“Guess whose attic we’re in today?” says Tom Cotter, opening up the latest episode of Barn Find Hunter. As fun as it is discovering entire cars that have been hidden away for decades, sometimes, the prospect of stumbling across parts of cars—cars that are filled with incredible stories—can be even better.
Tom and the team are back with Justin Gurney, son of All American Racers founder and national hero Dan Gurney, who died in 2018 at the age of 86. The last time we saw these two together, they were unloading this incredible 1961 Chevy Impala off a shipping container, a car whose history runs as deep as any in the Gurney fleet.
This time, Tom and Justin are cruising through the All American Racers shop in Santa Ana, California. The pair are swapping stories, pausing at dozens of small pictures and pieces, and generally just reveling in the lore that this building, this team, and this man, have built up.
The celebration of Gurney’s legacy—in IndyCar, Formula 1, sports car racing, and even beyond the track to industries like aerospace—begins the literal moment you go through the door, where the first thing you’ll step over is a couple of rows of bricks taken from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Talk about setting a precedent.
The first hallway they come through is full of trophies and images of Gurney’s successes throughout the decades. Justin regales Tom with some of the incredible particulars, and you can tell that Cotter is in his element, listening to the stories of his hero. (Seriously, just listen to Justin tell the story of his father’s victory at the 1962 Daytona Three-Hour race; that alone is worth your time!)
Eventually, Justin and Tom head over to a small display inside one of the meeting rooms, where a chunk of a wing is mounted in a glass case. This is, of course, the Gurney Flap—a now ubiquitous piece of aerodynamic engineering that you’ll find on race cars, helicopters, airplanes, and basically anything else that needs to interact with moving air. By now, you can probably guess where this is going: The story about the flap’s invention is every bit as good as you can imagine.
As they head back to the shop, Gurney and Cotter make a stop at what looks like an unused station. The workbench belonged to legendary fabricator Phil Remington, another of the titans who helped craft American motorsports history. To see Rem’s station, as he’d left it when he passed away in 2013, is a remarkable testament to AAR’s respect for one of the legends who made the shop what it is today.
Things really kick up a notch when the crew heads to the attic, which is filled to the brim with old race car parts from various series. There’s an air inlet for a Formula 5000 Eagle, a bumper and light assembly from a 1987 Toyota IMSA GTO car, and even a full aluminum tub from a 1970 Indy car, which was Dan’s final season racing.
“Most racers that I know, when the year is over, all that stuff is yesterday’s news,” remarks Cotter. “Here’s the exception, that Dan was as much a constructor of race cars as he was an enthusiast. ‘Why would I get rid of something that gives me great memories?’”
As we near the end of the episode, Cotter and Gurney head to another facility nearby to check out a Gurney Eagle F1 car that never got the chance to run. The car was nearly completed in 1968 for the 1969 season, but following a shift in priorities for Goodyear, the title sponsor of the car, AAR had to cease building the Eagle and it sat in the attic for 50 years, according to Justin.
Thankfully, the team at AAR is in the process of completing this car, and—as with pretty much everything else in this episode—the stories that accompany the car are nearly as wild as the current effort to finish it.
Keeping the legacy of one of America’s most decorated racers alive and well is both an easy task and a tricky one. The stories, immortalized in thousands of pictures on the halls of the AAR facility, and in the hardware stacked seemingly everywhere, will never grow old. But the machines that Gurney drove, designed, and managed all take real effort to either keep running or return to running order. Listening to Justin throughout the episode, one thing is plainly clear: Dan’s son is more than up to the task.
By loading the video, you agree to YouTube's privacy policy.
Learn more
Report by Nathan Petroelje for hagerty.com
