Welcome!

Twisted from the Sprue is my little corner of the internet. This site started as a simple web presence for the Three Rivers IPMS model club - as in middle-aged guys who never quite out-grew gluing together miniature cars and planes (and not a club of really good looking people who have their pictures taken for underwear ads and the like). The club now has a real web-site, and this blog is a place for me to post stuff I find interesting or just want to ramble on about.

Its reassuring to know you're not the only guy with an obsession for trivia - if you happen across something interesting here, or have a question or something to contribute, please leave a comment or drop me an email at dnschmtz@gmail.com

Don
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Sunday, December 11, 2016

The Gulf Boys Go Racing (part 2)

In part 1 we ended with Grady Davis teaming up with John Wyer in late 1966, leading to the formation of JW Automotive Engineering (JWA) in England and the first official Gulf Racing team making its debut in 1967.  Lets pick up the story there...



Wyer knew he had to move fast; even with his plan to breathe new life into the GT40, the design was already showing its age - its steel monocoque chassis would soon be too heavy to be competitive with newer cars using lightweight composite materials.  Neither Wyer or Davis wanted to spend all of 1967 developing cars that wouldn't race for another year.  With Gulf's money, Wyer had a chance to have his reworked GT40 (to be named the Mirage) ready for Le Mans in June, but the big races at Daytona in February and Sebring in April were a bit of a stretch. Enter Davis's personal GT40, the dark blue "road coupe" that Dick Thompson had been flogging around Pittsburgh area SCCA races in late 1966.

Wyer would ship all the parts needed to turn Davis's car into a state of the art "race coupe" (many of the parts had been developed for the big-block MkIIs and were significant upgrades over the MkI race cars from just 2 years earlier). Davis would add a wide orange stripe and a few "Gulf" decals. Dick Thompson - a veteran of the early unofficial Gulf Racing team and still a Washington DC dentist - would join with John Wyer's driver Jacky Ickx for Daytona, pulling off a 6th place overall (the Ford factory team's big-block GT40 MkIIs would all break due to faulty gearboxes).  At Sebring Davis would tap Ed Lowther, another Pittsburgh businessman who raced on the weekends (and who had driven for Davis occasionally since the early Corvette days) to team with Thompson. They wouldn't be so lucky this time, losing the engine early in the race, but gaining valuable experience.

Davis's old friend Don Yenko was also at Sebring, driving an L-88 Corvette - sponsored by Gulf rival Sunray Oil. The striking red, white and blue Sunray Corvette was essentially a test-mule for a bigger effort Sunray had planned; a similar Corvette (built by Dana Chevrolet in California) would run at Le Mans that summer with Dick Guldstrand and Bob Bondurant driving. Yenko and Sunray would have some success, but it would be short lived; in 1968 Sunray would be bought by Sun Oil (aka Sunoco), who already had their own racing program - most notably Richard Penske's Corvette and Trans Am efforts - and the Sunray team would be shutdown. Over the next few years Don Yenko would come close to driving at Le Mans several times but never actually would.

A month after Sebring, Dick Thompson would fly to Spa for the the first big race of JWA's new Mirage, teaming with Jacky Ickx again - a driving team that seemed to have luck on their side. Ford had provided Wyer with a number of new 302 and 351 inch versions of their small block V8, prepared by the engine gurus at Holmann&Moody. The Mirage was painted in powder blue (the corporate color of the Wilshire Oil Company, a California oil company Gulf had bought in 1960) with a Gulf orange stripe over the roof, a color combination that would become one of the most famous racing liveries of all time. The two would win at Spa, raising hopes for a good showing at Le Mans.

But Le Mans is rarely kind to optimists or the ill prepared. One of the Mirages would last just 29 laps, the other 59.   59 laps at Le Mans, about 1/4 of a whole race, is nearly 500 miles - but that's about twice the length of the typical Trans Am race. While the small-block Ford engines were plenty strong, ancillary parts - especially head gaskets - weren't up to the long term punishment. Wyer would continue to develop the engines until they were reliable at Le Mans distances, and would have some success the rest of that summer, but not surprisingly that first year was a mixed bag, with a number of DNFs.

As expected, for 1968 the FIA lowered the displacement limits for the endurance racers, and threw everyone a curve by limiting the engine displacement of the low-production "prototypes" to just 3 liters. "Sports cars" (requiring at least 25 units be built) were allowed 5 liter engines (at least for the moment), but Wyer had built only 3 Mirages. This was a technicality: a Mirage was essentially a re-bodied GT40, but it was officially manufactured by JW Engineering, not the Ford Motor company, and the FIA was not about to do any favors for teams with American hardware, regardless of what name was on the paperwork.  So instead Wyer "re-built" the Mirages back into GT40s so they could continue to run the "big" 5 liter Ford V8s.
Replica of 1969 Le Mans Winning Gulf GT40,
Photographed at the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix 2016
Dick Thompson - who had been driving and winning for Grady Davis since 1960 - was 48 years old in 1968, and still spent much of his time drilling teeth: he was out of his depth competing with professional drivers half his age at the big high-speed European races. Moreover, he had not impressed John Wyer the year before, having wrecked a Mirage at Brands Hatch on one of the few occasions the JWA car was running well. After the '67 season he would "retire", and John Wyer would hire a few young-guns with solid endurance racing experience - Belgian Jacky Icxx, Brits Brian Redman and David Hobbs, and Mexican Pedro Rodriguez would all win races in the Gulf/Wyer GT40s.

Wyer would finally have his revenge, winning 5 of the 10 FIA sanctioned events, including Le Mans. Since the GT40s were still considered Fords, he would also earn Ford another FIA Manufacturer's Championship in 1968. Wyer would nearly repeat in 1969, winning Le Mans again with the same GT40 that won the year before, and earning Ford a 2nd place in the Manufacturer's Championship.

A brief diversion: in 1958 a young Bruce McLaren - a budding race driver and car builder - had left home in New Zealand for an apprenticeship with the Cooper F1 team in England. He proved to be a talented engineer, mechanic and driver and was soon working his way up through the F1 ranks. In 1963 John Wyer would recruit him to drive for his last Aston Martin team, and then brought him on to the GT40 effort the following year, culminating in McLaren taking Ford's first Le Mans win in 1966 - an impressive addition to the young driver's resume.

By the time of Wyer's Gulf deal, McLaren was having some success building cars and driving in both F1 and the new North American CanAm series. Wyer would introduce Davis and McLaren, resulting in the iconic orange McLaren's wearing Gulf logos during the 1968 and 69 series when the CanAm series became known as the "Bruce and Denny Show", with Bruce McLaren and teammate Denny Hulme winning nearly every CanAm event that season.

But back to JWA. All good things must come to an end; in 1970 the basic GT40 design was 7 years old and Ford was no longer putting millions of dollars into its development. In 1969 Porsche had gotten serious about an outright win at LeMans and had developed a GT40-killer: the 12-cylinder Porsche 917.  Not surprisingly, the Porsche's first outings against Wyer's GT40s were plagued with reliability and stability problems, but the writing was on the wall: the 917 - with its lightweight tube frame, composite body panels and all new flat 12 engine - was more than a match for the aging Ford and its push-rod V8.

Porsche wanted their first outright Le Mans win as badly as Ford had in 1965, and they knew Ferrari was building a new 5-liter 12-cylinder car of their own for the 1970 season, so they would take a page from the Ford play book: Porsche would do a deal with John Wyer and Gulf Oil to further develop the 917 and race it in the 1970 season in much the same way Shelby had developed the GT40 for Ford, and then Porsche quietly set up another factory 917 team, officially sponsored by the Porsche Salzburg holding company, and also provided significant support to a third team sponsored by Italian beverage company Martini&Rossi.

Porsche had designed the 917 to be very low drag to allow high top speeds at fast tracks like Le Mans, but with the limited aerodynamics of the time low drag also meant low down-force, making the car difficult to drive.  JWA would put a lot of effort into making the 917 more stable; they would eventually shorten the rear bodywork and add a horizontal spoiler, trading a small bit of drag for a lot of stability and creating the 917K variant ("K" for kurz heck, German for short tail).

There would be 8 Porsche 917s entered at Le Mans that year - including 6 of the short-tail 917Ks - plus 2 new 917L (lang heck - long tail) cars with a big rear wing added to improve stability, plus 11 of Ferrari's new 512Ss, plus a number of slightly older Porsche 908s and Ferrari 312Ps. It must have been amazing to see and hear all those 12 cylinder cars facing off on the Mulsanne Straight. Wyer ran three 917Ks, and would have had four - with actor Steve McQueen driving the fourth car - except the FIA had declined McQueen's entry at the last minute. At the end of the race, everyone - especially John Wyer - was a bit surprised to see a 917K finish in first place not wearing Gulf colors. The three Gulf cars had all DNF'd due to accidents and engine failure while the Porsche Salzburg team, with Hans Herrman and Richard Atwood driving, would bring home the win, followed by a Martini 917L in second and an aging Martini 908 in third.

Despite the bad luck at Le Mans, that year Gulf-Wyer 917s would take first place at 7 of the 10 FIA races, insuring Porsche the manufacturers championship. In 1971 Wyer's 917s would do almost as well, winning 5 of the 11 FIA races and placing  second at Le Mans, sealing another manufacturer's championship for Porsche.

Then in 1972 the FIA would finally kill off the big-motor cars. Under their new rules, the top-dog prototype cars were limited to 3.0 liter engines, with the intent of allowing race teams to use F1 engines. JWA would go back to building their own cars - Mirages - powered by the already venerable Ford-Cosworth DFV engine. The new Mirages showed promise, but it was clear the DFV would require a lot of development work for 24 hour reliability. John Wyer would retire at the end of 1972, turning JWA over to new managment. Back in Pittsburgh, Grady Davis was also nearing retirement age; he managed to lock in funding for what was left of the JWA team for a few more years and got a retirement present in 1975 - the year after his last day at Gulf Oil - in the form of one more Le Mans win by a blue and orange Mirage.

With the OPEC oil shortages of the mid 1970s, Gulf had little interest in racing. Consumers cared more about mileage than performance and FIA racing focused more on production based cars - even the European auto makers gave up on developing and building super expensive prototype racers.

By the early 1980s the oil industry was in turmoil. Starting in the 1970s the middle east oil countries had nationalized their oil businesses, breaking the sweetheart deals the US oil companies had made back in the 1930s. The oil companies were still making money, just not quite as fast as in the past, and the impact of that drop on stock prices - compared to the value of all the refineries and tankers and such - made many oil companies prime targets for takeovers by so called "corporate raiders".  To "protect" themselves, in 1985 Gulf Oil would merge with Standard Oil of California, creating the new company Chevron, with offices in California.  Chevron would shutdown the Gulf offices and research facilities in Pittsburgh, putting lots of executives and scientists out of work and leaving their 1930s art deco headquarters building empty (my first real job with a real office, at a Pittsburgh software startup company in the 1990s, was in that building - at the time all but 4 of its 44 floors were deserted).

Don Yenko was killed in a crash while landing his private plane in 1987.  John Wyer retired to Arizona; he passed away in 1989.   In the 1990s Chevron would dabble with reintroducing the Gulf name, resulting in a few McLaren F1 GTRs racing in Gulf's trademark blue and orange colors. Grady Davis would die in the fall of 1995, living long enough to see a Gulf sponsored car run at Le Mans one more time, although the Gulf McLaren would only manage a 4th place. The Gulf McLarens would have a good run through 1999, although they never matched JWA's dominance.

In 2010 Chevron would finally sell off the Gulf name; it is now owned by a petroleum distribution company who owns and operates oil terminals and gas stations and such around the world.  This new Gulf Oil company would continue sponsoring assorted racing teams through at least 2014 with the blue-and-orange scheme gracing both Audi  prototypes and Aston Martin race cars.  Today - 2016 - Gulf Racing seems to have faded away again - maybe for the last time.  If the stunning blue-and-orange cars do make a comeback, the modern team will be hard pressed to match the passion and spirit of adventure that Davis and Yenko and Wyer brought in those simpler days. But we can hope...

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