Anglo American Racers (Eagle) was a Formula One constructor from Britain. They participated in 25 Grands Prix, entering a total of 34 cars. The team was originally named All American Racers, established in Santa Ana, California in 1964, by Dan Gurney, to run sportscars for him to drive in the United States between his Formula 1 commitment with the Brabham team. In that same year, Carroll Shelby, who was running Goodyear tires on his Cobra sportscars, introduced Gurney to the tiremaker because Goodyear wanted to take on Firestone at Indianapolis. A deal was struck and work began on an Indycar for 1966. Gurney hired Len Terry, the designer of the Indianapolis-winning Lotus in 1965 and he laid out an Eagle chassis which would serve for both Formula 1 and Indycar racing. The result was the Eagle-Ford T1G for the US and the Eagle-Climax T2G for Formula 1.
In order to run the Formula 1 operations, Gurney established Anglo American Racers Ltd. in Sussex, England. The Eagle-Climax debuted at the 1966 Belgian GP and scored its first points with a fifth place three weeks later at the French GP. In 1967 Richie Ginter was signed as a second driver. The Climax engine was replaced by a new 3-liter Weslake V12 specially designed for Gurney by Aubrey Woods and built in Great Britain by Harry Weslake. At Spa in June of that same year Gurney got a victory, the first "all-American" victory in a Grand Prix since Jim Murphy in 1921.
The Eagle-Weslake was a beautiful car and efficient car using titanium and exotic alloys. Sadly the Weslake engine was unreliable despite being powerful. The engine seemed well designed but Weslake used surplus Royal Navy World War 1 machinery. Weslake obsolete machines were introducing such variations in the size of the parts that they were not fully exchangeable between engines. Gurney's program ran out of money in 1968 and by the end of the year he returned to the United States to concentrate his efforts on the more successful Indycar program, in which Bobby Unser had won the Indianapolis 500 and the 1968 Indycar Championship.
External links
http://www.allamericanracers.com/gurney_grand-prix/eagle_f1-effort.html
Complete Formula One results
(Note: grands prix in bold denote points scoring races.)
