machines. The season proved to be intensely frustrating. Although Gurney and sometime teammate Bruce McLaren managed to qualify the Eagle-Weslake cars in the front two rows of the grid on eleven occasions, only two cars finished a race. Both of these finishes were in podium positions. AAR's first major race win came in the 1967 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, with Gurney taking the aluminium-chassis 102 to victory. Chassis 104, the lightest and fastest of the Eagle Mk1 vehicles, was introduced at Zandvoort, the Netherlands early in 1967; it was with this car that Gurney scored the team's only Championship victory: the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix.

By 1968, Anglo American Racers were running short of funds. Development of the Eagle Mk1 was halted as the team ploughed funding into the design of its successor, the projected Mk6. Gurney persisted with the older car for the first half of the 1968 season, but was only rewarded with a handful of retirements and one single, ninth-placed finish. AAR bought a McLaren M7A. It was with the McLaren, built by his previous year's AAR teammate, that Gurney scored the team's only points of the season. At the end of the season, AAR closed the doors on their foray into Grand Prix racing to concentrate their efforts on USAC racing.

Although commonly referred to as the T1G (and chassis 101 as the T1F), Dan Gurney has stated that this was never the car's official designation. Instead, the car was simply the Eagle Mark 1. Hence, the four chassis produced were numbered 101, 102, 103, and 104 (the Ti-Mag car). The Indianapolis sister cars were the Mk2, with subsequent Indy designs also taking model numbers 3 and 4. The Mk5 was a Formula A car adapted from the Mk 4 chassis, while Mk6 was the designation given to the still-born Formula One successor to the Mk1. With AAR's withdrawal from Grand Prix racing at the end of 1968, the team switched to a year-based chassis numeration scheme, with Indy chassis from 1971 onward taking numbers according to their year of design.

This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.