“In racing, it’s good to forget,” Joey Hand told me. This was hard-won wisdom. Hand was intimately aware of what happens when the brain starts to interfere with the driving. “I’ve had some big wrecks in my day. If something goes wrong, it’s going to hurt. But you’re not going to be quick if you’re concerned about that.”
This is something those who drive fast for a living are surprisingly good at: coming up with pithy words to summarize their way of life. Screenwriters have been giving characters lines like this forever. But somehow, when they come from a real driver, they sound fresh and wise.
Obviously, it isn’t just about the person behind the wheel. The car is a major factor. All other things being equal, as the lead-up to Le Mans progressed in late winter and spring of 2016, it became clear that the Ford GT was a car that could do it all. It was fast in a straight line, but it had fantastic handling in the corners—“it turns with braking really well; I can drive it on the brakes,” Hand said—and its limits extended beyond the boundaries competing cars could push for.
It was also an easy car to drive. “I jumped right in and felt at home right away,” Hand said. “It’s not just a badass-looking car.” But at base, Hand was a racing realist. “We’re the new kids on the block.” he said, “We have a lot of people who have done this before. But it’s our first time to Le Mans as a group, so we have to do everything right.”
After Daytona, which took place at the end of January, the North American GTs would stay in Florida for the 12 Hours of Sebring in mid-March. Then they had two California courses to look forward to: the Long Beach street circuit in mid-April and the Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca on May 1. These latter two were slower tracks with a lot of turns, where factors such as driving skill, brake durability, and fuel and tire strategy play a bigger role than raw speed.
Daytona had revealed that the car had issues—hardly a surprise, although the gearbox gremlins hadn’t shown up during extensive testing prior to the IMSA WeatherTech season kickoff, and other teams in various Le Mans classes were using the Ricardo transmissions that were giving the GT so much trouble.
But the car was also capable of scorching the track, surging straight into the lead pack when everything was properly firing, as Joey Hand had discovered at Daytona, when he was able to confidently mix in with the Porsche 911s and Ferrari 488s until the pit-stop mishap knocked his GT out of the race and off the lead lap. And Ganassi, despite all the problems, was in love with the GT.
“In this series, there’s always a new car,” he told me. “And with a new car, you look to have one that does what it’s supposed to do. And that’s what this car does. You make a change and something changes. You’re personalizing the car for the drivers and the conditions. Some cars won’t let you do that. This car does. It responds well to change, and that’s the sign of a good car.”
Ford rolled with the punches meted out by the early problems and setbacks and concentrated on getting ready for the remaining races in Florida and California before Le Mans, and on preparing for the European team’s April debut at Silverstone in England.
The six drivers Ganassi had ready to strap into their new GTs in Europe were enthusastic about the car, but of course part of getting the job was agreeing to stay on message—they weren’t going to complain about a brand-new ride that was under the media microscope as it made its run at Le Mans history.
The U.S. races that followed Daytona gave Ford and Ganassi the chance to sort out the GT’s mechanical issues and gave the North American drivers plenty of opportunities to lay down good laps. Sebring was a major improvement over Daytona; the numbers 66 and 67 cars finished eighth and fifth, respectively. It might have gone better for Richard Westbrook and the 67 car but for a slide off the track with only ten minutes remaining on the twelve-hour clock. Up to that point he had been battling for a podium position. The 66 car also ran well, but with Dirk Müller in the seat during a period of rain, the GT hydroplaned in the first turn of the course—which is notorious for its uneven, unpredictable surface—and spent two hours in the garage being patched up. A lucky red flag held the field in the pits, however, while the weather cleared, and by the time Müller, Hand, and Sébastien Bourdais’s ride was back on the track, a top ten was still in the cards.
The Ford brass wasn’t exactly ecstatic about finishing fifth and eighth, but it was an improvement after Daytona. In his post-race comments, Raj Nair focused on the GT’s reliability, which hadn’t been a repeat issue. Lingering in the back of his mind, as well, was the GT’s speed, which was a repeat virtue from Daytona. Ford and Multimatic had built the GT to be fast, aiming to win races from the lead, and in the United States, velocity had been a consistent plus for the cars in their first two races.
The Long Beach race the following month showcased some additional GT capabilities. It could handle well on a tight track. But the racecourse, laid out on city streets, didn’t allow the IMSA drivers to totally cut loose and hammer the cars down nice, long straightaways. For that they would have to wait for Le Mans and the Mulsanne, which, if the gearbox issues didn’t recur and the drivers could keep the GTs on the track and out of the paddock, could be an ace in the hole for Ford’s comeback. But although the gearbox malfunctions weren’t a challenge to overcome, racing has a way of throwing up new and often terrifying struggles, always when you least expect it.
The Bubba Burger Sports Car Grand Prix—definitely the oddest race name on the 2016 IMSA schedule—on the nearly two-mile, claustrophobic Long Beach circuit would see Ford Chip Ganassi Racing and driver Richard Westbrook briefly face down a team’s and a driver’s worst nightmare: fire.
It happened during practice laps on the Friday before the race weekend, when a fuel leak caused an engine fire as Westbrook was getting used to the GT on the legendary, and legendarily bumpy, Long Beach street circuit, which in the late 1970s and early ’80s hosted a Formula One race (won by Mario Andretti in 1977). More recently, it has been home to an IndyCar event. A fountain, complete with leaping dolphins, marks the middle of the course.
Westbrook was able to escape his burning GT no worse for wear, but the blaze was disturbing. No sooner had the team gotten a handle on the problems from Daytona, and enjoyed a glitch-free Sebring, than the worst threat imaginable cropped up. Pro drivers are mostly fearless, but they’re all terrified, down deep, of suffering the fate of Niki Lauda, the Austrian three-time Formula One champion, who in 1976 crashed at the German Grand Prix, at the Nürburgring track, and was disfigured by fire when he was trapped in his car. (Lauda recovered admirably from the trauma, which sent him into a short coma, by capturing the F1 championship the following year and again in 1984 after coming out of retirement. The Nürburgring remains an important track, but it’s no longer used in F1.)
It was ironic that the fire would knock Westbrook’s number 67 car out of qualifying, forcing him and his teammates to start at the back of the pack, because just a few days prior to the mishap, in a blog post for Dailysportscar.com, Westbrook had confessed his affection for the Long Beach circuit. “I love street circuits full stop, but Long Beach is a great one,” he wrote, before characterizing the tight-quarter racing as “more a case of one eye backwards, one eye forwards, rather than both eyes forwards.”
The burned car had to be repaired, and this was where the brotherhood of motorsport, or at least motorsport mechanics, entered the picture: both the Corvette and the Porsche teams offered to help Ford out.
By the time the 100-minute race was ready to start on Saturday, April 16, number 67 was back in action and would just miss out on third place, as Porsche took first, Corvette Racing placed second, and an impressive privateer Ferrari team from Risi Competizione captured third. It was a stunning result for Westbrook’s car, which had for all practical purposes been crippled just twenty-four hours earlier. “We fought at the sharp end all race long and finished on the lead lap,” he wrote in a blog post. “Daytona we were 30 laps down and nowher
e.”
Sadly, a malfunction with the number 66 GT’s scissor-door hinge doomed it to making up lost laps and ultimately an eighth-place result. By this point, despite their optimism and faith in the GT, the drivers had every right to express frustration and maybe even blame bad luck: gimpy gearboxes, cut tires, a freak fire, spinouts in the rain, and a funky door. But even though they weren’t getting the payoff, the cars were running hard and fast. So they had to remind themselves of that, while focusing on the positives.
“I had fun out there,” Dirk Müller said after the race, brushing off the door problem with his number 66 car and preferring to dwell on his quick late lap of just under one minute, eighteen seconds. His teammate Ryan Briscoe would argue that the number 67 car, despite starting from the rear, was running so well that it could have nipped Ferrari for a podium opportunity.
Despite the good vibes coming from the drivers, the uneven and by some estimates disappointing results for the North American GT team were leading to considerable speculation that Le Mans in 2016 would be a nice commemoration of the 1966 win for Ford, but probably not an opportunity to drink any Champagne on Sunday afternoon after twenty-four hours of racing. As the end of April neared, the GTs had been pushed around in their racing class by Porsches, Corvettes, BMWs, and Ferraris. The car itself was a hot-looking piece of superlative technology, but it was taking its time serving up much more than a handful of impressive laps. Ominously, none of the races in the United States after Daytona had matched in duration what the GTs would confront in France, and for the European GTs, Le Mans would be the team’s first all-day, all-night contest.
What the motorsport pundits and Le Mans veterans had told me before the season started was ringing true. It wasn’t that Ford wasn’t ready to race, as Dave Pericak had put it several months earlier at the Detroit auto show—it was that Ford simply didn’t have enough experience in sports-car competition yet, on the national stage, with cars in this league. Maybe Raj Nair was right, and the retake–Le Mans campaign should have started in 2015. A real possibility of a Ford embarrassment loomed, when what the world had expected back in mid-2015 was a poetic coronation. Panic wasn’t really an option, so Ford Performance and Ganassi continued to focus on one race at a time.
And then the GTs’ luck started to turn, in a big way and at the best possible time.
Chapter 11
Silverstone,
Laguna Seca, and Spa
The biggest difference between the Ford GT’s European and American racing debuts was the climate. Daytona had been an awful outing, but the Florida sunshine was warm and benevolent. The six-hour race at Silverstone took place in mid-April, and the weather was initially looking as if it was not going to cooperate. On April 16, a day before the race, the temperature climbed only into the mid- to high thirties Fahrenheit, and a snowstorm blew through the seventy-year-old venue, about sixty miles north of London in the English Midlands.
That meant difficult conditions and rain tires during qualifying, but the Ford drivers made the best of it, even though one of the two cars endured yet another gearbox issue that limited its shifting to third and fourth gears—fortunately, right in the GT’s sweet spot, so that a strong lap time could be recorded. Even with the glitch, Ford qualified in third and fourth positions. Both Pericak and Nair, who were on hand for the European debut, were pleased, although both guys were haunted by memories of the Daytona disaster and the gearbox issues that had destroyed Ford and Ganassi’s chances for a headline-grabbing return to big-time sports-car racing.
Just as building both the GT race car and the road car more or less simultaneously, on a time-crunched schedule, initially looked like a colossal undertaking but actually went quite smoothly, the organization of two racing teams, running under different regulations, with the Atlantic Ocean between them, deploying four cars and twelve drivers—not to mention crews for each car—was in practice not that big a deal. Chip Ganassi admitted that there were challenges, but he was quick to note that his people knew what they were doing, and that Ford’s support was invaluable. Both the IMSA and the WEC teams were regularly checking in with each other, and of course both Ford and Multimatic had operations in Europe. Bearing the brunt of the struggle to bring four cars to Le Mans was Pericak, who by mid-spring was in full globe-trotting mode, jetting between coasts in the United States, with frequent touchdowns in Detroit, and making jaunts to Europe. Remarkably, the Le Mans campaign wasn’t his only job; because he was running all of Ford Performance, he was also overseeing Ford’s NASCAR efforts in 2016.
Silverstone turned out to be a decent first outing for the GTs in the World Endurance Championship. The number 67 car, driven by Olivier Pla for the final stint, just missed a podium finish, coming in fourth in a race that was cut short by rain. The number 66 car was close behind, in fifth. Ferrari took the top two spots, and Aston Martin Racing nabbed third.
Competitive themes were emerging on both side of the Atlantic. In the United States, it was Ford struggling to catch up to Corvette as it dealt with the reliability of the GT—a classic confrontation in America, with the Blue Oval taking on a traditional rival in General Motors’ Chevy. In Europe, the looming battle was between Ford and Ferrari, a classic in its own right, as it evoked the 1966 Le Mans showdown. That matchup seemed more logical, given the similar technological natures of the GT and the Ferrari 488, both mid-engine supercars with turbochargers. For the U.S. confrontation, Corvette Racing’s wealth of experience was paying off, as the team was coming to the track with a car that had notably less power than the GT.
After Silverstone, the action shifted back to the United States. The Ford-Ganassi team had already moved the operation almost 3,000 miles west, from Florida to Long Beach. Now the team headed for northern California and the Continental Tire Monterey Grand Prix, on the first Sunday in May. The race was a two-hour test.
The Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca is a two-and-a-quarter-mile track that opened in the 1950s and over the decades has come to be loved by professional drivers and club racers alike. It’s a technically challenging course, with eleven turns in total, including the Corkscrew, an incredibly tricky left-right combo that drops 109 feet from top to bottom. That section has made the course legendary; drivers effectively spend an entire lap preparing to tackle it. The beauty of Laguna Seca—which was constructed on a dry lake bend; hence the name—is that it can be driven fast or relatively slowly, by racers of widely varying levels of skill. On balance, however, it’s one of those tracks that, on paper, set up better for less powerful cars that are optimized for handling. It’s not surprising that it’s a favorite of Mazda Miata owners doing “spec” racing of their peppy, low-horsepower roadsters. The Porsche 911 looks, on paper, to be the perfect true race car to bring to Laguna Seca, while the 600-horsepower GT would seem to have too much unused oomph under the hood.
In 2016, the prototype classes and the GT classes were broken up, so that half of the prototype group ran with half of the GT group; this was required by the limited amount of pit space at the venue. Over the two hours of racing, the fans weren’t treated to the usual bonkers straight-line speed of the prototypes, but the racing in the GTLM class, with the Fords battling Ferraris, BMWs, Porsches, and Corvettes, was just about ideal.
The Monterey Peninsula is one of my favorite places on earth, a region of surpassing beauty, with vineyards everywhere, the crashing surf of Big Sur to the south, and the Pebble Beach golf course on the coast. The Laguna Seca race in this environment is a real looker. It’s genuinely easy to observe the racing on the track, because the drivers are compelled to do a lot of, well, driving. It isn’t necessary for a car to make a lot of pit stops, and with an abundance of turns, there are plenty of chances to work quick passes. The two-hour length of the race is also perfect from a fan’s perspective—a sprint rather than a marathon.
The race was excitingly covered on television by Fox, with plenty of cameras inside the cars and around the course. It
was like watching hot lap after hot lap, with none of the yawning distance between beginning and end that you confront with Daytona, Le Mans, or even the six-hour races I was familiar with from going to Watkins Glen in upstate New York, another stop on the IMSA sports-car schedule. Watching live racing outside the big oval setups (such as the Daytona 500 and Indy 500) can be like watching a golf tournament. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, so TV coverage makes for a more educational experience. You see everything important, the big passes and the accidents and mishaps, and you also get some insight in real time from the racing teams.
At the outset of the race, in the GTLM class, Corvette, BMW, and Porsche engaged in considerable dueling—and the Porsches looked sharp, as expected. But Ford and Ferrari were out in front, holding the top three spots. And just over an hour into the race, it started to become clear that Ganassi’s strategy was to pit as infrequently as possible, maxing out track time at the risk of running dry on gas and overdoing it with the tires. On a perfectly sunny and dry day, the GTs would wear slicks for the entire race and monitor the degradation of grip closely as the constant turning and drifting chewed away the rubber. One of the quirks of the track is that there’s sand everywhere off the paved surface, so the turns can get slippery, and tires can pick up grit if they slide off—grit that can take a few laps to get rid of.
With just over two minutes to go in the race, Richard Westbrook in the number 67 car was pushing the envelope on fuel consumption. With just a single pit stop in two hours, would he be able to get the GT home for the checked flag? He had to pull it off for Ford’s first win of the season, as Hand and Müller’s number 66 car was too far back to overcome the Ferrari of Scuderia Corsa, a privateer team trailing Westbrook in second.
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