by A. J. Baime
Wyer turned to Richie Ginther, a short, toothpick-shaped man with red hair and an impressive résumé. Ginther had raced on the Ferrari Formula One team, and was an old friend of Phil Hill’s back to the days when they both had worked at Roger Barlow’s automobile dealership in Los Angeles. Ginther had qualified fastest on the Ford team. He was partnered with Masten Gregory, “The Kansas City Flash.” Wyer ordered Ginther to run hard at the start to try to get the Ferrari drivers to break their engines.
Ginther got the point. The opening laps would be a dogfight. He was going to show the world what the new Ford could do.
All roads leading into Le Mans clogged with overheating cars, trunks filled with tents, sleeping bags, and Kodak Instamatics. Cabs moved bumper to bumper past the Le Mans train station. By the afternoon, spectators had swamped the grandstands and crowded the fields around the circuit. According to French officials, the largest crowd ever was attending the race, well over 300,000. Strolling through the mobs one heard English, German, Italian. Barracks full of American soldiers in uniform, on leave from base in West Germany, formed lines at the beer tents. The airfield behind the grandstands was busy with traffic, private planes and helicopters carting in bigwigs.
Mechanics began pushing racing cars out of the paddock and onto the pit straight at the bottom of the grandstands. Flowers piled up under a plaque that marked the spot where Pierre Levegh had crashed into the crowd nine years earlier; the plaque read simply, “June 11, 1955.” The official Dutray Le Mans clock hung over the pavement in the center of it all, and as its hands rounded closer to 4:00 P.M., drivers appeared holding their helmets. They wore racing shoes, leather gloves, and fireproof coveralls, goggles draped around their necks.
The Le Mans start was foreign to the American racing fans. Drivers stood on one side of the road across from their cars, which lined the pit row in order of qualifying, the fastest car at the front. The starter stood in the center of the road holding the French flag high and when he dropped the flag at exactly 4:00 P.M., the drivers sprinted across the two-lane road, jumped in the cockpits, hit the ignition, and boxed each other into the opening straightaway in the fiercest and loudest traffic jam ever witnessed.
Minutes before 4:00 P.M., gendarmes herded the crowds off the pavement and the drivers took their positions. In Italy, Enzo Ferrari sat down in front of a television. In the pit, Shelby paced; the reputation of his company was on the line. His Cobra had clocked 197 mph in qualifying on the Mulsanne Straight. A host of highlevel Ford executives had arrived and they stood in the Ford pit waiting and watching. Following a handful of national anthems, silence settled over the hundreds of thousands of spectators. Smokers could hear the crackle of their cigarettes burning. Rows of photographers lined the pavement aiming like gunners in a firing line. A voice over the loudspeakers counted out the final moments in French.
“. . .Thirty seconds . . . ten seconds. . .”
Start
Phil Hill dashed across the road. He jumped through the right-side door into the Ford’s cockpit and hit the ignition. The V8 came to life. Clutch in, shift into first, down on the gas, up on the clutch. The engine stalled. Hill saw cars peeling off all around him onto the opening straight. The noise was deafening even through earplugs. And then he was alone on the starting line. He couldn’t get the car to move. He couldn’t goddamn believe it. In the pit, mechanics and Ford executives looked on, their jaws hitting the pavement. By the time Hill got the car going, he was alone, motoring down the straight in last place, gearshifts crackling in rapid fire.
Even then Hill knew something was off. Something was very wrong.
Surtees tore down the opening straightaway, up the slight right-hand incline, and under the Dunlop Bridge. He loved the pavement at Le Mans—“billiard table smooth.” Two other Ferraris got a jump on him and he found himself trailing in third place.
It was a long race.
The early laps were among the most dangerous, when not-so-skilled drivers swapped paint at high speed. Which is why it was wise to motor ahead of the riffraff as soon as possible. Surtees focused on the course, every nerve and reflex in tune with the movement of the car and the other cars around him. He was merciless in close combat. No matter how good you thought you were, he’d find a way to pass you, leave you wondering, your concentration snapped. It was custom for drivers at Le Mans to wait until they reached the Mulsanne Straight to strap on their seatbelts; on the straight they could hold the wheel with their knees.
By the time Surtees was hauling back through the grandstands at the end of the first lap, it was one-two-three for Ferrari. A flagman stood in the center of the lane signaling caution; slick oil had already spilled onto the pavement.
In the cockpit, everything unfolded in slow motion. “When you start [racing],” Surtees once wrote, “120 mph seems like 160 mph. With experience, that 120 mph seems more like 60 mph.” As Surtees maneuvered the twisty, downhill Esses on lap two, he saw in his rearview mirror the mouth of a Ford GT40 tuck in behind him. Mere inches separated the two cars. Surtees downshifted into second gear and turned into the right-hand Tertre Rouge corner onto the Mulsanne Straight. Then he accelerated hard, with the Ford slipstreaming behind him. Third gear, fourth, fifth. Surtees was approaching 190 mph. The world turned into a Technicolor blur, as if he was being sucked into some cosmic vacuum cleaner.
Suddenly the Ford jumped to the left to pass. It was the #11 car. Richie Ginther darted past Surtees traveling faster than any car ever had on the storied Straight. Surtees saw him through his windscreen and—just like that—Ginther was gone.
In the press box, ABC’s Jim McKay was yelling wildly into his microphone, taping footage for the next weekend’s Wide World of Sports broadcast: “Word from the course is that Richie Ginther, who had moved up from eighth to fourth place, has passed some more cars. As a matter of fact, the word is that Richie Ginther has taken the lead in the second lap in the white Ford with blue stripes. The American racing colors are in the lead at Le Mans! There he is on the right of your screen. Get a look at that low-slung Ford! I’ve never seen a car as low as that!”
Phil Hill was back in the pit and mechanics were digging into the engine compartment. Minutes were speeding by, Hill losing more and more ground. The crew found the problem: a blocked jet in one of the Weber carburetors. The car couldn’t breath. These Italian-made carburetors were so complex, the mechanics were dumbfounded by them. Where the hell was the Weber representative? Against the noise of engines John Wyer heard a man shouting at him from above in the crowd. He looked up. It was the Weber rep.
“What are you doing up there?” Wyer yelled.
“They wouldn’t give me a pit pass,” came the reply.
Not soon enough the carburetor was fixed and Hill raced off in a healthy GT40.
Cramped into that small cockpit, the champion began to weave through the traffic. By this time Hill was in forty-fourth place. He’d lost twenty-two minutes. To catch up to the Ferraris from that distance would require the powers of a superhero. Hill knew this circuit better than any man.
How to Go Fast
Hill began to rip off a series of perfect laps. Experience told him how to make up time at high speed without overtaxing the engine. There can be only one shortest distance around a racetrack, achieved when the driver chooses the perfect line on every turn. When he moved the car through a bend he could ease the tires within an inch of the pavement’s edge. The great endurance racer possessed a kind of compassion for the machine and its countless moving parts, allowing it to breathe and flex its muscle.
In large part, the race was won or lost on the rev counter, the rpm gauge staring the driver in the face from the center of the instrument panel. If Hill aimed to take a turn at 4,500 rpm, 4,400 rpm wasn’t good enough. The difference between a 4-minute lap and a 3:58 lap equaled roughly 25 miles at the finish.
In the grandstands, fans watched Hill shriek out of the White House bend and down the pit straight. Thumbs clicked on stopwatches when he f
lew past the start/finish. He was cruising at 185 mph in fourth gear at 5,700 rpm. A slight inclining right bend led him under the Dunlop Bridge. He eased up on the gas, then accelerated again, shooting down a slope at 183 mph into the Esses. He downshifted to third, then second, in perfect fluid motion. Easy on the downshifts; no stress on the gear teeth or clutch plate. Hill left the Esses in second gear at 5,800 rpm—82 mph. A hard brake down to 65 mph, a tight right turn onto the Mulsanne Straight, and he hammered the throttle. Third, fourth. The g-forces pinned him against his seat. A glance at the tach: 6,100 rpm. Two hundred mph summoned with his toe.
Nearing the end of the Straight, a blind right-hand kink approached—La Grande Courbe. Hill took the kink flat out. Then came the Mulsanne Corner, the hardest turn on brakes in racing. He let the car coast . . . Then he nailed the brake pedal and downshifted: three, two, one. Exhaust pipes spit sparks and the cast iron brake discs turned fiery red. The lap belt dug into Hill’s waist. He steered into the right-hander at 35 mph.
Hard on the accelerator. Second, third, past the signaling pits on the right, back up to 180 mph. Hill hurled the car through turns, rear wheels struggling for grip. The grandstands appeared in the distance. Hill gunned through that chasm, a huge valley coated with human bodies. Many thousands of eyes followed the blue and white streak as it passed the start/finish, a Ford car hurtling 185 mph on four patches of rubber. Thumbs clicked on stopwatches again. The American was moving.
No two laps were the same. Hill’s brain filtered stimuli, automatically ranking it in order of importance in nanoseconds. Photographers leaning in and waving at him. A piece of newspaper floating in the wind. Pit signals: P2 (pit in two laps), P1, along with lap times. With each lap, fuel burned off, lightening the car, increasing its speed. Perception was near extrasensory. “True concentration is not aware of itself,” Hill explains. When the driver forgets himself is when he becomes one with the machine. The engine is ignored unless there is a problem. The heart is racing, maybe 160 beats a minute, but it, too, is ignored. “The flagmen, unless they are holding a yellow flag or some such thing, are perceived and forgotten,” Hill says. “A small car you are overtaking is registered and erased as you safely pass.” Always there is the danger that a driver in a car moving 80 mph slower will make an unexpected move.
As Hill weaved through the field, the cockpit heated up. During daylight hours it could hit 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Dressed in coveralls, helmet tight over the head, the body began to dehydrate. Noise numbed the ears and the same brutal, incessant vibration that threatened the car’s electronics wore on the driver’s nervous system. Lap after lap, hour after hour. “Sometimes you may not even be aware of the break in your concentration,” Hill says. “Not until you find yourself plunging past your breaking point.”
Pit Stop
Richie Ginther pulled his #11 Ford into the pit. It was just after 5:30 P.M. Ginther stepped out of the car and the crowd roared for him. He was in first place.
None of the mechanics said anything. Four of them—the most allowed by Le Mans regulations—went to work. They were wearing armbands with MECANICIEN 1964 printed in black so they were easily identified by the hovering officials. Tires to check, tank to fill.
“Well, for God’s sake,” Ginther shouted, “isn’t anyone going to ask me how the car went?”
Questions followed and Ginther told his story. One man present described him as “wildly ecstatic.” When he passed those Ferraris to take the lead on the Mulsanne Straight, Ginther said, his tach read 7,200 rpm. He had hit 210 mph. Only two months earlier, Surtees had set a mark on the Straight during the Le Mans test weekend at 194.
Ginther’s teammate Masten Gregory hustled over to the car. He looked over his shoulder at his boss John Wyer, nodded, then jumped in. But the mechanics were not finished. The whole team watched and waited. And waited. No matter how fast the car traveled, it meant nothing if pit stops were slow. By the time the #11 Ford screeched onto the pit straight, two minutes seven seconds had passed.
Surtees had taken the lead.
Attrition
In the Cobra pit, Shelby stood making a meal of his fingernails. At 9:00 P.M., one of his Cobras was leading the GT class in the hands of Dan Gurney, miles ahead of the Ferrari GTOs, lying fourth overall. Gurney had raced here six times, but he’d never finished. He had a heavy foot, perhaps too heavy for this race. The Cobra had a 5-mph edge in top speed over the Ferrari GTOs, but those Ferraris were bulletproof. As one GTO pilot put it: “A Ferrari was like insurance. You were assured that you would finish the race.”
Would Shelby’s Cobra hold together? The tall Texan rubbed his eyes and watched the Cobra as it passed, as if the intensity of his stare could somehow ward off mechanical failure. The sun ducked slowly behind the grandstands.
John Wyer’s careful plans began to unravel. A little more than four hours into the race, the team received word that a GT40 had burst into flames on the Mulsanne Straight. Word from the signaling pit on the other side of the circuit: the driver, Richard Attwood, had climbed safely out of the car, but it was still burning on the side of the road.
When Attwood made it back to the pit he saw Wyer’s sour face. “I saw some flames coming up around the induction system in my rearview mirror,” the driver said, explaining that he parked the car on the side of the road and jumped out. “I literally watched the fire take hold of the car. It seemed like a long time before any attention came to put the fire out.”
One of the three prototype Fords was retired. Wyer later learned that the fuel hoses, which were supposed to be made of an ultradurable synthetic material, had in fact been made of plain nylon, and the heat of the engine compartment had melted one of Attwood’s hoses. “This was the result of almost criminal negligence,” Wyer later commented. “It was a miracle the other cars were not affected.”
Meanwhile, Masten Gregory was battling with Surtees for first place. The announcer’s voice in French over the loudspeakers signaled that something had happened. When Gregory plunged past the grandstands again, he was leading Surtees. Morale in the Ford pit soared. Don Frey leaned in to Wyer.
“It is enough,” Frey said. “If we do nothing more in this race, I am satisfied.”
Ha, Wyer thought, I should get that in writing.
Minutes later, Gregory limped into the pit. He was having trouble with the transmission. He couldn’t get out of second gear. Mechanics went to work but it was futile. Wyer gave word to the officials; he was withdrawing a second Ford. Roy Lunn stood by, the irony eating at him. The faulty component—the Colotti trans-axle—was made in Modena, Italy, by a former Ferrari employee.
Only one Ford remained. Hill was still far behind the leaders, with 19 hours to go.
Night
After sunset, spectators no longer saw the silhouettes of cars on the track but rather headlights stabbing through the dark. Speeding shadows could be identified not by shape and color but by exhaust note. Keen ears could pluck out the song of the Iso Rivolta, the Porsche 904, the thunderous GT40.
Darkness added an element of danger. To aid vision on the Mulsanne Straight, tree trunks were painted white so they would reflect headlights. Some drivers preferred the action after dark. “Driving at night, once you become accustomed to it, you find that the very high speed is much safer than during the hours of daylight,” Bruce McLaren later wrote in his diary. “The main danger at Le Mans was the little cars with a top speed around 90 mph that were cruising nearly 100 mph slower than we were, but in the darkness they couldn’t help but see our lights coming up behind, and they stayed out of our way.”
McLaren took over for Hill at midnight. He later described this four-hour shift as “the best 500 racing miles I’ve ever covered.”
For the crowd, the party picked up steam. From its inception, Le Mans had always been more than a motor race. When Charles Faroux and Georges Durand dreamed up this race in the 1920s, they understood that watching cars cruise by for 24 hours, especially at night, could bore spectators,
so they added a sideshow circus. Countless bars and beer tents served up German sausages, crepes, oysters, and French fries. Ham on French bread: 30 cents. Crowds lined up to ride the massive Ferris wheel that, lit brightly against the night, could be seen spinning incessantly from miles away. Guys ogled the packs of young French women, dressed fashionably in striped “poor boy” sweaters and tight pants belted below the waistline.
The sideshows lent the party an element of Kafkaesque absurdity. “In a tent,” one man wandering that night described, “girl snake charmers charmed snakes that looked suspiciously stuffed while awed hundreds passed by at one franc a head. In another tent two girls lay in a glass box. They were said to be Siamese twins. It cost one franc a glimpse, and they did not even look related.” A few yards away in another tent, strippers danced and grinded all through the night in a display of endurance that rivaled what was happening on the racetrack. Through it all came the cry of engines, and the faint smell of exhaust.
As the night wore on, the fields around the track became a camping ground. Tents offered some shelter. Others slept in the dirt with newspapers over their faces, or curled up in the backseats of cars.
By 1:00 A.M., twenty of the fifty-five cars had dropped out of the race. ABC’s Jim McKay was still at it in the press box, stubble darkening his jaw line. “It’s the middle of the night here,” McKay barked into his microphone, “and the leader is the favored car, the factory Ferrari driven by John Surtees and his partner Lorenzo Bandini, who was one of the two winning drivers last year. That first-place car is followed by two more Ferraris. However, of very much interest is the fourth-place car, the #5 Cobra driven by Dan Gurney and Bob Bondurant of the United States. That car is not only in fourth place but is leading the GT division. And in fifth place, a remarkable story, is the one remaining Ford in this race, driven by Phil Hill and his partner Bruce McLaren from New Zealand. That car has moved up from forty-fourth place. It’s going faster than any other car by far, lapping faster and faster every time. . .”