Go Like Hell

by A. J. Baime

  He had begun to take the Western invasion very seriously. Ferrari was stunned by the amazing amounts of money Henry II was spending on the Le Mans campaign in 1965. Beating the Americans was priority number one. The next duel with Ford was the 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida, where Ferraris had won the last four years in a row, six of the last seven. At the factory, the men were readying the cars for the journey across the Atlantic. But at the last minute, Ferrari heard rumors that displeased him. Something was up at Sebring, something he didn’t appreciate at all.

  The phone rang in Carroll Shelby’s office. It was Alec Ulmann, the man behind the 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida.

  “Do you mind if the Chaparral runs?” Ulmann asked.

  Shelby held the phone to his ear and thought for a moment. The Chaparral was a fast roadster built by a Texan named Jim Hall. Shelby wasn’t the only entrepreneur trying to build a racing sports car to beat the Ferraris. Hall was a serious talent and innovator, and his car was getting all kinds of press. The thing didn’t meet FIA regulations as a prototype-class car by any means. It wasn’t really street legal, nor did it have trunk space. It did, however, have a big Chevrolet engine. General Motors, the biggest car company in the world and an antiracing stalwart, was rumored to be funding Hall’s project under the table. The buzz around Hall’s car was as loud as that Chevy V8, and an appearance at Sebring would pit Ford against Chevy, and Shelby against Hall. Who cared if the Chaparral didn’t meet regulations? If Ulmann could put Hall’s car on the starting line at Sebring, he’d see a major boost at the ticket office.

  “I been losing money,” Ulmann told Shelby, “and I really need this.”

  Shelby was in a spot. He felt for Ulmann. And Jim Hall was the brother of Dick Hall, an oilman who once lent Shelby a bundle of money.

  “I don’t give a shit if the Chaparral runs,” Shelby barked into the phone. “As long as you don’t give Jim Hall the trophy and you tell the world that it is a 1,500-pound car and we have to weigh over 2,000 pounds.” He couldn’t be clearer: If Hall’s Chaparral won, the world would know it wasn’t an official prototype entry. Before he even hung up the phone, Shelby had a feeling he’d made a major blunder.

  Sebring’s population multiplied by six times the day of the race. It was a strange little town nestled among the swamps and orange groves of central Florida. At the 10:00 A.M. start, the temperature hit ninety-five degrees. Enzo Ferrari had pulled out of the race when he’d heard the Chaparral would be allowed to run, because he knew the car would win. Ferrari didn’t want to be embarrassed by a car that was faster than his simply because it broke FIA rules. From the opening laps on Sebring’s 5.2-mile track, laid out on a perfectly flat old military airfield, there was no catching the Chaparral.

  At 3:25 P.M., halfway through the race, a tropical deluge pounded central Florida. In minutes the track was flooded. In some places water was six inches deep. Visibility shrunk to a few feet. Race fans ran for cover; they couldn’t see the cars anyway. Shelby saw Phil Hill bring a Ford GT40 into the pit. When Hill opened his door, water poured out of the interior. Hill tried to get out but Shelby pushed him back in. A mechanic leaned in between Hill’s legs and punched holes in the floorboards with a hammer to drain the water. “Watch out for my balls!” Hill screamed.

  He motored back onto the track, where the pace had slowed to a crawl. There was a commotion. Shelby’s truck driver Red Pierce was spotted unconscious, face down in the water in the paddock. He’d been electrocuted by a soaked generator.

  The race was a disaster. By the time Shelby was in his hotel room taking a shower, four drivers, one truck driver, and two spectators were nursing wounds in a nearby hospital. Jim Hall’s Chaparral won the race, snapping Ferrari’s dynasty at Sebring, and though officially the prototype-class trophy was given to Ford racers Ken Miles and Bruce McLaren, the Chaparral stole national headlines.

  “Hall Ushers in New Era at Sebring.”

  Shelby was furious. So was Leo Beebe.

  After Sebring was the Le Mans test weekend. Ford executives stood in the pit and watched John Surtees obliterate the lap record in the new Ferrari 330 P2. Surtees looped the twisty 8.36 miles averaging 139.98 mph. Next came the Inter-Europa Cup 1,000 Kilometers at Monza on April 25. Then the Nürburgring 1,000 Kilometers in Germany on May 23. The Ferraris were winning everything.

  As the spring days tumbled by, casualties continued to lure the ire of critics and bring controversy to the sport. Lloyd “Lucky” Casner at the Le Mans trials in a Maserati. Tommy Spychiger at Monza in a privateer Ferrari. Meanwhile, the publicity machine behind the upcoming Ford/Ferrari duel at Le Mans picked up speed.

  One morning Shelby awoke in his bedroom in Playa del Rey with his heart pounding in his ears. His angina was killing him. He’d had knee surgery not long before, and he was still nursing a bad wrist he’d mangled in a crash at the 1954 Carrera Panamericana. That wrist had required eight months of operations. Before the bones had fully set Shelby had raced again, battling at high speed with his broken arm taped to the wheel so he could steer. Eleven years later he could still feel the sting.

  He lay there taking stock of his life. He was producing street and racing Mustangs, street and racing Cobras, and fielding a Cobra racing team that had a shot at beating Ferrari to win the GT class World Championship. His GT40s were about to make a historic run at Le Mans. He was a Goodyear distributor to the western states, moving $40,000 of tires monthly. He was launching All American Racers with Dan Gurney, the first-ever American Formula One team. Shelby was traveling constantly, and he drank a lot of liquor when he flew to help him sleep. In a single week in April leading up to the Le Mans test weekend, he flew from Los Angeles to France and back three times.

  It was too much. Lately he’d been feeling out of breath a lot. Five years had passed since the doctors told Shelby he had a bad heart, that he might have no more than five years to live. He felt as though, at any moment, his heart was going to give out on him.

  Don Frey’s secretary buzzed him at his office at Ford division headquarters. Roy Lunn was on the horn, calling from his shop Kar Kraft, where he had been working on the next-generation Ford Le Mans car.

  “I got something I’d like to show you,” Lunn told Frey. “Do you want me to come over there or can you bring it here?” Frey asked.

  “I’d rather you came over. You’ve never seen what we’re doing down here.”

  Frey arrived at Kar Kraft minutes later and had a look around. Lunn had stepped foot on the premises for the first time only a few months earlier, and Frey couldn’t believe the operation was so fully outfitted already. All the equipment was spread out over the 4,000-square-foot space, even the surface table atop which designers build prototype cars—huge cast-iron slabs eight by fourteen feet, weighing thousands of pounds. Lunn had two of them. Frey didn’t bother to ask where they’d come from. Truth was, Lunn had sweet-talked them out of the manufacturing guys. If he’d put in the paperwork, it would’ve taken years. He essentially stole the surface tables. The whole shop came together this way.

  While Shelby American was racing the GT40s during the first four months of 1965, Lunn and his team—two design technicians, two draftsmen, and a secretary—were building the new prototype with the 427-cubic-inch engine. There in the shop Frey saw the car.

  “It doesn’t look much different,” Frey said, staring at the thing through his professorial spectacles.

  Lunn lifted the engine cover in the rear and Frey’s eyes bore down into that mass of metal. A hint of awe registered on his face. Mounted behind the cockpit of this car that stood no higher than his belly button was a huge 427-cubic-inch V8, the biggest production car engine Ford had ever built. It required larger exhaust. Massive pipes snaked out of the eight combustion chambers, feeding into two smoke-spitting barrels that pointed rearward like cannons.

  Standing over the car, Lunn explained the nuances. They’d moved the seating position forward to make room for the engine. There was a bulge in the cockpit bet
ween the two seats where the water pump now lived. The wider rear tires Shelby was using required a larger front end to hold the spare; Lunn’s team had redesigned the nose so it was longer with a gentler slope, giving it a blade-like sharpness. As for the engine: high-compression cylinder heads, aluminum intake manifolds, a special high-rpm camshaft. The power plant had conquered stock car racing (it would win forty-eight out of fifty-five Grand Nationals that year). But was it capable of success on the world stage?

  From the look on Frey’s face, Lunn knew he was impressed. Up to this point, both believed they’d never have time to build and develop the car in time for Le Mans in 1965. They’d figured it could be raced maybe as a backup, as an experiment, with an eye toward victory in 1966. But suddenly the idea seemed plausible.

  It was May—one month until the race.

  Lunn needed someone to put some miles on the car as soon as possible. He recruited a local B-level sports car competitor and Ford dealership owner named Tom Payne, who drove the car over Ford’s Dearborn test track for the first time on a rainy spring day, coursing through slow laps to see how it handled. He liked the car, so Lunn began making arrangements for a serious shakedown.

  That day came a week later, at the 5-mile, high-speed test track in Romeo, Michigan. The spring sky was clean and bare. A 20-mph wind cut across the pavement, swirling the hair of a small group of men who surrounded a 40-inch-tall racing car. During the week, Ford engineers used the Romeo proving ground to test passenger vehicles, but on weekends it was free and Lunn had commandeered the banked oval. Ken Miles and Phil Remington had flown in from Los Angeles, and Tom Payne was on hand as well.

  The Romeo test facility was situated an hour’s drive north of Detroit amid peach and apple farms. There was always the danger in such rural environs that a deer or some other creature would wander out of the woods in front of a speeding car.* Miles circled the machine and chatted with Remington. Payne looked on, nervously. From the moment the engine’s crankshaft turned its first revolution, the exhaust note roared. The car was far louder than the previous incarnation of Ford’s Le Mans car. Miles sniffed the exhaust and listened, opening up his senses. With no trophies, checkered flag, or purse, he was going to be the first to risk the mighty shot into a banked turn at full speed in a car this light with an engine this large mounted behind the cockpit.

  Payne warmed her up, taking easy loops around the oval. Around 11:00 A.M., he began to put his weight on the pedal. On the banking he slowed and the car seemed to turn itself. He clocked a lap at 180 mph, faster than he’d ever gone in his life.

  The crew broke for sandwiches, then Miles stepped into the car. He was far more sophisticated than Payne, and after some laps he went over his impressions with Remington. More laps, more adjustments. They worked on suspension setups—trial and error at 200 mph and beyond. Miles began to dive deeper into the turns, and the car spoke to him. He could sense its vast power, summoning more and more of it, holding the steering wheel with the tips of his fingers. When he rocketed down the straight past the crew the car’s blue and white profile blurred like film footage played at high speed. Lunn looked at a stopwatch.

  Miles had turned a lap at 201.5 mph, hitting 210 on the straights—four times the Michigan speed limit.

  The car was frighteningly fast. They began to wrap the session but Payne stepped in. He wanted to test the Ford in its final trim. The crew watched him speed through his first lap. On the second, he hit 200 mph on the straight. When he brought the car in, he was visibly scared.

  “I suppose you’d like to know what the dials were reading,” he said.

  Lunn waited for Payne’s next sentence.

  “Well,” Payne said, “I didn’t have the nerve to look down at them.”

  Later the crew gathered at a nearby hotel for a debriefing.

  “What does everybody think?” Lunn asked.

  Miles answered, “That’s the car I want to drive at Le Mans this year.”

  The decision was made to prepare two cars with the 427-cubic-inch engine for the 24-hour classic, now four weeks away. The new car was dubbed Ford Mk II. The one tested at Romeo was immediately shipped to Shelby’s plant for testing and development. Meanwhile, in Dearborn, Lunn and his team went to work building a second car.

  Miles lapped the new Mk II at Riverside. On that track’s twists, it quickly revealed a weakness, some loss in cornering ability due to the extraordinary weight of the engine. The car was less agile now. But on that long straightaway at Le Mans, the Ford would outpace anything with ease. If it could hold together. The days ticked by and the work at Shelby’s LAX facility moved at a critical pace. In early June, one week before departure for Le Mans, Shelby received an important visitor.

  The Deuce arrived one morning with two dozen men in expensive suits in tow—the entire Ford Motor Company Board of Directors. The Board was holding a meeting at Shelby American’s new facility. Shelby was exhausted from the pre-Le Mans rush, his health suffering. Still, he put his charisma to work. His charm appealed to rich and poor alike. The two men had met before, and Henry II liked Shelby. What Shelby had done for Ford Motor Company could not be measured in dollars and cents.

  The boss was in a good mood. A few days earlier, on Memorial Day 1965, “The Flying Scot” Jimmy Clark won a historic victory at the Indianapolis 500 in a Lotus-Ford. Clark led 190 of the 200 laps, topping A. J. Foyt’s record with an average of 150.686 mph. Henry II was swimming in great publicity. Ford had conquered NASCAR, and now Indy. There was but one race left on Henry II’s agenda, and he had placed the responsibility of winning that race in Shelby’s hands.

  Shelby showed Mr. Ford around. Here were Mustang GT350s, racing Cobras, the two new Mk II Le Mans cars. Shelby was the kid in the candy shop. A Ford executive tapped on Henry II’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, “Can you imagine a guy getting paid for doing this?” Henry II had spent his life in the auto business, making American cars. But he’d never seen American cars like these. Ken Miles took a break from work to take Henry II on a joy ride in a Cobra. The two fired around the premises, Miles letting the car have it, nearly taking out a fence in the process. It was a Board of Directors meeting Henry II would not forget.

  On May 25, 1965, the Ferrari team gathered at Monza at dawn to run a final 24-hour shakedown of the Le Mans prototype. This test session aimed to replicate all the conditions of the race. The car would lap the track, stopping only for refueling, driver change, and maintenance. Pit technicians and drivers would perfect their fusion. Anything that could go wrong outside of mechanical failure, they would be ready for it.

  Mechanics in jumpsuits wheeled a 330 P2 off a transporter and sparked its engine. The 4.0-liter V12 coughed and spit, then fired on all cylinders. (In American terms, the Ferrari engine displaced 244 cubic inches compared to Ford’s 427.) In the pit, the tired-eyed mechanics unloaded their gear and smoked cigarettes. The weather was clear, but rain was on the way. At precisely 8:00 A.M., the first driver stepped into the Ferrari and took off onto the track.

  Ferrari arrived at Monza later in the day. He distanced himself from the pit box, not wanting to interrupt the focus of his men, preferring to stand back with a friend, chatting and watching. The 330 P2 lapped over and over, Surtees setting the fastest time as usual. In the pit, Ferrari’s men were calm. They almost seemed bored.

  That afternoon a driver named Bruno Deserti approached Ferrari. Deserti was an up-and-comer recruited by Dragoni. He was local, from the Emilia. An Italian. His invitation to these trials was major news, landing his picture in the papers. (“Deserti is really fresh and young,” Dragoni had said. “He has the will of iron, not to mention a slender physique and a notable resilience. He’s tough.”) Deserti wanted to thank Ferrari for the invitation, and he nervously showed the old man a new white helmet. He explained that he had purchased the helmet for the occasion as a good luck charm.

  “It represents the crowning of my dream,” he said.

  Ferrari looked into the driver’s brown
eyes. Both knew this was the twenty-three-year-old’s chance, that his dream of becoming a Ferrari racer—a dream countless boys and young men in Italy had in common—hinged on what he was about to do when he stepped into the cockpit. Ferrari could see Deserti was enslaved by his nerves. He’d been in the young man’s shoes. He could remember trying out for Alfa Romeo so many years before, and he would never forget the purity of that emotion. Ferrari later described what he saw in Deserti’s eyes that day at Monza: “When such passion connected to the human spirit explodes like this, it is stronger than life itself, and it is stronger than death.” Ferrari smiled, said hello, then turned away. He feared that any further discussion would distract Deserti, so he appeared busy.

  The test session rolled along. At 6:55 P.M., the car was in the pit for refueling: 140 liters of gasoline. Deserti felt the tap on his shoulder. He stood and slipped on his new white helmet. He stepped into the car, checked the brakes. And then he went. Ferrari watched him drive by as he began to lap at comfortable speeds, building his lap time: 1:58, 1:52, 1:50, 1:48, 1:47, 1:46. (Surtees lapped at 1:32 that afternoon.) Suddenly there was silence on the track. In the pit, driver Lorenzo Bandini was the only one who caught sight, out of the corner of his eye, of the red car rocketing off the track into the woods. He jumped to his feet.

  “He’s out!” Bandini screamed. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  When the mechanics and drivers reached the car, they found it 50 meters into the woods, turned on its side. It was in tatters and smoking. Inside Deserti was slumped in the cockpit. When Ferrari arrived on the scene he looked down and saw the black stripes on the pavement leading into the upturned grass toward the woods, where the crumpled car remained. Those stripes represented the last-ditch effort of a young man clawing for his life.

  Deserti died a few minutes after 7:00 P.M. By 8:00 P.M., Ferrari was in his Fiat, Pepino steering south for Modena. It was a long, quiet ride.