The 1967 AAR Eagle Mk I, Dan Gurney's own F1 winner, is up for auction

A 1967 AAR Eagle Mk I, the only American-built car ever to win a Formula 1 Grand Prix, is being offered through a sealed-bid auction at RM Sotheby's, running from Wednesday, September 23 to Wednesday, September 30, with an estimate of USD 7,000,000 to USD 9,000,000.

This is not the race-winning chassis itself. It is the third of only four Eagle Mk I cars built, fitted with the Weslake V12 engine and driven across the 1967 season by Dan Gurney, Richie Ginther and Ludovico Scarfiotti, finishing third at that year's Canadian Grand Prix.

Gurney founded the team, All American Racers, in 1964 with Carroll Shelby, his friend and racing rival. A UK offshoot, Anglo American Racers, kept the same initials and built the Formula 1 cars, while the US side raced Champ Cars and the Indy 500 under Goodyear backing.

How the Eagle Mk I was built

The Eagle Mk I, also called the Eagle T1G, shared its design roots with AAR's 1966 Indy 500 car. Engineer Len Terry, who had helped develop the 1965 Indy-winning Lotus 38, drew a full-length monocoque chassis in aluminum, titanium and magnesium with the cigar-like profile typical of the period.

The bodywork was painted Imperial blue with white roundels and a white stripe running the car's length, a reversal of the white-with-blue-stripes scheme usually associated with American racing colors. Its pointed, beak-like nose set it apart on the grid from rival constructors of the era.

AAR's workshop sat near Harry Weslake's engine works, which built the 3.0-litre V12 specifically for the car, targeting around 390 bhp. Delays with that engine forced the team to debut the Eagle Mk I with a 2.7-litre Coventry Climax inline-four instead, at the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix.

Gurney finished fifth in France, seventh in Germany and fifth again in Mexico on the underpowered four-cylinder unit that first season. The Weslake V12 arrived midway through 1966, adding more than 100 bhp over the Climax engine, though it made little further impression that year.

The Belgian win that made history

The 1967 season returned to Spa-Francorchamps, where Gurney qualified second behind Jim Clark. Mechanical trouble dropped Clark back, handing the lead to Jackie Stewart with Gurney in pursuit, and the Eagle Mk I proved fast enough to break both the Grand Prix average speed record and the Spa lap record that day.

Gurney passed Stewart with eight laps remaining and took the win, the only Grand Prix victory under Formula 1 regulations ever scored by an American-built car. He remains one of just three drivers, alongside Jack Brabham and Bruce McLaren, to win a Formula 1 race in a car of his own construction.

Gurney's four career Formula 1 wins also included a 1962 victory with Porsche and two with Brabham in 1964. His broader résumé includes a class win at the 1964 Le Mans 24 Hours in a Shelby Cobra Daytona with Bob Bondurant, and outright victory at Le Mans in 1967 in a Ford GT40 Mk IV alongside A.J. Foyt.

Formula 1 results were harder won than the US side of AAR's business. The Eagle chassis built for Indy racing won 51 races stateside, including Bobby Unser's Indy 500 victories in 1968 and 1975 and Gordon Johncock's win in 1973, far outpacing the single Grand Prix win the Formula 1 program managed.

By 1968, AAR's final season in Formula 1, Gurney ran nine of twelve races in the Eagle without scoring a point, before switching to a Ford V8-powered McLaren M7A for the last three rounds and finishing fourth at Watkins Glen. He skipped the 1969 season and made three more starts in 1970 for Bruce McLaren's own team.

Within our coverage of the garage category, motorsport history has recently traded alongside Hollywood provenance and modern hypercar engineering. We reported on Steve McQueen's 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 Spider heading to auction with a $20 million valuation, a figure well above this Eagle Mk I's upper estimate.

We have also tracked the Batman Returns Batmobile, expected to fetch up to $7 million, a number that lands at the low end of the range RM Sotheby's has set for the Eagle Mk I. Both sales underline how film and motorsport provenance now compete for the same collector budgets at auction.

RM Sotheby's has not disclosed a reserve price or named the consignor behind the Eagle Mk I, and it is unclear whether the seller has owned the car for a defined period. Those details, along with the identity of the winning bidder, typically surface only once the sealed-bid process closes.

The sale is scheduled to conclude on Wednesday, September 30, when RM Sotheby's sealed-bid window closes and a buyer is confirmed. Further specifications and provenance documents on the car are listed through RM Sotheby's own site ahead of that closing date.