Next to that the GT40 looked like a slab of metal, albeit with a pair of arrogant hood scoops. The 330 P3 delivered the impression that it would obliterate all comers on the track, simply by conquering them with beauty. Its sheer prettiness was daunting. And its predecessors had set a standard, winning Le Mans from 1960 to 1965. That run included triumphs in the face of Ford’s first efforts with its new GT cars, the early Mark I versions, which tackled Le Mans unsuccessfully in 1964 and 1965. (Those cars ran with smaller engines, displacing 4.2 liters.)
What really distinguished the GTs from the Ferrari aesthetically was that the Ferraris were holistic in their design and engineering attitude, with the bodywork and the engine and the wheels and tires all adding up to a create an impression far greater than the sum of their parts. The GTs, meanwhile, were designed and built in England, with Ford engines provided; they could be more accurately described as “platforms” for racing, relying on a tried-and-true formula. A small, lightweight, aerodynamic chassis was combined with a big engine to produce speed, and lots of it. Sure, there were also reliability and handling to consider, but the basics were the basics. Besides, Ford didn’t have time to overthink the design, and as it turned out, the platform supplied an unexpected level of flexibility.
The initial GT40s, the Mark I models, were a disappointment, performing poorly in 1964, with Le Mans a total wash. This was when Carroll Shelby joined up, displacing his former racing partner, John Wyer, the Englishman who had overseen the first GT40 Le Mans campaign.
Shelby was an experienced driver—he had won Le Mans in 1959, in an Aston Martin—and an automotive innovator. His first creation was the AC Cobra, an utterly bonkers car that was both devastatingly attractive and comically fast. As the Mark I racers were faltering in 1964, Shelby’s Cobra won the GT class. That car was something of a general template for the first GT40s, in that it was a lightweight AC roadster with a 4.7-liter Ford V-8 under the hood up front. And it got Shelby—a Texas chicken farmer, who had a taste for speed, the talent to construct great cars and win races in Europe, and an iron will forged from overcoming a sickly childhood—noticed in Dearborn.
In addition to the Cobra and the GT40, Shelby would develop a series of high-performance Mustangs for Ford. These cars have lived on in Ford’s contemporary portfolio since the early 2000s, with big engines and Cobra badging. Along the way, Shelby, who passed away in 2012 at the age of eighty-nine, also participated in the development of one of the wildest sports cars ever conceived in Detroit, the Dodge Viper. The long-hooded, low-to-the-ground beast debuted in 1992, with a massive 8.0-liter V-10 cranking out 400 horsepower, which at the time was dismaying power.
Shelby notoriously had a bum heart, even as far back as the early 1960s. But that didn’t stop him from taking up the charge for Ford to beat Ferrari at Le Mans. Shelby knew what the secret was to a winning Le Mans car, but his knowledge wouldn’t yield victory until 1966, two years after the first GT40 Mark I hit the Circuit de la Sarthe. For several years, Shelby would struggle with unreliable early versions of the GT40.
One of the secrets he had hit upon was in the brakes. More accurately, it was how quickly the brakes could be changed. Again, as with so much about Le Mans, it came down to the Mulsanne Straight. It was just over three and a half miles, run at speeds clocking at 200-plus miles per hour. At the end of it, a tight corner forced drivers to saw their speed in half. Again and again, the brakes were subjected to perhaps the single most demanding challenge for brakes ever devised.
The stresses were so severe in the 1960s that the rotors—the cast-iron plates that the calipers clamp onto to slow the car—could crack. And a race car without brakes isn’t much of a race car. Braking really is the secret sauce of competitive driving; the pros don’t hold back on speed when they have the chance to run flat out, but on winding, twisting road courses (as opposed to high-speed ovals), they need superb and reliable brakes, because they quite literally slam them down without hesitation. From Shelby’s perspective, the brakes made all the difference.
With the driver and a full fuel load of just over forty gallons, the GT40s weighed about 4,000 pounds, and most of the weight was engine. As Shelby explained, the kinetic energy built up on the Mulsanne, and the braking demand on the hard corner at the end of it, would destroy the brakes in two or three hours.
“You really had to manage the brakes, because at the end of the Mulsanne Straight they would be cold and then subjected to tremendous heat as you slowed from 220 mph,” said Chris Amon, who had shared the driving with Bruce McLaren in the winning GT40 in 1966.
So Ford had a choice: design a longer-lasting braking system or figure out how to change the brakes faster. The latter won out. Shelby credited Phil Remington, whom he called an “old hot rodder,” with coming up with a way to switch out the brakes in a minute. Endurance races in the 1960s pivoted on little things like that.
Shelby’s tale of what actually captured the Le Mans wins back then is also indicative of how the mid-1960s assault was a frustrating, fitful undertaking. The 1964 and 1965 cars weren’t equal to the monumental task at hand. Life was indeed slower in those days, even as America raced the Soviets to put a man on the moon. Memos were still typed. People sent letters in the mail. Computers were the size of rooms. Air travel was a novelty, although a new global “jet set” had arrived. A working day was peppered with coffee breaks and smoke breaks, and executives often retired for the afternoon after their three-martini lunches. Henry Ford II didn’t hold back on the cigarettes or the scotch. His goal wasn’t to beat Ferrari immediately. It was to beat Ferrari soon, and then to keep on beating him, and to prove that Ford’s technologies were just as good as the best the Europeans had to offer.
Ford was prepared to be patient, although the dismal outings of the GT40 Mark I in 1964 and 1965 did bring about the most apparent major change to the car, which was the increase in engine size. Enzo Ferrari didn’t worry about this enough, although his lieutenants knew that it would be hard for any European manufacturer, not just Ferrari, to keep pace with the monster American power plants.
For Shelby and the rest of the engineers continuing to labor away at Henry II’s Le Mans objective, the bigger engine was a given.
The GT40 Mark II was, eventually, the game changer. Speed hadn’t been the issue for the Mark I—it was on paper and in testing faster than the 330 P3. Reliability was. All three GT40 Mark I cars failed to finish Le Mans in 1964.
In 1965, the first two Mark II GT40s with the 7.0-liter V-8 journeyed to the Circuit de la Sarthe, joined by several examples of the Mark I entered by non-Ford-factory teams. None finished—the race was won by a North American Ferrari team founded by Enzo’s old friend Luigi Chinetti—but Shelby now knew how he could fix the GT40’s key mechanical problem. The new V-8 was, understandably, a fuel hog, making for too many pit stops. So it had to get lighter. The GT40’s aerodynamics also had to be improved, to keep it on the track, and the gearbox would need to be upgraded to handle the malevolent torque that the big engine was capable of sending to the rear wheels. The GT40 had been steadily tweaked for three years, demonstrating that the basic architecture of the car was solid and that Ford hadn’t been bingeing on hubris in believing that it was possible to go from nowhere to the winner’s circle in endurance racing.
The changes could all be swiftly achieved, in time for the beginning of the 1966 season, at the first-ever twenty-four-hour race at Daytona. The Florida race would be the ideal test for the Mark II headed into Le Mans, and the revamped car lived up to Shelby’s and Ford’s ambitions. Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby drove the car to victory, and anticipation built for a Ford-Ferrari rematch in France six months later.
The bottom line was that Shelby, with Ford’s backing, had refused to give up on the car. Maybe there was some personal animosity between the crusty Texan and Enzo Ferrari, a residue from Shelby’s racing days. (According to A. J. Baime’s book Go Like Hell, Shelby considered Enzo a reckle
ss, win-at-all-costs taskmaster, unconcerned about the lives of his drivers.) But ultimately, the creation of the most famous Le Mans racer of all time was deeply American. Problems arose, and problems were solved. The car got better. It was prepared to win.
Chapter 8
One-Two-Three
The 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966 has moved on in the consciousness of even casual racing fans from the status of lore to legend. It has inspired books and spurred Hollywood to make movies about motorsports.
At Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters, 1966 stands as arguably the automaker’s greatest moment, a time when the racetrack and the boardroom operated on the same plane, with the same priorities. The 1966 Le Mans win has come to stand for American self-confidence, for the magical blending of the automobile as a national icon and as an instrument of speed, for the astounding bravery of the men who drove the GT40 Mark IIs in France on that June weekend, for Ford’s technological excellence, for Carroll Shelby’s determination, and even for Henry Ford’s vision in starting the company in the first place, thereby setting the entire glorious thing in motion.
The thing is, when you study the actual race more closely, you realize that Ford had it won almost from the beginning, when the French tricolor flag was waved and the drivers dashed from the pits to the waiting cars on the starting grid—the classic Le Mans start, which was jettisoned in 1970.
(In a tragic piece of Le Mans history, Belgian driver Jacky Ickx made a leisurely stroll to his Ford GT40 in 1969 and took the extra time to completely strap in while the rest of the field tore off. He started in last place and eventually won, but his gesture was a protest against the dangerous Le Mans start. His actions turned out to be prescient, when John Woolfe suffered a fatal crash in his Porsche in the very first lap.)
The main technical issue for the GT40 Mark II cars that would be entered in the race rested with their huge 7.0-liter V-8s. Ford was betting that speed would triumph over handling. The Ferrari 330 P3s were lighter and quicker in the corners, but their engines were half as big in terms of displacement. The Ferraris were going to get clobbered on the Mulsanne Straight. But the Fords were also going to have to slow all that extra weight down, and that could send them to the pits for extra brake changes, in addition to the additional stops to refuel.
But there’s a saying in automotive circles: “No replacement for displacement.” And on the Circuit de la Sarthe, the importance of velocity on the Mulsanne couldn’t be overestimated.
The new GT40s had been scaring the living bejesus out of their drivers for months before Le Mans. They were just so very fast. It was a real test of skill to manage all that surging power, those mountains of torque. During Le Mans practice several months earlier, a driver had been cranking out faster and faster laps—with times that would have been impressive in 2016 for the GT Pro class—until he lost control of the car and smashed it to pieces.
But the drivers all knew what they’d signed up for. Because Le Mans was defined by such high speeds, it was known for horrific crashes that maimed or killed drivers. Every single time you got into a Le Mans car, as you strapped in and made that first run through the gears, roaring under the Dunlop Bridge and into the turns known as the Esses that precede the Mulsanne, you took a good hard look at death. And death looked right back and laughed at you, taunted you, said you’d been a stupid, stupid man to pick this job and that the two of you might have a meeting scheduled, quite possibly out there in the French darkness at 200 miles per hour.
Ford and Ferrari both came to Le Mans in force. Eight new GT40 Mark IIs and sixteen drivers formed Ford’s army, while the Ferrari fleet consisted of seven 330 P3s and fourteen drivers. For the sake of comparison, the copiously funded Ford factory effort in 2016 would see four GTs and twelve drivers line up on the grid.
Objectively, you had to scrutinize those numbers and conclude that it was a Ford-Ferrari race and that everybody else would be a spectator.
And that’s the way it shook out. Henry Ford II served as the starter for the thirty-fourth running of the race, and in the first half, it was a battle between the Ferraris and the Fords, with the Ferraris leading. But by the time Henry II had helicoptered back to his hotel from the track to wait out the night, the rain had started to fall and the Ferraris had started to fail.
Fortunes had been reversed. Now it was Ferrari’s new car that was unreliable, while Ford’s machines could go the distance. Through the darkness, the Fords bolstered their lead, while the Ferraris collapsed.
By morning, it wasn’t even a race anymore. The Ferraris that were left in the contest had no chance of catching the Fords. So the 24 Hours of Le Mans boiled down to a series of frantic political conversations. It was in fact the second political conundrum to emerge during the race. Early on, the GT40 driven by Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon had been shredding Firestone tires. Ford and Firestone were tight, but McLaren—a racing innovator who had just taken the plunge with his own Formula One team—had a deal with Goodyear and was told that if he could convince the Goodyear reps in attendance to allow him to run on Goodyears, that was his call. McLaren didn’t hesitate, and after some quick discussions, he had four Goodyears on his and Amon’s GT40.
But daybreak brought the truly challenging politics to the fore—regrettably, they would undermine what could have been one of the most memorable finishes in the history of auto racing.
The Deuce had returned to the circuit, only to encounter a furious debate about how Ford should stage the finish. With winning almost in the bag, the idea was to have the three leading Fords cross the finish line at the same time, on the last lap of the twenty-four hours. This brought up an obvious question: Who should win the race?
In the pits and the paddock, the idea was that no one should. The result would be a tie between the top two cars. The GT40 driven by Ken Miles and Denny Hulme was in front of the Ford helmed by Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon, and another GT40 was a dozen laps farther back. This third car had been entered by Holman & Moody, which was sort of the Multimatic of its day, a specialist racing fabricator that constructed race cars for Ford.
Initially, the fix was in. Ford and the Shelby team were on board, even though they thought that Ken Miles should get a shot at winning the race outright, given that he had taken firsts at Daytona and at a rainy, deadly, chaotic Sebring race earlier in the season. The Holman & Moody GT40 was strategically permitted to catch up to the lead Shelby GT40s in the waning hours of Le Mans; the third car would finish a distant third, but the Fords would cross the line as a group. And then the technicality of all technicalities doomed Ford’s publicity stunt.
Race officials informed the racing teams that McLaren and Amon’s car had started farther back on the grid than Miles and Hulme’s. If the two cars crossed the line at the same instant, the McLaren-Amon GT40 would have traveled a greater distance in the twenty-four-hour period and would therefore be the winner. You win Le Mans by getting in the most laps during the time frame of the race.
That was what Ken Miles thought. But Ford had other ideas, and in any case, even when everyone figured out that the one-two-three photo for the finish wasn’t going to reflect an actual three-way tie, it was too late. Miles, a Brit who had come on board as a test driver for Shelby, had become a racing legend in southern California but hadn’t made a big name for himself on the world’s grandest stages. The year 1966 was his best shot, and he was dismayed that Ford would deny him the triple victory, of Daytona, Sebring, and Le Mans, for something as irrelevant to a driver as a photo op. He had driven hard for a day and a night and into another day.
Miles had bucked authority in his time with the Ford effort; he was a California guy and tight with Shelby. McLaren and Amon, meanwhile, were great drivers, and McLaren was increasingly an international racing celebrity. But they were from New Zealand, a faraway place no one in America had ever heard of. (It was close to Australia, right?)
In the end—and it was a bitter en
d that has always tainted the result—the drivers followed orders, and Miles came in second while McLaren finished first. It would be Miles’s last chance to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Just a few months later, he was killed testing a new GT40 prototype in California for Shelby—a faster and more durable model called the J-car. He was forty-seven years old. McLaren would also soon meet his end. He perished in a crash in 1970, also while testing a new car design. He was thirty-two.
Auto racing was appallingly dangerous in the 1960s. Numerous men had died in the years leading up to Ford’s win in ’66, but in those days, that was considered the price of doing business. It was one of the factors that animated Carroll Shelby’s dislike of Enzo Ferrari, but it wasn’t as if Shelby didn’t play along. The assumption was that if you were a driver, you didn’t just know the risks; you welcomed them. Winners didn’t just beat the competition—they beat death.
This nihilistic attitude would be forced out of racing by the Scottish driver Jackie Stewart in the 1970s. Stewart demanded that new barriers between the track and the fans be constructed, and that drivers be required to wear seat belts and more advanced helmets. By the 1980s, auto racing had become far safer.
The sad truth is that fans continually over-romanticize the racing era of the 1960s and ’70s. Motorsport was on an even footing with other major sports at that time, featuring competitors who captured the public’s imagination. Their exploits behind the wheel brought Hollywood stars into the game, men like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, who actually finished second overall at Le Mans in 1979, driving a Porsche sponsored by Hawaiian Tropic outfitted in wildly colorful livery. Speed had menace, danger, and sexiness—it was like a drug, for a culture that was suffused with drugs.
It took the heroes of this period, the drivers themselves, to force the changes that would give pro racers a much better chance to enjoy a full career and a long family life. The most terrifying tracks were tamed or retired. The racing teams and the manufacturers began to concentrate on driver safety as a first priority, building the car out from a safety cage that was designed to remain intact in a crash, while the entire vehicle shredded around the driver, absorbing the deadly energy of a impact. Racing went from being a glamorous cult of death to what it should have been all along—a sublime celebration of speed. To be sure, drivers still die at the wheel. But many more things have to go wrong than in the good old days, when a mere tire puncture could send a man to racing Valhalla.
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