Dan Gurney and his Alligator
Dan Gurney and his All American Racers organization won't have an Indy car presence in 2000 after finishing up their Toyota deal last year. Gurney is a former Formula One car racer (and winner) and one of the very few guys on the planet to have won F1, Indy car and NASCAR. He's been a car guy and racer since the early 1950s.
He also sort of ran for President, but hey that's another story.
So now, with time on his hands, well, at least more time, Gurney will devote much of that time to his other passion: motorcycles. Gurney is a car guy but he also loves motorcycles and bike racing. He's been riding probably longer than he's been driving and has been chasing a dream of designing and building his own motorcycle for about the past ten or fifteen years.
With very little time to devote to this previously, Gurney has developed four running prototypes of the Gurney motorcycle, named the Alligator. They are powered by Honda single cylinder engines in different configurations; one is a performance street bike, another is an enduro, most have a very low seat height and an unconventional riding position.
Gurney said today that he is now working on the Alligator project a great deal of the time. "We're working more on the prototypes now and have funding in place to do more. We want to do this correctly all the way, start producing them and selling them to the public."
Gurney's design ideas changed the world of car racing and his bike design is very unconventional. "We've historically never taken the easy way in anything," he said. "We take the road we feel produces the best performance."
Although his enduro prototype has gotten scads of attention over the years, what intrigued us was his streetbike. Gurney wants to build a single cylinder high performance streetbike that weighs 300 pounds and has a top speed of 150 mph. "The prototype we have now goes 130 mph," Gurney said.
They're also going to manufacturer their own engines, probably in the next round of prototyping. Some of the Alligator prototypes now have a Gurney manufactured cylinder and cylinder head. "We're going to build our own engine and gearbox for the bike. If we didn't it would be hard to sell ourselves as a real manufacturer," Gurney said. Gurney has built race cars for a living for the past thirty-odd years and still does a great deal of engine and chassis development work for many of the manufacturers, so he can back up this talk, big time.Gurney then chatted about his motorcycle racing heroes. "I grew up going to races with Ed Kretz ... Senior ... in them. I saw him race a lot out at a track called Box Springs out by Riverside (Raceway). Of course I knew Hailwood when I was in Europe. Then of course I knew the whole Ascot gang and some of the later ones: Wayne Rainey, Eddie Lawson, guy like that. We helped Kenny (Roberts) when he was still a novice rider of sorts; we were the Montessa importer and we helped Kenny out when he was dirt tracking by giving him a bike."
About fifty people have ridden the Alligator prototype, according to Gurney, and the response thus far has been "99% positive".
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