Go Like Hell

by A. J. Baime

  When he was ready, Miles climbed back into the car, strapped his seatbelt, and took to the track. On the last lap of the last run of the day, he was burning down the mile-long backstretch at roughly 180 mph. Headed toward turn nine he slowed the car to about 100 mph. As he neared the bend, he was speeding no faster than one might on an empty highway, on a stretch of pavement as straight as a Roman road. A fireman was stationed at turn nine, watching Miles make his approach. In the pit, crewmembers were thumbing stopwatches when they heard the telltale screech of rubber.

  “Oh my God,” yelled one.

  The J Car inexplicably veered sharply to its right and took flight, tumbling down a 10-foot embankment. The sound of bludgeoning metal ended with a final impact, after which the wreck exploded in flames.

  Instantly, the pit emptied and by the time the crew reached the scene, firemen were already aiming extinguishers into the wreck. Miles lay 15 feet away, on his back. The crash was so violent, his seatbelt had torn from its mount and he’d been hurled to the ground. A quick glance was all it took to know that he’d been killed instantly.

  Miles’s son Peter arrived out of breath; he’d seen the fireball from the parking lot. “I remember seeing the car burning,” Peter Miles later said. “But I didn’t see my dad.”

  “Where is he?” Peter shouted.

  A crewman pointed and Peter saw his father’s body.

  The trip home was a long one for Peter. He got stuck in traffic and he sat there, waiting for the congestion to loosen. When he arrived home at the little cottage on Sunday Trail, cars were already parked out front. The place was filled with friends and colleagues who’d heard the news.

  In the morning the headlines appeared—Ken Miles was dead. Through the years, Miles had earned little except for a few dollars and some pats on the back from fans and colleagues. His acid tongue had made him some enemies, but nobody who knew Miles lacked respect for him. Only in his final year, at the improbable age of forty-seven, had he emerged as an international star. How gracefully he flew into turns, accelerating deeper into them than most others dared, the papers said. What skilled hands he had. He’d lived his life so close to the edge; that was his existence. Finally, he’d gone over that edge. As one obit put it, “We don’t have to feel sorry for people who choose to live dangerously, and lose. So the bull wins one. The matador must take the risk. The closer he plays to the horn, the better the show . . . Well, Miles, good show.”

  Already the investigation was under way. When the J Car careened off the road, it behaved as if the wheels on one side simply locked up. It appeared that the rear of the car simply broke away. That someone would be blamed for Miles’s demise was not something anyone wanted to face, but everyone knew instinctively that driver error was out of the question. Ford’s aerospace division, Aeronutronic, was sending in a team to study the wreckage. Shelby was in Detroit at the time of the accident and he flew back immediately.

  “We really don’t know what caused it. The car just disintegrated,” Shelby said, visibly shaken. “We have nobody to take his place. Nobody. He was our baseline, our guiding point. He was the backbone of our program.” Then: “There will never be another Ken Miles.”

  Every piece of wreckage was examined as if it were a flight crash investigation. But the car was so severely destroyed by impact and fire, nothing could be proven, and Ford Motor Company had its image to uphold. “The evidence is that it was not mechanical,” Don Frey said from his office in Dearborn. “We can’t pinpoint anything which failed in the car before the crash.”

  In the end, all the evidence proved inconclusive. To this day, the cause of the accident that killed Ken Miles has never been determined.

  On Saturday, August 20, at 2:30 P.M., a crowd of more than four hundred people filed into the Utter-McKinley Wilshire Mortuary at 444 South Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles. When everyone was seated, a family friend of the Mileses named Arthur Evans Sr. stepped up to the podium. Evans began a eulogy.

  We are here today to honor Kenneth Miles and to reassure his wife Mollie, and his son, Peter, of our continued devotion. Mollie has asked me to express her deep gratitude for your many kindnesses. . .

  Shelby sat slumped in the church. All around him were friends and colleagues, a who’s who of California sports car racing. Shelby had known Miles for a long time, and over the past four years they had formed a deep bond. As he listened to the eulogy, something burned inside him. It wasn’t his bad heart; he didn’t need a nitroglycerin pill. It was something else. His friend Miles loved machines and racing. He loved the instrumentation, the development work, the problem solving. And he loved winning.

  . . . Life, brilliant and vital as it may be, is an uncertain thing for everyone. It is in the memories of a life that we can find the immortal. . .

  Ken Miles had won more than his share of trophies, Shelby was sure of that. In 1966 alone, he had won Daytona, and he had won Sebring. Le Mans would have meant the triple crown (a feat never achieved to this day). As the eulogy ended, and the crowd shuffled out the door into the bright California afternoon, Shelby kept coming back to the same thought: Miles should have taken that Le Mans trophy—the greatest of them all—with him to his grave.

  Epilogue

  And I remember my grandfather saying, “Boy, we Americans, we can do anything.”

  —BARACK OBAMA at the Democratic National Convention, August 28, 2008

  “DEAR FRIENDS,” Enzo Ferrari began his introductory note in the 1966 Ferrari yearbook. “This year we were finally beaten at Le Mans.”

  The grudge match between Ferrari and Henry Ford II continued in 1967. In the season’s first face-off at Daytona in February, three Ferraris crossed the finish line together in one of the most dramatic victories in racing history. So spectacular was the finish, a photo of the three red cars speeding past the checkered flag at Daytona International Speedway today graces the wall in Ferrari’s classic car restoration shop at the factory, blown up to nearly life-size.

  But Enzo Ferrari’s sports cars were unable to continue their dominance. The cars did not win at Le Mans in June. A Ferrari never won the 24 Hours of Le Mans again.

  In 1969, Ferrari finally sold 50 percent of his company to Fiat. Ferrari’s son Piero Lardi grew with the company. In 1978, he took on his father’s last name and became a vice president, a title he still enjoys today.

  Enzo Ferrari died on August 14, 1988, at the age of ninety. Upon his death, Fiat’s stake in the company rose to 90 percent. The other 10 percent is still held by Piero Lardi Ferrari. Today, the Ferrari continues to be the most desired supercar in the world. The Scuderia Ferrari won its sixteenth Formula One constructor’s World Championship in 2008, far more than any other team. In the rural fields where Il Commendatore built his factory during World War II, a bustling town has risen up around a modernized car plant. Across from the factory gate, the Cavallino still serves Ferrari’s favorite dishes. Thousands of tourists visit Maranello annually, where the spirit of the man looms in every bottle of Lambrusco and every automobile that passes down the Via Abetone.

  On June 12, 1967, Henry II claimed his second consecutive Le Mans victory. He climbed onto the podium along with his wife and the two winning drivers, Dan Gurney and A. J. Foyt. Gurney held a magnum of champagne. He aimed the bottle and—pop! “I drenched Henry Ford and his wife,” he recalls, laughing. Thus, the victory tradition of spraying champagne after a race—de rigueur in Europe today—began. The race marked the first time an American car won Le Mans with a team of American drivers at the wheel. The New York Times called it an “All-American Victory” and “a cakewalk.”

  Two days later, Henry II launched a new company under the umbrella of his corporation: Ford of Europe, Inc., the first-ever pan-European automobile company. In the following years, when times grew tough for Ford Motor Company in America, Ford of Europe served as a huge profit center, the crutch that kept Henry II’s empire moving forward.

  Ford cars won Le Mans the following two years, making it four
in a row (which did not top Ferrari’s streak of six straight wins). In 1968 and 1969, the effort was led privately by J. W. Automotive Engineering, a team of Ford racing cars formed by John Wyer and sponsored by Gulf Oil.

  The Deuce’s quest to become the first American automobile manufacturer to conquer Le Mans was an experiment unlike any ever conducted in the world of modern automobiles, one that was life-defining for so many, and one that could never—under any circumstance—ever happen again. In the 1970s, the grandeur of the 24-hour classic began to fade. The race is still held every June, and still draws hundreds of thousands of spectators. But the glory days are past. Many fans believe the Ford-Ferrari rivalry represents automobile racing’s true Golden Age.

  Henry Ford II died on September 29, 1987, of pneumonia at Henry Ford Hospital. Even as he took his last breath, his name was on the building. The obituaries praised a larger-than-life maverick whose legacy lay as much in Europe as it did at home. The Detroit News: “He enjoyed beautiful women, strong drink.” The Financial Times: “His insistence on setting up a highly integrated European operation had proved a brilliant success, so much so that the European plants far outshone their American sisters.”

  Born with hundreds of millions, Henry II could have lived a life of leisure and indulgence. Instead, he took a crumbling empire and led the effort to re-create it in a time of revolutionary change. At the time of his death, the corporation that bore his name was the most technically innovative and profitable automobile company in America.

  Henry Ford II made cars.

  In 1978, a bitter falling-out between Lee Iacocca and Henry II led to Iacocca’s firing. He went on to take over Chrysler Corporation in 1979, which was on the brink of collapse. Ironically, Iacocca led a corporate comeback that eclipsed Henry II’s achievements with Ford after World War II. It is, today, generally accepted as the greatest corporate comeback of all time.

  John Surtees returned to Italy in 1967. Il Grande John won the Italian Grand Prix on Ferrari’s home track not in an Italian car, but a Honda. “And the fans carried me high!” he remembers with a proud smile. Many watching at Monza understood the meaning behind this victory. The Japanese were about to release a full-fledged attack on the international automobile business.

  Surtees left Honda to launch his own racing team, but his greatest successes were behind him. Today he lives quietly in England. He is still the only man in history to win Grand Prix World Championships on two wheels and four. Regarding the Ford-Ferrari business deal, he says, “I don’t think Ferrari ever had any intention of going with Ford. I think it was a question of negotiating.” And his controversial exit from Maranello? “Ferrari said to me before he died, ‘John, we must remember the good times, not the bad,’” Surtees says. “I still love Italy and I love Italians and that’s it.”

  Phil Hill retired from racing in 1967 and spent much of the next four decades restoring cars and writing. He died on August 28, 2008, at the age of eighty-one. Only one American after Hill has ever become Formula One World Champion: Mario Andretti, in 1978.

  For the rest of the 1960s and into the 1970s, racing drivers continued to feed the fire with their lives. Lorenzo Bandini, Jimmy Clark, Ludovico Scarfiotti, Jo Schlesser, Bruce McLaren . . . At the end of the 1960s, ABC’s Wide World of Sports aired a segment on the decade in racing. The names of the dead scrolled down the screen like so many teardrops as Jim McKay raised some difficult questions.

  “We would not be reporting this decade in motor racing accurately if we did not mention the number of drivers who died on the racetracks of the world. The names you see [on screen] are only some of the more prominent men who lost their lives. You could make a case that motor racing is the most serious of all sports, or that it’s not a sport at all. Like all sports, it carries a penalty for miscalculation. But here, the penalty is not a foul shot or 15 yards, but possibly your life. Whether this is sport, adventure, or foolhardiness depends on your personal definition.”

  In 1973, Scottish Grand Prix star Jackie Stewart retired at the height of his fame, and spearheaded a safety campaign. His efforts helped change emergency services and track facilities. When asked why he quit racing at the height of his fame, Stewart said, “I saw my friends killed and I saw what my wife was going through. I heard my son Paul ask when Daddy was going to die and I saw the nervous tic he developed, never knowing if I was going to come home.”

  Today, in part due to Stewart’s efforts, death on the racetrack is a rare occurrence.

  “You wouldn’t believe what happens when a man like that turns on the faucet,” Carroll Shelby says, looking back on the days of Henry II and Le Mans. It is springtime in 2007, and Shelby is sitting at his desk in his office in Gardena, California. The room is cluttered with toy cars. In the garage downstairs, someone’s gunning an engine and the building’s girders are soaking up the revs.

  Against all odds, Shelby is alive. He is eighty-five years old. In the late 1960s, he got sick of the car business. He closed Shelby American and went to Africa. He made a comeback in the business in 1982, partnering with his old friend Iacocca to build high-performance Dodge cars. In 2004, Shelby teamed with Ford Motor Company again to produce a new line of Ford-Shelby Mustangs from his factory next to the Las Vegas Speedway. Today the man is made of used parts. He underwent a heart transplant in 1990; the organ came from a thirty-eight-year-old Vegas gambler. He has one of his son’s kidneys.

  After all these years, the controversial finish at Le Mans in 1966 still haunts Shelby. Former employees have even raised a conspiracy theory, that Ford executives had the French officials remove a lap from Ken Miles to put the tie into effect, that Miles had won that race all along. “I’ll forever be sorry that I agreed with Leo Beebe and Henry Ford to have the three cars come across at the same time,” Shelby says. “Ken was one and a half laps ahead and he’d have won the race. It broke his heart. Then we lost him in August.”

  The conversation moves along for another hour, and when our interview ends (there would be others), Shelby offers to drive me to the airport. We jump in a new Ford-Shelby Mustang GT-H. The car’s got enough horsepower to outrun anything on the road, and though Shelby’s eyes don’t work so well, his right foot is still heavy. This is a man who won Le Mans wearing chicken-farmer overalls. As he weaves through the traffic on I-405, he says out of nowhere, “It broke my heart when we lost Ken.” For a moment, there’s silence. He sits in the driver’s seat with his arms slightly bent, foot hard on the pedal. “I’m thinking about putting a million dollars in a deal to start a scholarship in his name,” Shelby says. “I’m going to go down to the little town in East Texas where I was born. It has a wonderful college. I’m going to set up a Carroll Shelby school for mechanics. I’m going to put that together and have a scholarship in Ken Miles’s name.

  “I got to do something for him,” Shelby says, squeezing the wheel. “I don’t want him to be forgotten. I don’t want him to be forgotten.”

  Acknowledgments

  This book could never have been written without the patience and time of all those who shared their thoughts and memories with me. With immeasurable reverence and humbleness, I want to thank (in no particular order) Carroll Shelby, Lee Iacocca, Edsel Ford II, Piero Ferrari, Franco Gozzi, John Surtees, Don Frey, Roy Lunn, Mario Andretti, Dan Gurney, Phil Hill, Peter Miles, Lloyd Ruby, A. J. Foyt, Robert Daley, Luigi Chinetti Jr., Richard Attwood, Phil Remington, Jim Hall, Jacque Passino, John Fitch, Homer Perry, Harry Calton, Bob Bondurant, and Eoin Young. Dave Friedman shared not just his stories, but also his tremendous photography.

  Though this book has my name alone on the cover, it is the work of many Baimes. If ever there was one, this project was a family affair. My wife, Michelle, spent hours upon hours translating bad microfilm photocopies of Italian newspaper articles from the 1950s and 1960s. She was also the one that opened my eyes to the wonders of Italy. My mother, Denise, read every draft and spent many days in the New York Public Library hunting down obscure old articles and phot
ographs. My father, David, also gave his thoughts on each draft and instilled in me as a youth the value of achieving goals, and also the deeper meaning of sport, which is what this book is all about.

  Susan Canavan at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not only a great editor, but a terrific human being. Her thorough reads and help shaping this book (not to mention her encouraging spirit) deserve more than a little credit. Scott Waxman at the Waxman Literary Agency is the best agent in New York, a man any writer would feel blessed to have in his corner. Thank you also to Lucas Foster, Justin Manask, Byrd Leavell, Farley Chase, Alex Young, and Josh Bratman. The great car writer Ken Gross, who served as consultant on this project, is without a doubt the most respected journalist of any kind I have ever met. Thank you, Ken, for your close readings and for putting me in touch with some key sources. Your love of cars is an inspiration.

  I would like to thank David “The Sage of the Stacks” Smith at the New York Public Library and Stephanie Epiro, a wonderful journalist in Italy who waded through old newspapers at the public library in Milan hunting down interviews with Enzo Ferrari. Special thanks go to Alan Hall at Ford Motor Company and Matteo Sardi at Ferrari, and, of course, to Chris Napolitano, Amy Grace Loyd, and all the brilliant editors at Playboy.

  In terms of historical perspective, truth is in itself a kind of myth. Aldous Huxley once wrote, “The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.” Through my many interviews, no two people ever told the same story. In many instances, the facts varied wildly. I put great effort into homing in on what really happened through the eyes of the men who lived through these exciting and tumultuous times. The dialogue was pulled directly from interviews and contemporaneous sources. Many of the men who appear in this book wrote memoirs themselves, which proved incredibly valuable. In some instances, I pulled characters’ descriptions of events and used their own words as dialogue. For example, I have John Wyer saying at the Le Mans test weekend in 1964, “It’s incredible that [Jo Schlesser] escaped with his life.” Those are his exact words from his memoir, describing the moment he saw Schlesser’s wrecked GT40.