BARONE'S C&CM

  Irish-American racer Derek Daly quickly ascended to the heights of automotive road racing, but not without his fair share of hardship. Sustaining a 17-year professional career in racing is a feat unto itself, but bouncing back from numerous life-threatening crashes required an inner commitment and strength of vision that forges champions. For Daly, it all started at the age of 12 when he spied a racecar hauler marked “Sydney Taylor Racing” around the corner from his father’s vegetable stand in suburban Dublin. The elder Daly noted his son’s interest, and arranged with the lorry driver to give him a look at the Brabham BT-8 inside. It’s likely this car was chassis #SC-6-64, which had been successfully driven by Denny Hulme throughout 1964 before heading to Ireland for the Leinster Trophy and Phoenix Park races in July of 1965. Young Derek was completely gobsmacked by the sight of the Brabham, and his father followed up by taking him to the races that weekend, cementing in him a ...

  A recent guided tour of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Legends of Speed exhibit – conducted by friend and legendary racer Lyn St. James – introduced me to the amazing career of Dan Gurney.   A successful racer who became both a car constructor and team owner, Gurney competed at the highest level in Formula One, NASCAR, IndyCar, Can-Am and the Trans-Am Series. On display at the exhibition was his famous Eagle Gurney-Weslake V12 that won the 1967 Grand Prix of Belgium. It was and remains the first and only time that an American citizen built and raced a car of his own construction and put it into the winner’s circle of a World Championship F1 race. As an aside, many consider the Gurney Eagle to be the most beautiful race car of all time. I have to agree. After a crash killed a spectator at the 1960 Dutch Grand Prix, Gurney became distrustful of engineers, and later constructed his own cars to better control his level of risk. He was quick to adopt the latest tools in s...