Gurney was born in Long Island and raised in Riverside, California, after his father, a Harvard Business School graduate who became the lead basso with the Metropolitan Opera, relocated the family there. Drawn into California hot rod culture as a teenager, Gurney built and raced a car at the Bonneville Salt Flats at age nineteen. He later studied at Menlo Junior College and served as an artillery mechanic in the United States Army during the Korean War. His first major break came in the fall of 1957 when, driving an ill-handling but very fast car powered by a Maserati engine, he finished second in the inaugural Riverside Grand Prix, beating established drivers including Phil Hill. This attracted the attention of Ferrari North American importer Luigi Chinetti, who arranged a factory Le Mans entry for the following year.
Gurney made his Formula One debut with Ferrari in 1959 and earned two podium finishes in only four races, but the team's strict management did not suit him. After a difficult year at BRM in 1960 — where a brake failure at Zandvoort broke his arm and killed a spectator — he moved to Porsche for 1961 and 1962. With Porsche's improved 804 car, he broke through at the 1962 French Grand Prix at Rouen-Les-Essarts, taking his maiden championship victory. It remains Porsche's only Formula One victory as a constructor, and the only Grand Prix win achieved with an air-cooled engine.
Gurney joined Brabham in 1963 as their first-ever driver, taking multiple wins including the 1964 French Grand Prix at Rouen and contributing ten podiums across three seasons. He then co-founded All American Racers with Carroll Shelby in 1965, entering Formula One under the Eagle name from 1966. Despite persistent reliability problems with the Weslake V12 engine, Gurney achieved his final and most celebrated Formula One victory at the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix — winning by over a minute and becoming the only driver in history to score maiden championship victories for three different manufacturers: Porsche, Brabham, and Anglo-American Racers. He is also one of only three drivers, alongside Jack Brabham and Bruce McLaren, to win a World Championship race in a car of their own construction.
His 86 Formula One Grand Prix starts ranks third among American drivers, and his four wins are second only to Mario Andretti.
Gurney's most celebrated sports car result came at the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans, where he and IndyCar driver A.J. Foyt shared a Ford GT40 Mk IV entered by Carroll Shelby. Pre-race predictions were largely negative — the Mk IV was said to be too heavy and too demanding on brakes — but Gurney and Foyt drove a disciplined race, established an early lead over the Ferraris, and set a new record of 388 laps completed. On the podium, Gurney took the magnum of champagne, shook it, and aimed the spray at journalists he felt had doubted the effort — and then gave everyone a shower. The spontaneous gesture became the enduring podium champagne tradition throughout global motorsport.
One week before Le Mans, Gurney had taken the Eagle's victory in Belgium, giving him two landmark wins in eight days.
Gurney was a five-time winner of the Winston Western 500 at Riverside International Raceway in the NASCAR Grand National Series, four of those victories with the Wood Brothers. He was a six-time race winner in USAC Championship Car racing and finished second in the Indianapolis 500 in both 1968 and 1969. In the Canadian-American Challenge Cup he won races and was competitive throughout the series' dominant years.
In 1971, Gurney and co-driver Brock Yates won the first competitive Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, covering the 2,876-mile route from New York to Redondo Beach, California, in 35 hours and 54 minutes in a stock Ferrari 365GTB/4 Daytona.
Gurney is credited with two lasting technical contributions. The Gurney flap — a small upward-turned tab added to the trailing edge of a wing — became a standard aerodynamic tool after Gurney developed it and described it in a 1971 memo; it is now used across all categories of motorsport and in aviation. He also became the first Formula One driver to wear a full-face helmet, at the 1968 German Grand Prix. The "Gurney bubble" — a raised roof section over the driver's cockpit of the 1964 Le Mans Cobra Daytona — was fabricated to accommodate his unusual height of nearly six feet four inches.
In 1978 Gurney wrote the "White Paper," an open memo calling for a race series controlled by team owners rather than USAC, which led directly to the formation of CART.
Gurney died of complications from pneumonia on 14 January 2018, aged 86. He was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1990. His son Justin assumed leadership of All American Racers in 2011.