Barn Find Hunter: Dan Gurney’s Fabled ’61 Impala Returns Home
Dan Gurney’s name permeates the history of American motorsports like perhaps none other. The smiling, blonde-haired hero who traded paint in machinery of all types and took checkered flags the world over holds an allure to car buffs that few other names can ever hope to. Gurney’s enterprising spirit and propensity to be fast in whatever he was piloting spawned enough stories and legends to fill entire websites, libraries, and television channels.
Today, we’re going to focus on one car in particular, with the help of none other than Tom Cotter, the Barn Find Hunter video crew, and a very, very special guest star: Justin Gurney, Dan’s son. The car in question: A blue and white 1961 Chevrolet Impala that, in true Gurney fashion, rolled off a boat in Britain and began beating Jaguar saloon cars so badly that it was eventually banned—through rather nefarious circumstances.
We’re not going to tell the story in full here in the text because it’s far better to hear it from Justin and Tom in the video below. But we will quickly touch on a few of the things that made this car—a nearly bone-stock 1961 Impala with naught but a Corvette swaybar and brake cooling ducts—such a legend in Gurney’s lore.
In the early 1960s, Dan Gurney was racing for the fledgling Porsche Formula 1 team over in Europe. When he noticed that some of his fellow drivers—legends such as Graham Hill, Jim Clark, and Bruce McLaren, to name a few—were also competing in the support races that took place before the grands prix, he took an interest in doing the same. He was attracted to the saloon car class, at the time dominated by 3.8-liter Jaguars. Naturally, Gurney began to ponder a way into the races, ultimately concluding that he could drop these Jags in a Chevy Impala.
The history here gets a bit murky, but it’s believed that toward the beginning of 1961, Gurney made a quick call to his old pal Zora Arkus Duntov—yes, the father of the Corvette—at GM and asked for an Impala to enter in the British Touring Car Championship, a series that shared weekends with a few of the F1 races around Europe. As Cotter later explained to us, “I have a feeling he had advanced knowledge and an opportunity to buy a pre-production package that was not available to the public until later in the year.”
Thus: An early-year 1961 Impala with a 409 Turbo Fire V-8—which was likely blueprinted from the factory to perform better at the track, a four-speed manual transmission, a radio, no air conditioning, a bench seat(!), and no power steering. Six-and-a-quarter turns lock to lock, as Tom and Justin would come to find out. Imagine Dan sawing away at that sort of steering ratio while dicing around Silverstone with smaller, lighter Jaguars.
You’ll have to watch the rest of the episode below to enjoy the history of this car—A boat, French conspirators, a cross-country honeymoon drive, and a rare Duntov mistake all come into play at different points.
But as you watch, pay extra close attention to the emotions bubbling to the surface—in Justin, to be sure, but even in Tom as well. “Gurney played all 88 keys on the keyboard,” Cotter later told us in an interview. “He was a hot rodder, a drag racer, a dry-lake competitor, and then he kinda got into road racing. This car, to me, is like all his automotive interests wrapped up into one set of wheels. It was a very loud, V-8-powered—you could have easily taken that car to a drag strip and drag-raced it. But he decided ‘I’m gonna road race it, and I’m gonna drive it on the street. And it’s gonna have a lot of horsepower.'”
Hard to think of a better summary of what this Impala means to Dan’s legacy than that—and by extension, what it now means to Justin.
Well, Justin might have an even better way of summarizing it.
“He would probably say that’s not loud enough, that exhaust.”
