by A. J. Baime
On Monday, Ferrari summoned Surtees, Dragoni, and Gozzi to his office. By this time, the boss had gotten wind of all the details—the argument, the mechanical failure. Right there in the boss’s chamber, Surtees and Dragoni went at it again. Surtees was incensed, and Dragoni—seeing an opportunity to get rid of the Englishman once and for all—pounced.
Ferrari had heard enough. “We will decide what to do after Le Mans,” he said. He called an end to the meeting and it seemed neither party had won; it was a draw. But, unquestionably, something had to be done, or things would continue to unravel. Later that evening, Ferrari called on Gozzi. He’d done some thinking. Surtees’s place on the team was growing more precarious by the day, and Ferrari needed a backup plan. The Englishman was not like the others; he couldn’t be controlled. Ferrari had his eye on the new talent from the United States, the fast kid being groomed by Luigi Chinetti.
“Contact Mario Andretti in America,” Ferrari told Gozzi. “Immediately.”
Meanwhile, in Dearborn, the Ralph Nader problem had spun out of control.
All spring, the Detroit News slapped onto front stoops in the posh suburbs each morning, one headline more shocking than the next. Paranoia had taken the world into its grip and the fist was squeezing. UFO sightings, race riots, druggies, and the nuclear threat. The Vietcong, pinkos, freaks, and spies. The Russkies had launched the first satellite to orbit the moon. “Subversive” rocker John Lennon had claimed his band “was more popular than Jesus.” Over breakfast tables in many homes around Detroit, however, it was the scandalous Nader stories that opened eyes the widest.
Senate hearings over the safety issue had exposed what many believed an ugly truth about Motor City, best expressed by a pithy maxim attributed to Lee Iacocca: Safety doesn’t sell. (In truth, it’s unlikely that Iacocca said exactly that.) A backlash from Detroit caused Nader to fear for his own safety. He charged that he was being followed, harassed with midnight phone calls, his friends sought out and grilled by mysterious operatives. (“Are you asking me if he is a homosexual?” one Nader confidant said when mysteriously questioned by a private eye. “Well,” came the answer, “we have to inquire about these things. I’ve seen him on TV and he certainly doesn’t look like . . . But we have to be sure.”) Nader even claimed that attractive young female strangers had tried to lure him into seedy situations. Were the Detroit companies behind these strange games?
The FBI got involved. Nader used the publicity to further his cause. So ambitious was he, it was as if this previously unknown lawyer had his eyes on the Oval Office.
The debate went global. Writing in the French magazine L’Europeo, Enzo Ferrari defended his passion against the safety crusaders: “A thorough survey on this thorny subject shows that most accidents occur for reasons which have nothing to do with speed,” but rather careless driving, he claimed. As the Senate hearings moved forward, Congress drafted what would soon become the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, the first instance in history of government regulation of the car industry.
Henry II was furious. Nader’s crusade was misguided, misinformed. Meanwhile, new car sales were plummeting. The Deuce had to take a stand.
“You will agree that we are being attacked on all sides, and we feel these attacks are unwarranted,” Henry II said in a speech that was excerpted in international papers. “Naturally, when 50,000 people a year are killed on the roads of the U.S., this is a bad situation. On the other hand, to blame it solely on the automobile is very unfair.” He paused. “We have a fellow called Nader. Frankly, I don’t think he knows very much about automobiles. He can read statistics and he can look up a lot of facts that are in the public domain and he can write books, but I don’t think he knows anything about engineering safe automobiles. I hope Congress will consider the problems that they may force on the automobile industry in depth before they pass a law. If they do something irrational, they can upset the economy of this country very rapidly.”
Once again, “safety” had become the buzzword in Detroit. It had come full circle. Only now automotive safety wasn’t just a buzzword, but a moral and political contest of wills that captured the attention of Capitol Hill and the world. As the scandal grew more ominous with each day, Ford Motor Company was entering the final preparations in a highly publicized quest to win what many believed the most dangerous sporting event of any kind. The Le Mans campaign was speeding right into the face of the safety crusaders. But the company had come too far and spent too much to turn back. In fact, Henry II had been officially invited to the thirty-fourth Le Mans Grand Prix d’Endurance. He was going to serve as Honorary Grand Marshal.
In laboratories throughout Dearborn, employees of all kinds were working to meet deadlines, to be assured that their specific job was perfectly executed. Every eventuality at Le Mans had to be considered and addressed. There was talk of nervous breakdowns and requests for early retirement. All the races, test sessions, debriefings, and Le Mans Committee meetings had led to this: the final build of a small fleet of racing cars. This work, and the theoretical lab work that accompanied it, represented probably the most sophisticated study of the inner workings of an automobile that had ever been undertaken.
Engineers in one lab were studying air intake, how the car breathed. By making alterations to the combustion chambers in the 427 engine so minute they were invisible to the human eye, the team unearthed 35 more horsepower. In another lab, electrical engineers were designing the final wiring system. The schematic utilized no moving parts, nothing that could be damaged by extreme vibration. The wire’s insulation protected electricity flow in temperatures as high as 275 degrees Fahrenheit. All switches, light bulbs, and wires came from heavy-duty Ford truck parts bins. The windshield wiper systems were the same as those used on Boeing 707 aircraft, geared to sweep at speeds of 105 to 115 times per minute.
Transmission engineers calculated every gearshift. A team of two drivers would spend a total of 3.6 hours in the act of changing gears—some nine thousand shifts. Inside Ford’s Reliability Laboratory, brake experts were trying to solve the most critical problem. Using mathematical equations—complex calculi scrawled across page after page—the team found that the Frisbee-sized brake rotors had to absorb a total of 12,597,900 ft/lbs of kinetic energy every lap. When the driver hit the brakes at 210 mph at the end of the Mulsanne Straight, the cast iron would spike in mere seconds from ambient temperature to more than 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The team experimented with vents and substances that could strengthen the cast iron, such as chromium and molybdenum. Both Shelby American and Holman Moody were working on a new brake rotor system that a skilled pit crew could change in a single minute.
In test room 17D of Ford’s Engineering and Research complex, the sound of an engine’s screams echoed against cement walls and down a hallway. Technicians had named room 17D the “Indoor Laboratory Le Mans.” Inside, a 427 Ford engine was laid on a special new test bed. Made by General Electric, the test bed cost many millions and it was rigged with a sophisticated computer.
Using the measurements from the oscillograph mounted in Ken Miles’s car at the Le Mans trials in April, the team programmed into the computer the engine speeds and gearshift patterns of a single lap on the circuit. The computer could then “drive” through a near-exact simulation. All attempts were made to make the computer and other equipment behave like a human driver. Gearshifts were actuated by pneumatic switches, each shift programmed to take between .3 and .7 seconds, mimicking Miles’s arm-throw during competition. The switch that moved the clutch was set to press it .25 to .5 inch past the declutching point, just as Miles’s left foot would in the cockpit. So elaborate was the test bed, it could account for the effect of cornering and wind resistance on the performance of the engine, even as it stood still.
Sitting at a console that looked straight out of Star Trek (which debuted on NBC that year), a technician threw a switch that kicked the experiment into gear, and the engine began to race through phantom laps. Eve
ry two hours, the technician hit a cycle switch that simulated a pit stop. It shut the engine down momentarily as a phantom pit crew jumped into action. And then it was back onto the track, shifting up through the gears and hammering on the throttle.
Day turned into night and night into day, but the cosmos didn’t register in the Indoor Laboratory Le Mans. The same fluorescent lights beamed and the clock on the wall ticked through the hours. Every time the engine failed, a full inspection followed, adjustments were made, and the race began again. The experiment didn’t end until the engine could survive the abuse not of one 24-hour race, but two in a row.
All this work took place behind closed doors, outside the glare of the media spotlight. The media focused on an emerging star, the man favored to drive this American car to victory.
That spring, Ken Miles attended a cocktail party at the British Consul General’s home. As he smiled and answered questions, wrinkles cut deep into his angular face. He was enjoying celebrity for the first time in his life. He had never courted fame, only success. But the two came hand in hand. One guest asked naively if he could ever become a race car driver. Miles looked deep into the stranger’s eyes, as if the answer lay there.
“That’s up to you, sir,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“There were some British movie stars at the party,” recalled one man present. “But it was Miles who captivated me. The movie stars had their little groups of admirers, but Miles had me and several others, who wondered about this man whose life was dedicated to speed.”
A growing fan base got a glimpse into the very private man’s personal life. Everything Miles did, he seemed to have an incredible passion for: gardening, fine wines. He had a cat that he had taught how to defecate on the toilet. All spring he’d been racing against the best in the world—Formula One racers—and beating them. “Miles the Man for Le Mans,” read a Los Angeles Times headline. “Ken Miles and [driving teammate] Lloyd Ruby have pushed American prestige to the peak,” read another.
“I am a mechanic,” Miles described himself. “That has been the direction of my entire vocational life. Driving is a hobby, a relaxation for me, like golfing is to others. I should like to drive a Formula i machine—not for the grand prize, but just to see what it is like. I should think it would be jolly good fun!”
His ultimate goal was to stand on that podium and sip the victory champagne at the greatest of all races. “I feel our chances at Le Mans are very good indeed,” he said days before departing for France. “These cars were built for Le Mans.” With his teammate Lloyd Ruby, Miles had won Daytona and Sebring in 1966. Le Mans would make for an endurance racing triple crown, something no man had ever achieved.
Mario Andretti was in Indianapolis when the phone call came. It was a call that the twenty-six-year-old would never forget. Franco Gozzi was on the line from the Ferrari factory. Had Andretti any plans? Could he, maybe, head to the airport? Right now?
That very week, Andretti had gone from hot young driver to an international star, the talk of the sports world. In his second year at Indianapolis, he outran everyone in qualifying trials, winning the Indy 500 pole with a record speed of 165.899 mph. His soaring performance had stunned all the Gasoline Alley veterans. They’d driven furiously, trying to keep up with him. Driver Chuck Rodee had crashed and perished in the process.
Andretti was what the sport of racing was begging for in the new age of television and wildly increasing popularity: a young idol with a handsome face, stars in his eyes, and a full tank of attitude. He had grown up in Italy and, once, in 1954, he had gone to the Grand Prix at Monza. The trip was quite an extravagance; the family had very little money. Andretti saw Ferrari drivers defend Italy’s honor against the Mercedes-Benzes. He was fourteen years old. His family emigrated to America one year later. They spoke no English. Mario and his older brother Aldo started racing a Hudson Hornet on dirt tracks in 1959. Short of funds, they shared the same gray helmet. Aldo crashed and spent two weeks in a coma, never to compete again. Andretti continued to wear a gray helmet in his brother’s honor.
In 1964, Andretti became an American citizen. He called that moment the greatest day in his life. But he’d never forget his roots: his lust for speed was born at Monza. He had a dream of returning to Italy and competing in Ferrari colors. But was he ready to step into that cauldron?
“Please try to remember me a year from now,” Andretti said to Gozzi in Italian. “I don’t feel that I can do the proper job. I’m not experienced enough yet. I’ll do everything possible to gain experience.” He was all but begging Gozzi to leave the door open, and indeed, Andretti’s time in Italy would come.
At the factory in Maranello, decisions needed to be made. Ferrari called a meeting on May 25. His inner circle gathered around, although Surtees was not invited. The boss asked for everyone’s opinion regarding the Surtees situation and the staff was divided. Some were for keeping him, some for sacking him.
“At the moment,” weighed in Gozzi, “we can’t lose our top driver. Bandini isn’t a number one. When I spoke to Andretti yesterday he said that he could not join us for at least another year.”
Dragoni saw an opportunity and he jumped on it. “As well as going into the F1 workshop,” he said, “Surtees also had a look at the sport 330 P3 and—surprise—in London Eric Broadley is building a Lola sport that’s absolutely identical.”
The team manager had made a serious accusation—that Surtees had stolen design secrets from Ferrari and brought them home to Engl and. But was it true? Surtees had a relationship with Lola and Eric Broadley, it was no secret. He had been in a Lola when he crashed seven months earlier in Canada. Team espionage was a fireable offense, period, and Surtees wasn’t present to defend himself. (“This is the most stupid thing of course that ever came out,” Surtees said in retrospect. “Anybody with the slightest bit of knowledge would look at [the Ferrari 330 P3 and the Lola] and see there wasn’t the slightest resemblance.”)
Ferrari thanked everyone and called an end to the meeting. He needed time to think. All he could know was what he was told by others, since he didn’t attend races and was preoccupied by the Fiat negotiations. He was a highly diplomatic man. It’s unlikely that he believed Surtees was guilty of anything but impetuousness and an absolute need to win. Nevertheless, he made his decision. He pulled Gozzi aside and assigned him a special mission. Gozzi was to go to the Belgian Grand Prix on June 12, the weekend before Le Mans. He was to appear in the press office and announce the immediate firing of John Surtees.
“You go and make the announcement at the end of the race,” Ferrari said. “Nothing else.”
Gozzi set out with two journalists from the magazine Autosprint, bound for Belgium. It was an exhausting 18-hour drive, the journalists interrogating Gozzi the whole way. They could smell the scoop but Ferrari’s lieutenant wasn’t talking. They’d have their story soon enough.
Spa-Francorchamps was possibly the most beautiful racing circuit in the world. It wound through wooded hills and livestock farms, through the Ardennes forest, on public backcountry roads where farm tractors normally trudged at creeping speeds. It was murderously fast, with looping bends and severe elevation changes.
From the beginning, Surtees put on a spectacular display of skill. He qualified first and when the race started, the rain came. In the showers, he tucked in close in second place behind a Cooper-Maserati, letting the Austrian Jochen Rindt’s deeply grooved Dunlop tires cut a path through the puddled pavement. This strategy relied on Rindt not making a mistake, as through the whitewater kicked up by those Dunlops, Surtees was driving, at times, completely blind through fast bends and elevation changes at furious speeds.
On the penultimate lap he passed Rindt, moving into first place. A camera helicopter followed him around the 8.7-mile circuit. The director John Frankenheimer was filming Grand Prix; the cameras captured Surtees’s brilliant performance in the #6 Ferrari as he lapped car after car in the rain. In a few months’ time Americans would sit in their theat
er seats and watch in awe as the red missile fired across the big screen.
In only his second F1 race after his critical injuries, Surtees won the Belgian Grand Prix. He stood on the podium and waved at the crowd, holding a bouquet of flowers so vast, it engulfed him. He got no congratulations in the Ferrari pit. When he saw Dragoni, the team manager criticized his performance, claiming Surtees trailed in second place for too long.
Surtees was incredulous. “Look,” he said, “when you tell me how to drive my races, that will be the day. Winning is the only thing that matters.”
Gozzi ran to a telephone to report back to Ferrari. As he placed the call, the Italian national anthem was blaring in the background. “He won. What should I do?” He heard a moment of silence on the line.
“Suspend it,” Ferrari said. “And come back immediately.”
Le Mans was six days away.
21
The Flag Drops: June 1966
This racetrack is a cornfield airstrip in the jet age. It was built 50 years ago for cars that went 65 mph. Tomorrow 55 race cars—some of them capable of 225 mph on the straightaway and all of them over the 130 mph class—will get off at 10 A.M. (Detroit time) and it will be a miracle if nobody gets killed. Nobody is fearless. Some of these drivers are scared stiff.
—Detroit News, June 17, 1966
IN LEO BEEBE’S OFFICE, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing and the paperwork was piled high. Days before departing for France, Beebe was struck by a string of setbacks. Eight Fords would be entered at Le Mans, which meant the company was contracting at least sixteen of the top drivers in the world. In a single week in early June, a handful of crashes on racetracks cut into the available talent. The company found itself short on drivers.