1967 and the Eagle V-12

We raced the car with the V-12 for the first time at Brands Hatch, at the Race of Champions.I remember it clearly as a very good handling car, and the engine had a lot of power for its time. By that time I had been racing in Europe for a long while and I still wanted to run my own Grand Prix team, and I wanted to drive a car, which represented my country. The chance had come about, as you know, through Carroll Shelby and the contacts with Goodyear Tires. Goodyear wanted Carroll and I to start an Indianapolis program to compete against Firestone. Part of the deal was that we could go ahead and build an F1 car to represent the USA in the international arena.

We had made arrangements with Weslake for the V-12 engine and overall I would say that they did an excellent job. There was never very much finance and that was always a problem from the beginning. When the Cosworth program came along, we saw what came from a good budget. They had new equipment and a lot of the Weslake machinery was old and pretty worn ex-Royal Navy equipment. This meant that all the engines were built individually and they weren’t all exactly the same. There was a problem with interchangeability of parts. I never blamed Weslake for this, we just didn’t have the budget. The staff at Weslake always worked very hard and they were good craftsmen. Michael Daniels and Harry Weslake had a “can do” philosophy and they got a lot done on the little finance we had. There were some problems in that we didn’t end up with what I thought we were going to get, which was based on the 500-cc unit which was being developed with research money from Shell. In the end, they redesigned the engine and ignored what I thought was going to be used and would have been a lot better and more powerful. As it was, we were worrying Cosworth at the time anyway.