by A. J. Baime
The threat of Ford Motor Company and the Shelby Cobras didn’t register with Ferrari. Though his Formula One campaign had seen its ups and downs, his domination of sports car racing—the kind that translated directly to customer orders—was long-lived and complete. Since 1953, Ferrari had won nine of eleven World Sports Car Championships. Ferrari cars had won Le Mans in 1958, 1960, 1961, 1962, and 1963. The prior year, a Ferrari had finished over 240 miles ahead of the nearest competitor after 24 hours. This new barchetta—the 330 P—added 60 horsepower to the previous year’s car, while shaving off about five kilograms.
Ferrari believed his new Le Mans weapon would be, when ready, the fastest and most durable racing sports car on earth. In Surtees’s hands, it was coming closer and closer to perfection.
9
The Ford GT40: January–April 1964
HENRY FORD II took the stage at Cobo Hall, a downtown convention center on the Detroit River. He looked out and saw countless faces through a haze of cigarette smoke. It was the annual meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers, and Henry II was to deliver the keynote speech.
“This is a year like other years,” he began, “in which America will arrive at a series of crossroads in the long journey in search of our national destiny. For generations our technology has been the most advanced and progressive in the world. It is the basis of our standard of living, of our national security, of our position in the community of nations. We have grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the unchallenged masters of the machine age.
“Fifteen years ago, such self-confidence was fully justified. The rest of the world came here to learn how to make things better and cheaper and faster. More recently, in industry after industry, we have seen new processes developed abroad and then adopted here. We have seen foreign products challenging our own, even in our domestic market, not only because the foreign products are cheaper but also because they are often better and more advanced. Signs such as these suggest that we should be asking ourselves some important questions.
“Do we still have more to teach the world than it has to teach us?”
Six time zones away, in a small industrial space in Slough, a suburb of London, a prototype Ford Le Mans car was beginning to take shape. The space was situated in a newly constructed brick factory complex just west of London’s Heathrow Airport—convenient for moving parts and people all over Europe and back to Dearborn.
Ford had pieced together a team of brains. Roy Lunn headed up engineering. Ford needed a manager to lead the operation, a man with experience who could be trusted with a checkbook. Shelby brought in his old boss from Aston Martin, John Wyer. (“Pappy can tell you everything you want to know about racing and sports cars,” Shelby said by way of introduction.) Wyer was fifty-three, a towering figure with a haggard, sleepless look. His gaze was so fierce, racers liked to call him “Death Ray”—though never to his face. Wyer was Aston Martin team manager when Shelby won Le Mans in 1959. Now, four years later, he signed with Ford for more than twice what he was making at Aston Martin.
Don Frey met with a laundry list of the brightest minds in England in search of an engineering consultant. He found his man in Eric Broadley, an ex-architect in his mid-thirties who’d founded a racing car company called Lola, named for the 1955 hit song “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.” Broadley had shown up at Le Mans in 1963 with a low-slung, midengined prototype racer exactly like the one Ford intended to build. Shelby saw the car and alerted his Ford contacts. Broadley needed money. He could provide experience and contacts to suppliers. Ford signed him to a two-year contract. Shelby’s chief engineer Phil Remington rounded out the team.
Already, a flurry of publicity placed a glaring spotlight on the activity at Slough. Le Mans was some 250 days away. Twelve-hour workdays were the norm. Weekends and holidays did not exist. It was only a matter of time before tempers flared. Within weeks, Lunn and Broadley could barely speak to each other. Don Frey was receiving letters from Wyer, second-guessing Lunn’s decisions.
Lunn traveled through Europe purchasing the finest state-of-the-art components, none of which were available in America. Borrani fifteen-inch, wire-spoked wheels and Colotti transaxles from Italy. Metalastic driveshaft couplings and Girling brake calipers from Engl and. Other parts came from the engineering laboratories in Dearborn. All these components needed to be married seamlessly so the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The failure of any one would result in a Did Not Finish. According to Le Mans rules, no major component could be replaced once the race began.
The first task was to test these components. The team used two of Broadley’s Lola cars as mules. Mechanics mounted components at the shop in Slough and trailered the Lolas to racetracks in England and Italy.
It was John Wyer’s job to bring in driving talent. He hired a test driver, the best in the business. Today, the name “McLaren” means racing excellence. At that time, Bruce McLaren was a fresh-faced New Zealander with a huge smile and one leg longer than the other. He wore corrective footwear, but he walked with a limp when wearing his racing shoes. As a boy growing up in Auckland, McLaren contracted Perthes disease, a condition of the bones. He spent two years at the Wilson Home for Crippled Children strapped to a “Bradshaw Frame”—a flat bed on wheelchair wheels—with weights hanging off his feet. It was on this wheeled contraption that he began racing. At the Wilson Home there were other kids his age on Bradshaw Frames.
Now twenty-six, McLaren had become a top-rate engineer and a champion pilot. He was the first driver associated with Ford’s Le Mans project.
All the car’s elements were in design at once. In Ford’s styling studio in Dearborn, a team under the direction of design chief Eugene Bordinat had already completed a three-eighths-scale clay model of the body, according to specifications Lunn supplied. This automobile would resemble nothing ever dreamed up in an American design studio.* According to an analysis of the components Lunn had chosen, designers conceived of a silhouette 156 inches long and just 40 inches high, no taller than a kitchen counter. Thus the car’s nickname. It was officially named Ford GT (a confusing name, since the car would race as a prototype, not in the GT class). But it came to be known as GT40. Designers painted the clay model blue and white—American racing colors—and shipped it to the University of Maryland for wind-tunnel testing.
As for the engine, the obvious choice was the modified 256-cubic-inch Fairlane V8 that the company was developing for the Ford Indianapolis racing car. Tuned to run for 24 hours, the engine could produce 350 horsepower. That it was modified from the stock Fairlane engine would make for strong advertising copy when the company won Le Mans. The champion car would be, as far as the public relations department was concerned, closely allied to a production Ford.
Before the first car was built, Lunn took the data from wind-tunnel testing and an estimate of the car’s weight and horsepower, and plotted it on a graph. The coordinates showed a top speed of 210 mph—faster than anything in Ferrari’s arsenal.
The Ford engine produced enough power. All the other elements had to work together to harness it and put it in the hands of the driver.
In Dearborn, Ford engineers were at work on a new suspension system that could survive the brutal abuse of Europe’s racetracks while planting all the engine’s power to the pavement. Like the human knee, the joint between the wheel and the car’s frame is a complex system of structural elements joined by mechanical tendons and ligaments. To create the GT40’s independent suspension, engineers used a tool that had never been employed in car design—the computer—plotting movement in different planes and on canted axes.
Electronics would prove critical. As a street-legal car, the GT40 needed blinkers, windshield wipers, an ignition system. Unlike in a production car, the circuitry would be subject to extreme heat and vibration over long periods of time. Rules dictated that the vehicle must be shut down during pit stops and then restarted off the battery, and the car would be disqualified if any lighting equipment faile
d at night. The team designed the car with two rubber stomach-like fuel bladders wrapped in fire-proof neoprene built into the frame below each door, each with its own filler cap and electric fuel pump. Total capacity: forty-two gallons, the limit according to Le Mans rules.
At Slough, Lunn spent most of his time in the drafting room, where a diagram of the car was sketched across a wall. He knew the transmission was going to be the key. The only one immediately available that met his needs was from Colotti, a small company based in Ferrari’s hometown of Modena. It was a four speed. Would it hold up? Drivers would shift some nine thousand times over 24 hours, high-rpm shifts that would place massive loads on the gear teeth. And the disc brakes. Would they last? At the end of the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans—the fastest stretch of road ever incorporated into a closed racing circuit—the Ford GT40 was going to decelerate from 200 mph to 35 mph in a matter of yards. It was the single most punishing corner on brakes in all of racing.
In mid-December, everything was in place and the team began to build the first car. The frame was critical in determining how the automobile would perform under extreme abuse. Racing engineers in Europe were experimenting with exotic lightweight metals, but there was no time for experimentation. The team chose old-fashioned sheet steel of 0.024- to 0.028-inch thickness. They mounted the frame onto the wire-spoked wheels and positioned the car’s heart and soul, its high-revving V8 engine, behind the cockpit and ahead of the rear axle. The skin arrived from the supplier, Specialised Mouldings Ltd., a local company that molded the fiberglass according to a full-size mock-up shipped from Dearborn’s styling studio.
The days ticked by, and the deadline loomed. In mid-January, Lunn sent a report to Dearborn. The news was not good. He admitted that the prototype was “well behind schedule” and attributed the tardiness to “the human nature aspects of forming a new team.” They were at each other’s throats and running out of workdays. Lunn noted that “build time will now run concurrently with race preparation.”
The first GT40 was completed on April 1, “eleven months after putting pencil to paper,” in Lunn’s words. Every square inch was designed to cut through air—the long, sloped nose; rear stance; raised, clipped tail. It was painted navy blue and white, the paint on the hood a matte finish so as not to cause glare. The driver’s seat was on the right side, Euro-style. Toggles and gauges were pointed directly at the driver on the instrument panel in various shapes so he could identify them without taking his eyes off the road. The engine sat deep in the chassis, just behind the two seats. On both sides of the car, “FORD” was painted in big letters.
But the work had only begun. The goal was to build two more cars in time for Le Mans. And who knew how the machine was going to behave at speed? A new racing car required extensive development so it could evolve into a safe and efficient machine. As test driver McLaren put it: “A racing car chassis is like a piano. You can make something that looks right with all the wires, the right length, the right size, and pretty close to the right settings, but until it is tuned it won’t play so well.”
Le Mans practice days, when the GT40 would have its first run at full speed in front of the Ferrari team and an army of writers and photographers, was three weeks away. Meanwhile, the team was down a man; Eric Broadley left. So much for the two-year contract. More bad news arrived.
“Roy?”
“Yes,” Lunn said into his telephone.
It was Don Frey calling from Dearborn. Frey wanted the finished car shipped to New York for a press conference on April 3. Both Lunn and Wyer protested furiously. They needed time to put miles on the car, troubleshoot, and adjust. They had no choice, Frey said. Iacocca and Mr. Ford were going to attend the unveiling.
Wyer made the arrangements. The car was flown from Heathrow at 3:00 P.M. on April 2, arriving at JFK Airport in New York. After clearing customs, it was trailered to a Ford dealership for a polish, then to the Essex House on Central Park South in Manhattan. It would leave JFK for London at 3:00 P.M. the following day.
The unveiling was timed for the opening day of the New York Auto Show. Which meant the entire automotive world was on hand. Sitting on a carpeted floor in front of a curtain at the Essex House sat perhaps the most expensive marketing tool in history. It looked like something out of the James Bond movie From Russia with Love, which premiered in New York that same week.
Here was an American sports car that could travel 95 mph—in reverse.
When Mr. Ford walked into a room, executives straightened their spines. Henry II looked down at the car for the first time. He saw a sexy, low-slung rocket of a European racing car with his name on it. He wondered what his stingy grandfather would have thought of the GT40. Henry Ford probably would have hated it. But Henry II’s father Edsel would have loved the thing.
A crowd filled the room, and Ford executives mingled. They were all here: Frey, Lunn, Wyer, Iacocca. Photographers snapped shots of the car, the camera flashes sparkling in its wire-spoked wheels. Reporters jotted impressions in their notebooks. There was an air of unconcealed excitement. A Ford car to race against the Ferraris at Le Mans—those reporters couldn’t have scripted a more enticing plot.
Iacocca took to the podium and delivered a short speech, with talk of 200 miles an hour and 350 horsepower. The engine was built in the United States, the brakes were from England, and the transmission was from Italy. This was not just an American racing car, it was The World Car, an embodiment not of a Detroit company but a global empire. As Iacocca spoke, Lunn and Wyer sat in the audience listening. They feared the worst. Le Mans practice days were two and a half weeks away and their car had barely turned a wheel.
A few days later, Wyer stood in the pits at Goodwood, a racetrack near Engl and’s southern coast, watching the Ford GT40 as McLaren looped it around the winding circuit. Wyer instructed McLaren to drive “at medium speeds,” no faster than 145 mph. A couple of short shakedowns were all they could do to develop the car before heading to France. Standing next to Wyer in a leather jacket, leaning up against the pit wall with hands folded in a ball, stood Phil Hill. Except for a female assistant holding a stopwatch, the two men were alone. The grandstands stood empty.
That spring, Hill was trying to find himself. He’d spent the 1963 season with an upstart Italian racing firm called ATS, but the company was a failure and so was Hill. He didn’t finish a single F1 race. Pundits said the American champion had lost his confidence. Worse still, some said he had lost his courage, his nerve cracked. There could be no more damning criticism for a man in Hill’s shoes.
The former champion found himself without a Le Mans ride for 1964, and Wyer signed him to lead the American effort along with McLaren. As Hill watched McLaren cruise past the pits in the Ford car, the irony must have burned into him. How quickly his fortunes had turned. The press had called him “Mickey Mantle in a Ferrari” two and a half years earlier. Now he was “Hamlet in goggles and gloves.”
He was to take on his former boss Enzo Ferrari at Le Mans. Was Hill in fact washed up? The most accomplished endurance driver in the world was the man who had the most to prove.
10
Loss of Innocence: April–June 1964
In the long run, death is the odds-on favorite.
—EDDIE SACHS
ON THE MORNING of April 18, 1964, a group of mechanics pushed two Ford GT40s down a muddy path at the Le Mans circuit, underneath the grandstands to the pit lane. Roy Lunn and John Wyer walked alongside soberly, dirtying their shoes. According to Lunn, the two Fords had “an aggregate of only four hours running time with no high-speed experience.” They were geared to run at 200 mph down the Mulsanne Straight, faster than anything had ever traveled at Le Mans before. But who knew what they would do in actuality?
The Le Mans test weekend was an institution. The race was held on public roads that, come June, were cordoned off and turned into a closed racing circuit. So each April the organizing committee, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, sealed off the circuit so teams could te
st the new machinery at speed without having to dodge car and tractor traffic. Conditions were typical for spring that morning: a sky so overcast it appeared almost purple, with a misty drizzle that made for slippery pavement. Spectators and journalists were given free access to the pits and they crowded around the mysterious Ford racing cars.
Soon cars were speeding down the straight past the pits, kicking up wakes of rainwater, windshield wipers thumping. Ford’s top drivers were competing that weekend in the Aintree 200 in England. Hill and McLaren were contractually obligated to race for the Cooper team; they were planning on flying into Le Mans to turn some laps in the new cars before the weekend was over. Wyer had brought in two other drivers—Roy Salvadori and Jo Schlesser. Salvadori was a Le Mans champion, having won in 1959 driving for Wyer in an Aston Martin, teamed with Shelby. Schlesser didn’t have the same pedigree. He was co-owner of a Ford dealership in Paris and was more known for crashing cars than winning. Ford of France was keen on having a Frenchman on the team. The Paris office wanted a piece of the action in more ways than one.
Salvadori was first onto the track. Rain-slicked gray helmet on, he pulled his leather gloves over his hands. When he fired the engine, its aria shrieked from the dual crossover tuned exhausts. He put the car in gear, rode the clutch for a moment, and the Dunlop tires gripped the wet pavement. As the car eased onto the straight Lunn stood beside the track wringing his hands nervously. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and watched the car pull away.