But the number 66 GT was performing well for the moment, in the afternoon sunshine. While Briscoe and 67 were out, number 66, driven by Joey Hand, surged into second place in the GTLM class, dueling with Ferrari.
Once the 67 car was in the garage, it became clear that it wouldn’t be returning to the race anytime soon. The problem was going to take a while to fix. Briscoe and his teammates had to wait it out.
The fact was that the 67 car had been having problems all week, through the qualifying rounds. In the garage, the rear spoiler was pulled off and a hulking crew member knelt on the massive carbon-fiber diffuser, before that too was removed. Replacement parts were hauled in. The tires came off, and the process of dismantling the entire rear end commenced.
The car had looked glorious just a few hours earlier, sleek and powerful, like a superhero. Now, it resembled a crippled combatant being treated at a field hospital.
Gearbox failures are vexing but not uncommon in endurance racing, where gears are being constantly and harshly shifted under extreme stress. The GTs’ gearshifts, in fact, had been a source of preoccupation for fans who had watched the car undergoing testing on YouTube videos for months before Daytona. The sound was like a sledgehammer striking an anvil, and when it was joined by that of the belching turbocharged V-6 engine, it caused fans’ heads to spin. “The New Ford GT on Track Sounds Violently Sick” was a Jalopnik headline after the videos aired.
An agonizing forty-five minutes after the failure, Briscoe was running again in the 67 car, but he was in fifty-third place overall, and he had an impossible amount of ground to make up over the next twenty-three hours. Unfortunately, the number 66 car was also in trouble. Hand’s car pitted at lap forty-two, and while the crew was undertaking a usually routine brake replacement—a process that should take only about two minutes—a brake line was damaged. The video feeds showed brake fluid dribbling onto pit lane, leaking like urine. It was a pathetic sight, and it ultimately put the 66 car well back on laps as well—and that was before it, too, had a gearbox failure and had to be pushed back to the paddock bays.
The 66 came back out with twenty hours to go, but though the race had really barely begun, the lap deficit for the GTs was already insurmountable. Both were running dead last in the GTLM class. Sure, they were fast, but they weren’t durable, and the combination of durable and fast is what wins the Rolex 24. Through the night and into the next day, Ganassi’s drivers turned fast lap after fast lap, slowly chewing their way up the standings, passing slower cars in the next class down and hoping that a few Porsches, BMWs, and Ferraris would hit their own patches of trouble—which, as it turns out, they did.
The Corvettes, on the other hand, were tanks. By the last half hour of the race, both cars and their drivers were given permission to go full out, and the finish was close, a drag race, with one Vette winning by a nose.
It was Ford versus Chevy versus Ferrari, old rivals taking one another on at the debut and the pinnacle of the U.S. endurance-racing season. On paper it sounded fantastic. But on the track, Daytona was a grueling disappointment for Ford—a monumental emotional blow. The numbers 66 and 67 GTs finished seventh and ninth in their class, respectively.
A week after the Daytona catastrophe, there was still plenty of postgame chatter about the GTs that had both spent so much precious time in the garage instead of turning lead laps on the track.
Two basic views emerged. One held that the cars’ struggles were to be expected. Sure, we’d seen the GT taking test laps, and while the turbocharged six-cylinder sounded pretty nasty at times, the car hadn’t looked as if it were going to break down.
Nor did Ford Performance suggest that there were any looming problems. At the Detroit auto show, just weeks before the GTs’ Daytona debut at the Rolex 24, Ford Performance’s boss, Dave Pericak, put any naysayers’ questions to rest, decisively: “We are ready to race,” he declared.
But Chip Ganassi was grumbling. There were too many cooks in the kitchen for his taste, too many points of view on the car. This was a marquee effort, and his struggle at the head of the racing team was to square what had to happen on and off the track with the rapidly building media frenzy around the GT and Ford’s return to Le Mans. Adding to Ganassi’s problems was his management of two semi-independent racing teams on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
He later confessed that he had worried about all this before Daytona and that his nightmares had come true. The highly accelerated timetable for getting the GT racing, in the United States and Europe, had been grating on him. But he was dealing with it. That’s what you do when you run the second-most-successful racing organization in history. You deal with the bullshit and move on.
By any reckoning, the Rolex 24 was going to be a tough start for the car. Yes, the GT had been bred for the track, with the race car and the road car developed simultaneously. The GT had thoroughbred written all over it—it looked shockingly more ferocious than anything else in the GTLM class, including the privateer Dodge Vipers and the new Ferrari 488s. It certainly struck anyone with eyes as more race car than the Corvettes that had been dominating the class. Compared with the GTs, the bright yellow Vettes were almost like NASCAR machines; a huge, supercharged V-8 sat under the hood, but the Vettes’ drivers and crews had to compensate for all that oomph and weight up front. Still, the Corvettes had shown that they were both pretty fast and superlatively reliable. What they lacked in flamboyance and daring design, they more than made up for with their solid nature. Simply put, they didn’t break.
Fans of the GT also noted that when the cars were running free of trouble, they ran very, very fast. Raw speed in a straight line and quickness into the corners equaled a perfect endurance-racing car—as long as the durability actually came through. In fact, how fast the GTs could consistently go would create a minor controversy and some grumbling during the season, especially in Europe—and that grumbling would burst into public view just one day before Le Mans.
The other view that emerged after Daytona was the argument that the car wasn’t ready for prime time, and that Ford had been served a bit of karmic comeuppance, after promoting its return to endurance racing quite avidly for a year. The mutterings I heard around the car-show circuit prior to the Rolex 24 suggested that Ford was not in for an easy time; even though Ferrari wasn’t running a factory team, it was debuting its own mid-engine sports car, and the drivers working for the privateer outfits were some of the best in the business.
“They’re going to bleed red”—that was how Ferrari’s drivers would approach the lead-up to Le Mans and their somewhat involuntary role as the foils to Ford’s efforts to revisit upon Ferrari the humiliation of 1966.
As it turned out, Ferrari just missed out on a third-place finish at Daytona. The 488s were quick, but they couldn’t hang with the Corvettes on the huge, banked curves and straightaways of the NASCAR sections of the track, where the Vettes’ power plants found drag-racing heaven. The in-car video feeds told the story, as the TV and radio commentators were happy to remind anyone tuned in over the course of the twenty-four hours. “Just listen to the sound of a big American V-8 at full, growling, heavy-metal song,” one said.
The GTs, meanwhile—those very pretty, very technologically advanced GTs, custom-sculpted from carbon fiber by Multimatic—had languished in the Ganassi garage, their carefully crafted red-white-and-blue body panels scattered around the cars as mechanics dug into the internals and engineers looked on with consternation and concern.
I wasn’t surprised the GTs had problems. Practice is practice, and racing is racing. It’s a truism in motorsports, especially apt in endurance racing, where the format is intended to break the cars. One of the Porsche 911s at Daytona, after running impeccably for over twenty hours, basically exploded. It was pushed back to the garage to finish out the race in a widening puddle of engine oil oozing from its destroyed flat-six.
The GT was without question a fast car. It goes w
ithout saying that racing requires fast. The Vettes had it flat out. The Ferraris had it in the twisty parts. But the GTs had it everywhere. And they weren’t that much slower than the 1,000-horsepower prototypes they shared the Daytona course with. In fact, one of the two GTs posted the fastest GTLM lap time for the entire race, and both cars turned some of the fastest laps on the track as they fought to catch up from their deep deficits. But the 1965 GTs were fast cars, too. The reliability, however, was up for debate; the GTs that had taken on Le Mans that year were all retired.
Would the story of the GT end with an epic victory, as in 1966? Or was Daytona a bad omen?
Dave Pericak had thought the GTs were ready to race. A twenty-two-year veteran of Ford, Pericak wasn’t a guy to make lighthearted declarations that he intended to twist around later when they didn’t pan out. He was all business, all the time, although he was also quick to grin, and his determination never seemed to cause him misery. Ford had given him responsibility for probably its most important vehicle, the Mustang, and had asked him to oversee as chief engineer the creation of a new model for 2015.
“Dave did a great job with Mustang,” Mark Fields told me. “So we put him in charge of Ford Performance.”
No big deal, right? His job before had been to not screw up the most famous sports car Ford had ever created, and now he was being asked to not screw up one of the biggest returns to racing in the history of the sport. And not only the CEO was watching; the entire Ford family was, as well.
A compact, intense man, Pericak shares with professional racers that ability to peer deeply into the future, to imagine not just the next curve but the endless deluge of them that makes up an endurance race that starts in daylight, runs through the darkness, and concludes long after the sun has risen.
“We were very happy with how the car performed,” Pericak told me. “But we were very disappointed with its durability.”
He admitted that the entire return to Le Mans to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the win was run “at light speed,” and he showed plenty of humility when he said he wished the program had had more time. But I heard the frustration in his voice—the sense that Ford Performance and Multimatic had let down the drivers and the company.
“I take everything personally,” Pericak said, holding back on throwing blame around. “The way the cars struggled tore me apart inside, but I don’t let it get me down. Outwardly, there’s not a bigger cheerleader for the team than me.”
The critical failure with the number 66 and 67 cars turned out to be minor and race-day fluky: a small actuator had failed. But Pericak pointed out that it was actually better for the GTs to share a fault than to have separate ones. Different problems would double the troubleshooting. A bad gearbox could be fixed, and without forcing a switch in transmission suppliers, in the four GTs that would, as Pericak said, in a return to his brand of straightforward, borderline-cocky language, “stage an assault on Le Mans.”
But his confidence wasn’t being restored without some shame. Ford had been promoting the GT and its return to racing for a year. The drivers were among the best in the business, on both sides of the Atlantic. Chip Ganassi Racing knew what it was doing. For months, the drivers had been praising the car. They were ready to go. But almost immediately, the GT wasn’t.
“I told Chip and the team that they had done an amazing job,” Pericak said. The next part came without a beat. “But we owe them a durable race car.” The next part came even faster. “There’s never been a car more born to race than this one. And we all have skin in the game.”
But nobody from Ford left Daytona either soaked in Champagne or sporting a new Rolex watch.
The game would now move on to the 12 Hours of Sebring in March. For Pericak, for Ganassi, for the Ford brass, and for the GTs, the pressure would be cranked up about as high as it could go. After all, they were out to repeat history.
PART II
ALL RIGHT, WE’LL BEAT HIS ASS
Chapter 5
Ford Would Like
to Buy Ferrari
In the mid-1960s, Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari decided they couldn’t stand each other.
It was a completely different era in the auto industry, long before the gas crisis of the 1970s and the arrival of Japanese and German brands in the U.S. market. The Detroit Big Three ruled America, and there was even room for a fourth player, American Motors Corporation (AMC), run by George Romney, who would go on to be governor of Michigan (and whose son, Mitt, would be Massachusetts governor and a two-time presidential candidate). In the 1950s, the elder Romney’s claim to fame was overseeing the rollout of the AMC Rambler, a relatively small car by the standards of a decade known for excessive chrome and flamboyant tail fins on cars whose front ends seemed to arrive five minutes before their rears.
The Rambler was called the “dinosaur fighter,” and it presaged the battle the prehistoric Big Three would fight in the 1970s. (AMC would become even more famous during that decade when it acquired the World War II Jeep brand from Kaiser, another U.S. automaker operating in the shadow of the Big Three; Jeep would later become Chrysler’s most important brand, after AMC was absorbed in 1987.)
Imports, in those days, were from Europe. The Volkswagen Beetle had arrived in 1949 as a one-off import. VW would set up shop in the United States in 1955, and the car really took off in the 1960s. Like the Rambler, the Beetle was a counterpoint to the enormous sedans the Big Three were selling.
But the Beetle wasn’t a sports car, and that’s what the Big Three thought of when they thought about Europe. As BMW wouldn’t introduce the sports sedan to America until the late 1960s, the nameplates consisted mainly of one German, one Brit, and two, possibly three, Italians. Porsche. Jaguar. Ferrari. Lamborghini.
Alfa Romeo could also be counted, and its Spider roadster gained fame in the 1967 countercultural coming-of-age film The Graduate, from the director Mike Nichols. The MGB roadster from the British Motor Corporation was also a somewhat familiar sight. But the roadsters were for bohemian rakes and sophisticated college kids. The real sports cars were creatures of the racetrack.
And the men who ran America’s auto industry knew it. These marques were different from what was common on both U.S. roads and U.S. racetracks. Racing was controversial in the United States at this time, anyway. In the 1950s, concerned that racing was encouraging reckless behavior both on and off the track, the American Automobile Manufacturers Association called for a ban on carmakers’ participation in or support of motorsports. The Big Three went along with the ban, from 1957 until Ford broke the ban in 1962.
What intrigued people about the European sports cars was the usual mixture of features that woo straightforward, plainspoken Yanks to the charms of the Old World: sexiness, chiefly, but also a spirited attitude toward driving and an embrace of timeless beauty over the notion that cars are A-to-B machines. Sure, Detroit had lost its mind in the 1950s and created some of the most out-there, exuberant, overdone cars of all time, orgies of thrusting hood ornaments, dramatic tail fins, thick whitewall tires, wild colors, and oceans of chrome. But by the 1960s that excess had all been dialed back. Ford’s “pony car,” the Mustang, would be introduced in 1964, following the Chevrolet Corvette roadster by a decade, and the brutalist muscle cars that would define the brawny side of Detroit would arrive over the next ten years.
The really stylish stuff, either dripping with sex in the case of the Italians, oozing panache like the Jags and Aston Martins, or proposing the perfect driving experience, à la Porsche, was a European thing. And the racing added a dash of danger to the seductiveness.
When Henry Ford II—nicknamed “the Deuce”—thought about what he really wanted in life, he wanted some of that sex and style. The son of Edsel Ford and grandson of Henry Ford, the Deuce was a man of considerable appetites and ambitions. He had a taste for European cars and European women, and he wasn’t reluctant to act on his urges. In 1965, he left his
wife and married his Italian mistress, Maria Cristina Vettore Austin, who would appear on the cover of Life magazine in a Detroit Lions T-shirt.
But Cristina ultimately didn’t represent his boldest Italian conquest. Henry Ford II wanted to buy Ferrari. And he almost did.
Henry Ford II was actually the perfect American to make a play for the Italian carmaker. The Deuce was one of those mid-century scions of industry who combined worldly self-confidence with a well-tailored masculine swagger and a passion for business. He was no entitled layabout, happy to live off his inherited lucre while savoring the 1950s’ and 1960s’ never-ending, sun-chasing party for wealthy elites. There could have been frequent touchdowns in New York, London, Rome, Paris, Hollywood, the south of France, Monaco, the Italian islands, and before the Cuban Revolution, Havana. He had the wherewithal and could be indulged—being a Ford has never automatically meant following in the founder’s giant footsteps. Working in the family business is optional and at times has been actively discouraged, given that certain heirs have lacked the competence to manage a global manufacturing enterprise.
Henry Ford II’s grand and often grandiose life has been thoroughly examined, investigated, and recounted, but the short version is that in 1945, when he wasn’t yet thirty years old, he took charge of Ford on his father’s death and dragged the original American car company, an icon of the second industrial revolution, into the modern business world. He did so by making two critical decisions.
First, he brought in a group of number crunchers from the Army Air Forces. They hadn’t beaten the Nazis and the Japanese militarists all by themselves. But they had proved that victory in war, and later success in business, could be ruthlessly quantified and statistically scrutinized. The Whiz Kids, as they were called, took Ford out of its play-by-feel, postwar mode and into the new age of management by hard data. One of them, Robert McNamara, would become president of Ford in 1960 and later John F. Kennedy’s and then Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, presiding over the early phases of the Vietnam War.
Return to Glory Page 11