Return to Glory

by Matthew DeBord

  When Westbrook finally made it across the line, at the North American team’s last outing before Le Mans, a page was decisively turned for Ford Chip Ganassi Racing. Both GTs had run immaculately, with no mechanical issues or snafus in the pits. The GTs had qualified in the two and three slots, right behind the Scuderia Corsa 488, which had grabbed the pole. And the EcoBoost V-6 was revealed to be a secret weapon of sorts. Under the hood of a GTLM machine, it could run hard for two hours in the California sun with only a brief break for fuel. This sent a powerful pre–Le Mans signal. In France, you win Le Mans by staying out of the garage and out of the pits.

  The entire Ford team was practically giddy. Henry Ford III (briefly misidentified in an on-screen credit by Fox as Ford’s “President and CEO,” rather than the Performance division’s marketing head), Westbrook, and codriver Ryan Briscoe struck a thumbs-up pose for photographers with the Michelin Man mascot (the GTs were running in Michelin racing tires).

  Ganassi’s engineers were also ready to reveal how they’d come up with their cunning, race-winning strategy. Brad Goldberg told Racer.com that the guys working to get the number 67 car ready in the days before the race had actually practiced getting in as many laps as possible without a fuel stop. Racer.com also got a nice scoop on where the whole fuel-saving strategy had originated—at Daytona, remarkably. With the number 67 car knocked out of that race, Briscoe could use his IndyCar, open-wheel racing chops, where fuel strategy is paramount, to give Westbrook (“Westy” to his fellow drivers) a lesson in how to stay off the gas without losing pace or position.

  Hilariously, Westbrook got so good at this that by the time the opportunity arose to use his new skills, he executed too well. Ganassi’s engineers revealed that he had had only enough left in the tank after the race to manage a post-race cool-down lap.

  After Laguna Seca, the scene shifted from the baked-brown hills of California to the lush foliage of the Ardennes forest in Belgium, site of the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. Silverstone had given the Ford team confidence, but the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps was a proper preparation for Ford Chip Ganassi Racing’s European squad, a test in which the two European GTs would rack up well over 600 miles on the roughly four-and-a-half-mile Spa-Francorchamps circuit before the finish.

  It was going to be a tough race by any estimation, on a track that a lot of pros call their favorite. Spa has it all: dramatic elevation changes, huge sweeping turns, tight hairpins, and a long strip of asphalt known as the Kemmel Straight. The circuit is physically spectacular, but as with the Nürburgring in Germany, its history is one of death, mayhem, and carnage. The circuit has been tamed since its grim heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, but even with changes that brought Formula One back in 2007, Spa is still deeply respected by drivers. The most harrowing section is the downhill-then-uphill corner called Eau Rouge (“red water,” so named because it crosses a stream that has high iron content), perhaps the most admired piece of twisted asphalt in the entirety of motorsport. “If you take away Eau Rouge, you take away the reason why I do this,” remarked the late, legendary Ayrton Senna, three-time Formula One champion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

  Eau Rouge has been a controversial section of the circuit for decades, a place where the old attitude of cheating death in very fast machines for fame and glory still holds authentic currency. The corner inspires fear, awe, and desire in equal measure because it has to be taken at high speed to prepare for the long run down the Kemmel. The downhill sweep intensifies acceleration, while the uphill sweep ends blind, so it’s difficult to aim for an exit point. The entire sequence is both disorienting and thrilling.

  Eau Rouge is where the most harrowing, bad thing yet befell a Ford GT, one that made the gearbox gremlins of Daytona and the freak fire in Long Beach seem like trifling distractions.

  Stefan Mücke was at the wheel of the number 66 car, fresh off an engine repair in the pits, when he rounded Spa’s first, ultra-tight corner, La Source, and started his run to Eau Rouge and its uphill successor, Raidillon. Mücke was in good form, energized by a duel with his own teammate, the British driver Harry Tincknell in the number 67 car (yes, drivers on the same team will often compete with one another). With about an hour to go, Marino Franchitti had taken over the controls in the 67 GT and was on the lead lap, fighting for a podium spot. Mücke had ground to make up, and he was going to start strong coming out of Eau Rouge.

  But the track had other ideas. Afterward, Ford Performance and Ganassi Racing determined that debris on the racecourse had cut Mücke’s tire. The result was that the 67 GT spun completely around, screeching, amid plumes of white tire smoke, until first the rear and then the side and front struck a tire wall and were totally shredded. Hanks, hunks, and slabs of the GT’s exquisite bodywork were strewn across the track, while a miraculously uninjured Mücke sat inside what was left of his car, and several prototypes dodged the wreckage.

  A tense few seconds passed before the crew back in the pits discovered that his radio still worked. “I’m OK,” he said. The word was passed to Franchitti, who breathed a sigh of relief, and the safety car was brought out to escort the bunched-up field around the carnage, as crews swept up the remains of the number 66 GT.

  Mücke was only bruised and required just a short medical evaluation. The GT had done what a race car is designed to do in a crash—intentionally shatter to absorb the force of the impact and prevent anything deadly from getting to the driver. Nevertheless, the accident was by far the most unnerving and spectacular of the entire sports-car season so far. It instantly reminded everyone not just of Spa’s reputation, but that in Ford’s campaign to make history, lives were on the line. Far fewer drivers are maimed or killed than in decades past, but even in the twenty-first century, motor racing remains dangerous, and drivers still die at the wheel. And Spa-Francorchamps has been particularly gory. The most infamous incident occurred in 1966, when racing legend—and early advocate for better motorsport safety—Jackie Stewart crashed during a Formula One race and ended up in a farm structure off the course, unable to escape his mangled car while being sprayed with fuel.

  The race at Laguna Seca had allowed Ford to leave the United States and head for Le Mans on a high note, exactly as the team had hoped. And although a second-place finish in only the European team’s second outing, on a beast of a track, was a fantastic presaging of potential glory on the Circuit de la Sarthe, Mücke’s crash meant that one of the four GTs destined for action in southwestern France would have to be put back together, if Ford still wanted to take on the legacy of 1966 full force. Strength through speed was Ford-Ganassi’s guiding principle, but strength in numbers was a close second.

  When I caught up with Dave Pericak after Laguna Seca and Spa, with just over a month to go before Le Mans, he was a changed man from when I had last spoken with him, after the Daytona meltdown. Then, he had almost pledged his considerable reputation on reversing what had gone down in Florida, determined to give the drivers a reliable race car.

  “How am I feeling?” he said. “I’ve finally got some validation that the roller-coaster ride is all worth it. The plan is working, and the team is resilient.”

  The Laguna Seca win and the second at Spa had obviously given him a second wind, just in time for the big show at Le Mans.

  “We need one last push of energy,” he said, before conceding that the season was taking a toll. “Our people are tired, man.”

  Pericak had also gotten plenty of exposure to all the other teams that would be gunning for Ford in the Circuit de la Sarthe. “You can’t underestimate anyone,” he said. “The competition is the best it’s ever been. But now we understand everybody’s strengths and weaknesses.”

  Then he got back to hammering home the message: “We want everybody in our rearview.”

  The crash at Spa had freaked Pericak out, but he rapidly noted that it had nothing to do with the GT’s mechanicals and everything to do with a piece of deb
ris on the track that had killed a tire on one of the wildest turns in racing. “Everybody was concerned,” he said. “But once we assessed that Stefan wasn’t hurt, we could dig into the data. We were pretty confident that the car was OK, and Michelin looked at everything after the crash.”

  Pericak’s legendary intensity had finally found a more even register, part cheerleader, part engineer, and part student of history.

  “We’re fortunate to be going back to Le Mans with four cars,” he said. But he also knew that for Ford the stakes were only getting higher, with both a win and a solid podium finish on either side of the Atlantic.

  “The entire senior leadership will be there,” he said. He wasn’t kidding, either. Mark Fields, Bill Ford, and Henry Ford III were all going to attend. And Henry III’s father, Edsel II, was making his first return trip to Le Mans since he had accompanied his own father, Henry II, in 1966.

  I didn’t get the sense that Pericak was overly worried or overconfident in this final chat before the team would head for France. Nor did I detect any sense of intimidation. Later, at Ford’s paddock hospitality center at the track in France, I would see a guy who was beginning to think that a dream might become reality. He was allowing himself to relax into the possibility of winning, and he was doing this because the technical aspects of the Le Mans campaign had fallen into place. His internal checklist, which he was constantly running and rerunning in his head, was delivering the calm required for him to grin rather than grimace.

  Chip Ganassi would be a slightly different story, knowing as he did that he’d never undertaken a Le Mans effort before. It was a remarkable hole in his résumé as a team owner—the second most successful in history, after the older Roger Penske—although he had run the race, in 1987, in a car that failed to finish. Prior to the 2016 season, Ganassi had won virtually everything else with his team, including the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500. This obviously didn’t make him cocky. Although he had the best setup an owner could ask for going into Le Mans, as a former pro driver, Ganassi understood that while past results can be a useful guide, a twenty-four-hour race was purpose-built to undermine happy endings.

  But Pericak had undergone a modest transformation. A devoted Ford man who had become a minor celebrity thanks to his turn in the Mustang documentary A Faster Horse, he had stretched into a new role and become the intensely focused face of Ford’s return to endurance racing glory.

  There was no doubt about it: Pericak was looking forward to having the Ford brass turn out in force at Le Mans. He was running his own race and making his own bid for history. And although he had been on a rocky ride, by his own admission, the plan that he and his team had created with Ganassi and Multimatic only about 400 days earlier was about to peak.

  Destiny was now just over the horizon. The inexorable march of time would carry the GTs to a reckoning. On June 18, the sun would rise over a quiet farming town in southwestern France, where, at the end of a motorway bordered on both sides by waving oceans of wheat destined for the nation’s baguettes, the toughest race in the world would happen. The starting grid would form on Saturday, just before three o’clock in the afternoon; the honorary starter would send them off, and by three o’clock Sunday, the world would know whether 2016 would echo 1966. Fifty years later, the scene was the same, more or less. The names had changed, and so had some of the technology, but not enough to alter the simple fact that a car race consists of cars going fast.

  Well, most of the names had changed. At least two were the same, separated by half a century and several generations: Ferrari and Ford.

  Chapter 12

  You Want to Win

  the Big Ones

  In 1966, the only way to prepare for Le Mans was to have run it in the past or to arrive the week before to get in some practice laps, if you had never sampled the Circuit de la Sarthe in the flesh. This gave Le Mans a mysterious and somewhat unknowable ­quality—for almost the entire year, the course gave itself back to the citizens of France, who would drive at normal velocity down the Mulsanne Straight and never be forced to negotiate the Porsche Curves. Consider that: the racecourse with the fastest average speed in the world is, for much of the year, a cluster of downright boring, sleepy thoroughfares. You might see a truck. You might see a tractor. You might see somebody with a ­Ferrari—on vacation.

  Numerous members of the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing team had Le Mans experience, but they wanted to tune up before the main event in June. This is where twenty-first-century technology gave them a leg up on the 1966 drivers. In 1966, Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon and their teammates had a GT40 to turn laps in; in 2016, Joey Hand and Ryan Briscoe had a full-on simulation of their Le Mans–bound GT car at Ford’s Performance Technical Center in North Carolina. What a difference five decades make.

  The simulator was first activated in 2014, about two years before the 2016 Le Mans, and it’s used by Ford NASCAR drivers as well as the sports-car racing teams. Located in a 33,000-square-foot facility devoted exclusively to racing training and preparation, the simulator consists of a driver’s compartment that’s actuated by a computer-controlled system that can generate exceptionally realistic racing conditions. From the cockpit, the driver looks out at a vast curving screen whose images are delivered by five projectors.

  “It’s an immersive experience,” Hand said, in a Ford Performance video released before Le Mans. “It’s as real as you can get. You’re trying to put the lap down. You’re huffing and puffing. You’re sweating.”

  Beyond giving the drivers a chance to experiment with the unique performance characteristics of their car on the tracks they’ll actually be competing on, one of the key advantages of the simulator is its capacity to allow the team to play around with different vehicle setups and to discern which ones blend best with the skill of the driver, the technology of the car, and the peculiarities of a given track.

  Raj Nair loved it. “It will help us push handling to the next level, so that our cars can be fast right off the trailer,” he said. He also liked that when the real-life cars couldn’t turn laps, the simulator could be used to make additional setup changes between practice sessions and race day. It was the ultimate preparation machine.

  The Ford-Ganassi drivers needed all the preparation they could get, because even though some had Le Mans experience, the Circuit de la Sarthe is a racing anomaly, requiring a different competitive metabolism from what the Ford team had brought to other events. The truly tricky thing is that it’s possible to lapse into and out of full concentration at Le Mans, thanks to the Mulsanne. This gives the drivers a way to gather themselves on every lap, to simply put the hammer down and let the car fly. But it also means that they have to snap back into aggressive driving mode for the remainder of the lap.

  The Circuit de la Sarthe is essentially composed of three sections. The long Mulsanne Straight is in the middle. Preceding it is the escape from the grandstand and pits area and the sharp right-hand Tertre Rouge corner leading to the straightaway. Then, the slam-on-the-brakes hairpin at the end of the Mulsanne sets up a sequence of turns—Indianapolis, Arnage, the Porsche Curves, and the Ford Chicanes—before the cars reenter the stands complex and start all over again. There isn’t much in the way of elevation change, so a great Le Mans lap boils down to setting a pace on the Mulsanne, then finding a good line through the curves, with a car that has an aerodynamic package that’s set up for straight-line speed, not to deliver strong downforce in turning.

  In the twenty-four hours, the drivers will navigate the circuit well over 300 times, racking up nearly 3,000 miles in the process—a trip from Paris to Istanbul and back.

  But Le Mans isn’t just twenty-four hours of turn, let ’er rip, turn-turn-turn, repeat. There are sixty other cars on the circuit. Drivers in the GTE Pro class have to contend not only with the prototype-class field made up of much faster cars, but also with GTE Am machines that are slower. Traffic issues, especially during the early stages of the
race, should not be underestimated.

  For all the cars in the GTE Pro class, there will also be a potentially endless series of tweaks and adjustments once the race is under way. Practice and qualifying can give a team a good sense of what’s working and what isn’t. Have we adjusted the angle of the rear wing correctly to provide enough downforce to keep the car solid in the corners but not make it slow on the straights? Are we comfortable with the tire compounds we want to use? Of course, the race itself always throws up new challenges and forces the team to ask itself dozens of unanticipated questions.

  “The important thing is to have a plan,” Chip Ganassi told me on the day before the race. “The other thing to do is to be able to change your plan.”

  Rain means tire changes, but dry doesn’t mean that only one type of tire will be used; a team might put different tire compounds on to enhance speed or handling. The aerodynamics may have to be adjusted. A driver may have to push hard if he falls off the pace, affecting the fuel strategy. Electronic glitches can show up. And that’s just the routine stuff. All bets are off if the car is damaged in a minor mishap, as Ford learned at Daytona, when a broken rear diffuser ended up shredding a tire before anyone noticed that it was a problem.

  Of all the teams converging on Le Mans in June, Ford’s had the least preparation for this intricate, exhausting undertaking. The first prototype GT race car had been rolled out only thirteen months earlier. There had been precious few testing opportunities on the track—known as “shakedowns”—prior to Daytona, so Ganassi and his drivers were still learning the car. Only Ferrari was in a similar boat. Corvette, Porsche, and Aston Martin were all running proven cars. And over the course of four races in the United States and now two in Europe, the competition in the GT classes had been fierce. It had been the best season for sports-car racing in years, a thriller for the fans but commensurately nerve-racking for the drivers and teams.