Second, Henry Ford II believed that employee Lee Iacocca was onto something with a new car called the Mustang. Henry II had put Iacocca in charge of the Ford division of the Ford Motor Company (like General Motors, Ford was a holding company, encompassing Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, and Ford Credit, which had been set up in the late 1950s, despite Henry Ford’s distaste for lending at interest).
The company has on balance enjoyed more successful runs with other vehicles, namely the F-Series pickup truck. But Iacocca’s Mustang (in truth, he wasn’t the only Ford executive or employee to champion the first ’Stang, but he was an instrumental mover and shaker) is Ford’s most iconic car except for the Model T, which naturally is no longer in production. The only other Ford vehicle ever built that has inspired such raptures of loyalty and enthusiasm as the Mustang is, of course, the Le Mans–winning GT40.
But we’ll get to that car shortly, and for what it’s worth, almost no GT40s made it to the road, while Mustangs have hit the highways in the United States by the millions—and more recently have become the most popular sports cars in Europe.
Iacocca’s insight was simplicity itself: young people want a young people’s car. When he took Henry II up on his offer to run the Ford division, he saw a wave of people under thirty hitting the U.S. car market. They weren’t going to buy a hulking sedan—they were going to want something fun.
This was what Henry II saw in Iacocca—not a gasoline-in-the-veins gearhead, not a number cruncher like McNamara, but a salesman. If Iacocca thought there was a market that was about to be underserved by Ford’s products, then Iacocca was probably right. The guy was born to sell. Let him create something that he could sell, and you were home free.
It’s all more complicated than the Whiz Kids and the Mustang, but those two developments nonetheless nicely capture what made Henry Ford II a great leader. There was a third idea, however. It wasn’t critical to Ford’s business, but it would set the company on a trajectory that would conclude in France in June 1966.
Enzo Ferrari was a dirt-poor working-class Italian kid who fell in love with racing the first time he saw a Fiat running flat out. He became a driver for Fiat, and later for Alfa Romeo, and in 1929 he founded the Scuderia Ferrari, which was intended to build race cars for Alfa. After the war, the Scuderia (which means “stable” in Italian) would build race cars for itself, and its first big win would come at the 24 Hours of Le Mans of 1949. One of the winning car’s drivers was Luigi Chinetti, an exceptionally important individual in Ferrari’s history; it was he who would start selling Ferraris in America and open a vast U.S. auto market to the road-car arm of the Scuderia that Enzo would establish in 1947, entirely to fund his racing efforts.
The company, even today, begins and ends with the Scuderia, even though its road cars have been with us for decades and have graced, in poster form, the bedroom walls of countless young men. Maybe Ferrari fans don’t yearn to race so much as they yearn for everything the brand represents: speed, sexy red cars, and lots of money. Ferraris pop up everywhere in the culture: on television in Magnum, P.I. (a 308 GTB) and Miami Vice (a Daytona) and in movies such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (a replica 1961 250 GT California Spyder) and National Lampoon’s Vacation (another 308, possibly outclassed by its driver, the leggy blond model and actress Christie Brinkley).
What really matters to the company, however, is racing, and for much of Ferrari’s history, racing meant Le Mans and Formula One. It was the perfect one-two punch. Formula One was the acid test of speed, performance, technology, and driver skill, and Ferrari has never missed a season since the modern form of the racing series was developed in the postwar period. Le Mans wins would prove reliability and validate various types of technology developed for the prolonged speeds and changing conditions of the Circuit de la Sarthe, while the race itself would stress long-term strategy and teamwork.
Racing is expensive, and unlike Ford and General Motors in the United States, carmakers that were rediscovering factory-supported racing with stock cars in the 1960s, Ferrari wasn’t selling millions of cars and trucks a year to a gigantic and affluent population. Ferrari was barely selling any road cars at all, relative to European giants like Fiat. This was all sustainable in the small-scale prewar economy, but after the war it was a road to ruin for Ferrari. Enzo couldn’t make the business work on his own, so he started looking for help—which really meant that he wanted to locate a partner who would fund the Scuderia and bask in the glory of that undertaking, while aiding in the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of road cars.
This was where Ford came in. The setup seemed perfect. The Deuce owned a Ferrari, a gift from Enzo himself. He was perhaps unique among Americans in understanding exactly what Ferrari was all about, recognizing that Enzo’s Achilles’ heel as an automaker was that he didn’t really want to be an automaker. Race cars were something special. Road cars were a means to an end for Enzo Ferrari, and that end was more race cars.
There was a whiff of arrogance about that, but if anyone in the world was entitled to a little hubris, it was Enzo Ferrari, then in his sixties and not exactly equipped to be the master of Ferrari’s next necessary stage, which was to become a global car brand trading on its spectacular successes on the track. His son Alfredo, called Dino, had died in 1956; this was the greatest tragedy and setback of Enzo’s life, robbing him of an heir. He had another son, by his mistress, but putting him in charge of the company was an impossibility. (Enzo would finally claim Piero as his son in the late 1970s, and today Piero is the only living Ferrari, holding a 10 percent stake in the company. He became incredibly wealthy when Ferrari separated from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in 2015 with an initial public offering that valued the carmaker at nearly $10 billion.)
Something about Ford as a great family business appealed to Enzo. Yes, the American colossus had held a public stock offering in the mid-1950s, but the Ford family still ran the show. Enzo Ferrari believed that Henry Ford II would understand what he required, which was to become for all practical purposes the European racing arm of Ford, using victories on the track to sell more and more sexy road cars, especially in the United States. Chinetti was confident that the impeccable Italian style of the Prancing Horse could captivate anyone with the means to spend lavishly. The war had ended—Americans weren’t provincial anymore. Many of them had seen Europe during the war and were traveling there. They ruled the world and were getting richer and richer every year. It was a land of new millionaires, and they needed to display their wealth. What better way to do that than with an exciting car that could trace its lineage to epic wins on the track? Ferrari even called one of his cars “California,” in a nod to all the Golden State represented: boundless optimism, beautiful weather, Hollywood, gorgeous women, handsome men, pioneers, sunshine, beaches, and roads that went on forever, all leading to sunsets over the Pacific.
In his 2009 book Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, A. J. Baime hints that Enzo may have had an ulterior motive in courting Ford. Ferrari had been involved relatively recently in a crash that had cost the lives of both a driver and fourteen spectators at the Formula One grand prix race at Monza, near Milan, in northern Italy’s industrial region, and Enzo had abruptly become a national pariah, a menace. He had to do something to change the climate in which he lived, given that he was otherwise widely regarded as a national treasure, and Ferrari the automaker was a potent symbol of Italy’s recovery from the war and fascism. (There has never been a less fascist machine than a sinuous red Ferrari, brimming with decadent Western values and a disdain for Aryan Übermensch propaganda.)
Is it possible that Enzo was playing Henry for short-term reputational rehabilitation?
I don’t think so. Enzo could see that he needed a sugar daddy, and he did get one later, when Fiat took effective control of Ferrari in the 1970s. That was obviously more nationalistically palatable, as Fiat was the symbol of the Italian postwar economic comebac
k, overseen by a patrician family headed by the peerless Gianni Agnelli—the only man in Italy who had anything on Enzo Ferrari. As the deal making progressed with Ford and rapidly went off the rails, it became abundantly clear that all Enzo wanted, down deep, was to keep the Scuderia going. The rest was noise, vulgar commerce. Enzo wasn’t really a natural businessman—he was a driver, a merchant of speed, who built the machines that most gloriously accessed that twentieth-century creation.
It’s not really clear whether the Deuce overplayed his hand or if Ford simply over-bureaucratized the process of buying Enzo’s life work, without properly grasping why it was his lifework. But when it came time to sign the papers for a proposed $10 million acquisition of Ferrari by Ford, Enzo quickly spotted that Ford might—might—have something to say about racing investment. And that was that.
Here’s what Enzo wanted: 100 percent control of the Scuderia. Ford would buy the road-car operation and expand it. And the money would flow back to Enzo, and he would use it to build race cars, co-branded as Ferraris and Fords, that would win the 24 Hours of Le Mans and Formula One races. Or maybe just Le Mans, or whatever, ultimately, Enzo thought was right. He would have no master when it came to racing.
It was an astonishingly naive approach to the deal. But Enzo thought Ford understood. They were a company, and a family, that had built the Model T and sold it to everybody. Ferrari was a company, and a family, that built race cars and didn’t care about selling cars to anybody.
The thing is, in defining Ford as just a brute manufacturer of transportation for the masses, Enzo overlooked a small but relevant detail. The first Henry Ford, the founder of the company, had been a race-car driver. Like Enzo, he understood the marketing value of speed—of one car being able to beat another.
“He used his winnings from a race to start Ford,” Mark Fields reminded me in Le Mans.
In October 1901, Henry Ford took part in the only race he would ever win. He defeated Alexander Winton in a ten-lap contest (shortened from twenty-five) in Grosse Pointe, near Detroit, with $1,000 on the line. In a race that would predate the 24 Hours of Le Mans by decades, Ford won with reliability. Winton’s car exceeded Ford’s by forty horsepower, but Ford’s own design made it to the finish, while Winton’s faltered.
The thirty-eight-year-old Henry Ford was coming off a failed automotive venture and needed investors to start the new Ford Motor Company. His win against Winton convinced them that Ford would make good on his promises. By 1903, the Ford Motor Company had been established.
It all started with a race. Not much of race, to be sure, nothing that would have impressed Enzo all that much. But still, a race. Who knows whether the Deuce was channeling that victory, sixty-some years after the fact, when he got word that Enzo had rebuffed his offer. But something in Henry Ford II rose up at the thought that Ferrari had no respect for Ford’s racing potential, something deep-seated and based in its own way on racing pride.
Enzo didn’t need Ford? Then Henry Ford II would show Enzo he wasn’t as good at racing as he thought. “All right, we’ll beat his ass”—that was what Henry II reportedly said when the deal went bust. The Ford GT40 was about to be born. And the place Henry Ford II would choose to beat Enzo Ferrari was the site of Ferrari’s greatest success: Le Mans.
Chapter 6
No Tougher Test
It’s not easy for anyone living in the early twenty-first century to understand what speed meant to someone living in the early twentieth. Just two decades before the running of the first 24 Hours of Le Mans, “speed” meant a particularly fast horse or a ship that could go perhaps 17 knots (about 20 miles per hour). The first automobiles were clattering, modified equestrian coaches with small motors. They were faster than walking, and faster than bicycles. But to the modern eye, they were alarmingly slow.
The fastest machines of the day were trains and, as the new century progressed, airplanes. A train powered by steam wouldn’t hit 100 miles per hour until 1934, a mark set by the legendary Flying Scotsman, known for its runs from London to Edinburgh. Airplanes in the early twentieth century were also crossing the once-mythic 100-mph barrier: the Sopwith Camel biplane, which achieved fame in the skies over England and France during World War I, had a top speed of 113 miles per hour.
Of course, all this relative speed for citizens of the pre– and post–WWI era was a revelation. It did more than improve their lives and add danger, romance, and glamour to the most exciting products of the technological revolution—it redefined consciousness by altering humanity’s relationship with time. What once took weeks, it was apparent, could now take days, or hours. High-speed transatlantic crossings were in the cards; after World War I, Nazi Germany would build huge zeppelin airships that could beat a luxury liner from Europe to America. Faraway cities and towns were now much more accessible. And it wasn’t necessary to feed, groom, and attend to the flesh-and-blood health issues of an automobile. A car required a mechanic, not a veterinarian, and if you blew a tire, you didn’t have to consider shooting your car to put it out of its misery. It might have been a less noble form of transportation, but it redefined life.
Almost as soon as cars arrived on the scene, people started to race them, as Henry Ford had in that Michigan race designed to drum up funding for the future Ford Motor Company. By the 1920s, it was abundantly evident that fast cars made for a thrilling spectacle, and a culture of racing grew up around them. But these cars were often purpose-built for the track or the racecourse, or at least seriously modified, as were the road cars Enzo Ferrari built for well-heeled enthusiasts of his true passion, racing.
Le Mans represented a different challenge: to build fast cars that could go the distance. Speed and reliability mattered. A race car could impress for the distance and time span of a grand prix race, but how about a car that could handle an entire day of uninterrupted punishment? That, it was reasoned, would be a car worth owning—and the automakers that gave society those cars would be worth buying from.
The first 24 Hours of Le Mans—known in France as the 24 Heures du Mans—was held in 1923, in the very early days of motor racing. It didn’t take long for Le Mans to cement its reputation as the premier endurance-racing event in the world (being first certainly helped). A French team of two drivers won the first race, in 1923, but the host country was dethroned the following year by a team from Britain. The Italians and Alfa Romeo would become contenders and champions in the early 1930s. The race would be interrupted by a strike in 1936 and then by World War II; during the war, the venue had been turned into a Luftwaffe base by the Nazis, with the Mulsanne Straight pressed into service as a runway, leading to its bombing by the Allies. Basic repairs delayed the track’s return to use until 1949, when Le Mans was both revived and modernized as an important date on the motorsports calendar.
The 1949 race was notable for several reasons. First, it was won by Luigi Chinetti, driving a very early postwar Ferrari racer, the 166. His victory would establish Ferrari at Le Mans for the coming decades, and set up Chinetti, who had left Italy, to become Enzo Ferrari’s point man in the United States, which would eventually grow to become the carmaker’s largest market. The 1949 comeback race was marred by crashes and a death (Pierre Maréchal, a Brit, who drove his Aston Martin without brakes until he finally and tragically wrecked it), but that was Le Mans, a dangerous contest. The competitors, and for that matter all of liberated France, were patriotically thrilled to witness the return of the race.
The postwar period also meant that Le Mans would be professionalized. Military technologies would come into play; if the people of Europe had thought World War I biplanes were fast at 113 miles per hour, the arrival of P-51 Mustang fighters in the skies over Europe, escorting bombers into Germany, was a revelation: they could crack 400 miles per hour with ease. The Le Mans cars began to more closely resemble what we now commonly think of as a “Le Mans racer”—a sports car with highly aerodynamic bodywork and a closed cockpit for th
e driver, versus the open design of the prewar years.
From roughly 1950 to 1970, Le Mans was a high-risk venue for drivers and spectators alike. After eighty-plus fans were killed in a 1955 crash, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO), the organizing entity, began to make major changes, implementing a now-familiar separation of spectators from the dangers of racing.
Racing legends were made during this twenty-year stretch. American driver Phil Hill won at Le Mans for the first time in 1958 and again in 1961. New Zealander Bruce McLaren, who was in the winning Ford GT40 in 1966, would go on to build race cars and give his name to a winning Formula One team and a line of supercars and hypercars in the 1990s (McLaren himself died in a crash in 1970). Belgian racer Jacky Ickx won at Le Mans six times between 1969 and 1982. The Englishman Derek Bell won five times, once in the mid-1970s and then four times in the 1980s. And American legend A. J. Foyt took a Le Mans crown in a Ford GT40 in 1967 with fellow American Dan Gurney; Foyt is the only driver to have captured motor racing’s most prestigious quartet: the Indy 500, the Daytona 500, and the twenty-four-hour races at both Le Mans and Daytona.
Le Mans also caught the imagination of Hollywood, although the most famous on-screen depiction of the race, Steve McQueen’s Le Mans, from 1971, was a box-office disaster. Its production had been beset with delays, screenplay rewrites, director changes, and an actual crash during filming, in which British pro driver David Piper was so severely injured that he had to have the lower part of one leg amputated. McQueen was not just a Tinseltown fan of Le Mans—his original plan for the film had been to drive the actual race, sharing seat time with the Scottish legend Jackie Stewart. McQueen had aimed to follow up on his second-place finish, with Peter Revson, at the 1970 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida, which he drove with his broken foot in a cast. To prevent the Hollywood icon’s Porsche from nabbing a first at Sebring, Mario Andretti made a late car switch to a second Ferrari competing in the race, and took the win.
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