All American Racers is an American-licensed auto racing team and constructor based in Santa Ana, California.

Founded by Dan Gurney and Carroll Shelby in 1964, All American Racers initially participated in American sports car and Champ Car races as well as international Formula One events with cars named Eagle. The Formula One team, based in the United Kingdom and using British-built Weslake engines was named Anglo American Racers. Under team manager Bill Dunne they set up shop in Rye, East Sussex. The team were adjacent to Harry Weslake's engine development plant and half a mile from Elva cars. They participated in 25 Grands Prix, entering a total of 34 cars.

The first Eagles were created after AAR entered a Goodyear-backed Lotus 38 in the 1965 Indianapolis 500 and Gurney hired former Lotus designer Len Terry to develop their own car for 1966. The resulting Ford-powered Eagle T2G was codeveloped with the Eagle T1G for Formula 1. After exiting Formula One in 1968 and concentrating on Champ Car, Eagle turned to sports car racing in the 1980s, partnering with Toyota to develop the Celica and later sports prototypes for the IMSA GT Championship.

 

Headquarters  Santa Ana, California, USA

eagle t1g 1967

In order to run the Formula 1 operations, Gurney established the Anglo American Racers team, based in Rye, East Sussex, UK, though the cars were built in Santa Ana, California, USA by the All American Racers team.

The Eagle T1G car, powered by an obsolete Coventry Climax engine, debuted at the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix and scored its first points with a fifth place three weeks later at the French Grand Prix.

For the 1967 season Richie Ginther was signed as a second driver. The Climax engine was replaced by a new 3-liter Weslake V12 designed by Aubrey Woods and built in Great Britain by Harry Weslake.

At the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix Gurney achieved a victory, the first "all-American" victory in a Grand Prix since Jimmy Murphy´s triumph with Duesenberg at the 1921 French Grand Prix. Excluding the Indianapolis 500, this is the only win for a USA-built car as well as one of only two wins of an American-licensed constructor in Formula One.

The Eagle-Weslake was a beautiful and efficient car, one example of which was constructed in titanium and exotic alloys. More than this, the Eagle was designed to make the tall Gurney fit comfortably at the wheel. Their efforts produced a V12 that was smooth and powerful.

At Monza, an insight into the future of engine design was seen for the first time. The engine had four valves per cylinder at a narrow included angle (thirty degrees) that allowed a single cover to enclose both the close-spaced camshafts on each bank. The sixty-degree-vee layout had a larger bore than stroke (72.8 X 60mm).

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.

A non-works version briefly appeared with privateer Al Pease in the 1969 Canadian Grand Prix, but Pease became noticed for all the wrong reasons and made history as the only F1 driver ever disqualified for being too slow.

AAR Eagle T1G 1967 (youtube.com)

1964-2012