Return to Glory

by Matthew DeBord

  The guys who would don the helmets for Ford-Ganassi were holding up best; the ups and downs of racing were familiar to them, and like most pro athletes they found value in evening out their highs and lows, fully cognizant that as sports-car drivers, they were running not just small marathons in individual races but a yearlong stretch that would determine whether they had done their jobs.

  On the executive front, Dave Pericak’s intense, hypercompetitive nature and devotion to the Blue Oval were taking a toll, but he was closing in on the big prize. When I saw him the day before the official start of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, he reminded me that, win or lose, Ford still had a full IMSA/WEC season to complete. But Ford hadn’t built a new GT to take an IMSA or WEC crown, and Le Mans was not just another race on the schedule. If sports-car trophies were all Ford wanted to bring back to Dearborn, the carmaker didn’t have to design and build an entirely new car and expose itself to the risks and embarrassments it had already faced.

  Raj Nair meandered over to join us. He was mellower and more cheerful than Pericak, but he was also hedging. Pericak was on a mission, but Nair was a pragmatist. He knew that Ford had implicitly over-promised with a new GT and the Le Mans return, and he was prepared to under-deliver. He had also found out the hard way that although the GT program had come together almost flawlessly in 2015, the 2016 racing season had really kicked the car and the team around. Nair was about the same size as Pericak—­neither was a big guy—but he was dressed in more monochromatic clothes, mostly dark blue. Pericak had on his blindingly white Ford Performance polo shirt. Nair was his usual funny self, down deep a Midwestern kid who loved cars and was living a dream at Ford, but also a tad evasive, reluctant to make eye contact when I brought up the abandoned Mustang plan. Pericak had the ability to stare right through you, so concentrated was his intensity. The first few times I experienced it, I found the stare unnerving. But I quickly realized that Pericak was a true-believer type who also happened to have a generous heart . . .

  Nair was more diplomat than soldier, an important foil to Pericak’s battlefield commander. It wasn’t easy to discern what Nair really thought. But there was no question that he was constantly assessing the odds, like a good engineer, and—like a good business leader—trying to figure out how to deal with numerous contingencies. He and Pericak made an interesting pair.

  If Pericak was determined, and Nair diffident, then Chip Ganassi was a weathered realist who wasn’t required to serve up any messages about Ford’s run at history. In person, Ganassi was taciturn and borderline gruff, but as soon as you thought he wasn’t even remotely interested in answering your questions, he would loosen up and engage in a little freestyle speculation on the GT’s chances, or the team’s performance prior to Le Mans, or the whole mad adventure that was motorsports.

  The curious thing about Ganassi was that although he had been a successful driver, he didn’t act much like a driver anymore. That peering-into-the-future driver stare didn’t appear in his eyes. He also didn’t make promises or call his shots. After I had been following the GT and its return to Le Mans for a year, it struck me that Ganassi was the critical player in the drama who least yearned to win the race. And that was reassuring. It meant that as the thousands of decisions piled up from January to June, he would be able to handle the pressure and manage the overload. Winning wasn’t an endgame for Ganassi—it was simply the result of proper planning and solid execution. The right drivers plus the right car plus the right strategy—plus a bit of luck—would bring the likelihood of a Le Mans victory into view. Then it was just a matter of pushing to that next level.

  Le Mans is not a commitment to be taken lightly. The race consumes an entire week, and it happens in the fairly remote countryside southwest of Paris. Literally right next to the track section and stands there’s an airfield, home to the famous Dunlop Bridge that drivers pass under as they begin a lap around the Circuit de la Sarthe. So if you have a private jet, a personal airplane, or access to a helicopter, you can zip right down from the City of Light. For kicks, I investigated a charter chopper, recalling that that’s how Henry Ford II commuted to Le Mans in 1966. The estimate was about five grand for the ride.

  It requires two trains to make the trip from Paris, so I decided to rent a car. My Renault Captur, a small diesel SUV, was both my chariot and my bedroom (for a night), and the car and I enjoyed our two-hour drive down and back, predominantly on the A11 motorway, which rolls past Versailles and Chartres and through the vast wheat fields of France’s breadbasket.

  Because I was just there to watch the race and talk with Ford’s executives and the Ganassi drivers and team members, I had it relatively easy. The competitors, however, while negotiating their way into and out of the facilities, trying to get used to the cars and the circuit, would be compelled to participate in the many festivities and local customs and traditions that have evolved over almost a century’s-worth of annual twenty-four-hour races.

  When I’m asked to describe Le Mans, I usually say it’s the Burning Man of motorsports. It has that flavor of a mass of people who are passionate, even obsessive, about something, gathering in an obscure corner of the world and staying awake all night, while various musical acts perform and everyone waits for an exciting, climactic event. But on a more mundane level, Le Mans is sort of like a mass camping trip with a car race in the middle. There’s even a small carnival, complete with a full-size Ferris wheel.

  Ford CEO Mark Fields was on his second trip to Le Mans when I caught up with him on Saturday. He was really into the whole crazy scene. “You won’t believe what I saw when we were driving in this morning,” he said, excitedly. “An Aston Martin—parked next to a pup tent! A pup tent! I took a picture.”

  That is Le Mans. I myself saw a $300,000 orange McLaren supercar parked next to a camper—and took a picture. There were Porsches everywhere, and next to those Porsches were tents. Ford and Ford owners had brought a massive contingent of the ­previous-generation, mid-2000s vintage GTs, along with lots and lots of Mustangs. On the drive back to Paris after the race, I was passed by a line of three Ferraris.

  All the tents and campers and mobile homes and temporary shelters, some large enough to house big-screen TVs and requiring portable generators, are actually sensible. Hotels in and around Le Mans are booked up well in advance, and there aren’t that many of them to begin with. And if you are staying off-site, traffic can be horrible getting into and out of the parking areas. Once I was in, I decided I was in for the long haul—forty-eight hours in total, from Friday to Sunday. It was plenty of fun. On the first night, a group of boisterous young Frenchmen who had parked their pickup truck behind my car were both drinking heavily and preparing to cook some food on a small charcoal grill. When I told them I was from the United States, their apparent leader asked me why I was driving a shit car like the Renault and then expressed his undying devotion to Cadillac. So strong was his devotion that he had the Cadillac shield tattooed in full color across his chest, with an American eagle perched on top; in the talons of one foot the eagle held Arnold Schwarzenegger’s machine gun from the movie Commando, and in the other, Sylvester Stallone’s serrated survival knife from Rambo.

  “I love America,” he said, and given what I had already seen, that sounded like an understatement.

  “America! Fuck, yeah!” his chorus of compatriots added. That sounded like an understatement, too. We discussed all things Yank for several minutes before I ducked inside my Renault for a few hours of sleep.

  Le Mans builds to its conclusion, and the building began several days before the Saturday start. It’s a bit like a prizefight. The teams have to subject their cars to a technical assessment by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO), called “scrutineering,” on the Sunday and Monday of the week before. If they pass, they can turn practice laps and go through eight hours of qualifying on Wednesday and Thursday. Qualifying involves at least two drivers from each three-man team completing at least o
ne timed lap in a twenty-minute run around the circuit, according to FIA/WEC regulations. The circuit is so long that numerous cars can be qualifying at the same time. If a car can’t complete its run—owing to mechanical failure—then it won’t qualify. The two best lap times for each driver are averaged to establish a “reference time,” and the fastest reference time wins the pole. Everyone else lines up sequentially behind that car. It all wraps up with a traditional drivers’ parade on Friday.

  Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of hard-core racing fans, day-trippers, and those exhibiting merely idle curiosity about a race that runs for an entire day drifted into and out of the venue. Apart from the sprawling campgrounds, the semipermanent areas around Le Mans provided abundant distractions. There’s an entire Le Mans museum chronicling the multiple decades of the race. There’s also what’s referred to as a village, which is really more of a food court—serving an immense amount of beer. The village is mixed with a shopping mall, complete with a Rolex shop in the middle and, in 2016, a jumbo screen broadcasting the European Cup soccer tournament. Scattered around are the food trucks, where you can get your crêpes filled with Nutella or spiked with Grand Marnier.

  The manufacturers erect immense hospitality facilities, exclusive two-level temples from which friends and family can get a good view of the cars as they exit the Mulsanne Straight and make their runs through the turn complexes and back to the stands and the pits and paddock. Some of the automakers—Audi, Porsche—that have won Le Mans and come back every year, competing in multiple classes, occupy huge, permanent structures festooned with their brand logos. There they host elaborate multicourse dinners before, during, and after the race, and loyalists can grab a drink, a snack, or a coffee at all hours when the twenty-four-hour clock is officially ticking down.

  For the media the amenities weren’t quite as lavish. The publishers of the Michelin Guide series, the renowned evaluator of the world’s finest restaurants, set up a lounge directly above pit row and kept the wine, beer, and Champagne flowing, along with restorative coffees. Deep into the night on Saturday and Sunday morning, servings of rillettes, the tasty pâté-like spread that’s the signature dish of the region, were set out. It was all quite civilized, a contrast with some of the staggering drunkenness on display outside the stands; at one point, I saw a gentlemen with a head wound, covered in dried mud from what I assumed was a fall, ordering yet another beer at one of the many bars in the village section, then wobbling off in search of joy and mayhem. Le Mans is a twenty-four-hour party, stretched out to forty-eight or even seventy-two, depending on your stamina, enthusiasm, and willingness to rough it in the French countryside.

  But the racing teams were worried that the actual race was going to be anything but festive. There was a good chance that lousy weather would make conditions difficult. In the weeks leading up to Le Mans, France had been hit with biblical rains. In Paris, the Seine had overflowed its banks, and the Louvre had been forced to close and move 7,000 artworks to higher floors. The forecast for the Le Mans weekend predicted a deluge sometime after the start on Saturday, followed by clearing and sunshine on Sunday. It often rains for Le Mans, but the timing of the wet is everything. Early rains can disadvantage the faster cars, preventing them from establishing an early lead. The field gets bunched up, as the heavier GT cars mix in with the prototypes, sometimes taking the most powerful and exotic Le Mans machines out of their front-running status. Rain at night means the track will take longer to dry out, preventing teams from getting off wet tires and back onto racing slicks, another disadvantage for the faster cars. And rain during practice and qualifying can both limit performance and curtail the drivers’ critical preparation of themselves for the circuit.

  When I asked Joey Hand on Friday about the weather forecast, he said the right thing—that Le Mans is Le Mans, and you have to work with what you’re given. But he also knew that the GTs were running better in dry conditions, and he admitted that the team would prefer it if most of the race were dry. I neglected to ask him whether the Ford simulator in North Carolina could realistically represent a soggy Circuit de la Sarthe.

  By Friday, however, Ford’s biggest challenge wasn’t Mother Nature. The problem was that the GTs had improved their lap times around the Circuit de la Sarthe by far more than the race organizers had expected.

  At the beginning of June, it had been the Corvettes that turned the fastest laps. A GTE Pro–class car can get around the circuit in less than four minutes, and both Corvettes entries did it in 3:55. The GTs weren’t as quick, but when official qualifying rolled around in the week before the race, the situation had been reversed. Now the GTs were the fastest cars in the field over the two-round qualifying period, while the Vettes were the slowest.

  The Corvettes weren’t too far off their practice-week pace of 3:55 (they would never add a full second, reaching 3:56). But both the GTs and the new Ferrari 488 blitzed the circuit at pace no slower than 3:52—and one car, the number 68 GT, nearly broke 3:51.

  In sports-car racing, the governing authorities don’t want one type of car design or engine configuration to run away with a race. They also don’t want the gaps between classes to get too small or too great. So during qualifying, the ACO kept track of who was fast, who was slower, and why. It did this during practice, and it also took into account previous performance in races. Then the overseers of competitive fairness determined whether “balance of performance,” or BOP, adjustments would be required of the teams, based on a formula that is developed by analysis of the data.

  BOP adjustments had already been ordered for the Corvettes, after testing a week before Le Mans qualifying had revealed what the ACO decided was excessive speed. But were the adjustments too much? In qualifying, the Vettes were four and a half seconds slower around the circuit than the quicker Ford GTs.

  Most of the GTE Pro field fell in for BOP tweaks before Saturday, and for most of Friday afternoon, a controversy bubbled up, threatening to tarnish Ford’s assault on history. All four GTs were very fast in qualifying, with the number 68 car taking the pole position. The Ferraris were also quick, but the Corvettes and Aston Martins were unexpectedly slow. The Porsches had been hit with the same BOP adjustments as Corvette during testing.

  This meant that the ACO was going to compel Ford and Ferrari to make changes, while Corvette, Porsche, and Aston Martin would be allowed to set their cars up for more speed. The core problem was the variety of machines running in GTE Pro. Ford and Ferrari had low-slung supercars, the Fords using the 600-­horsepower EcoBoost twin-turbo V-6 engine and the Prancing Stallion teams saddling up the new 606-horsepower twin-turbo V-8.

  Aston Martin had a big 480-horsepower V-8 under the hood, up front. Corvette had a potent V-8, also up front. Porsche had its famous Boxster six-cylinder power plant, but it was located over the rear-drive wheels. Porsche’s aerodynamic design, when you got right down to it, dated to the 1960s, when the rear-engine Porsche 911 had first appeared. It was among the most durable and effective sports-car designs ever, but both Ford and Ferrari were using state-of-the-art, twenty-first-century aerodynamics, with the bodywork on the GT and the 488 adding to the downforce. Corvette’s design for the C7.R was relatively new, and while the Aston’s styling was longer in the tooth, it was contemporary.

  The grumbling over the BOP situation reached its loudest pitch toward nightfall on Friday, June 17. The ACO would have to decide by the end of the day whether to assess penalties. In the media center, there were mutterings that Ford had played chicken with the racing authorities and up until Friday had gotten away with it. The accusations cut both ways. There were rumors that the ACO wanted to pit Ford against Ferrari, to put a sharp point on the revival of the 1966 contest. But Ford’s Raj Nair suggested that some competitors—not Ferrari—had held back in qualifying. Dave Pericak told reporters at Le Mans that the suddenly slow Vettes were suspicious.

  There wasn’t anything on trial here besides good sportsmanship. I
t wasn’t against the rules to run slower prerace laps, but it wasn’t in the spirit of the competition. Teams were supposed to show what they had, turning laps as close as possible to what they would generate at race time.

  After discussions, the ACO instructed Ford to reduce the turbo boost that its engines were producing. Both Ford and Ferrari were also ordered to add weight to their cars—twenty-two and thirty-three pounds, respectively. Corvette, Porsche, and Aston were allowed to adjust a technology called a restrictor plate to permit their uncompressed-air-breathing, non-turbo motors to inhale more oxygen. And Ferrari and Corvette were given a tiny bump in the amount of fuel they would be permitted to use (at Le Mans, fuel strategy is essential, because teams don’t have an unlimited quantity). Obviously, with the ACO and the teams meeting to go over the BOP issues on Friday night, it would be impossible to figure out before the race began whether the field had been aligned. The next time the GTE Pro cars took to the circuit, they’d be warming up to race for real. Porsche’s head of motorsports, Frank-Steffen Walliser, was profoundly upset and complained emotively about the BOP. Some reporters said he was practically in tears.

  But that wasn’t the end of it, because anytime there’s a BOP controversy, there’s talk of gamesmanship. Ford was swiftly accused of sandbagging—initially holding back on lap times, then letting it rip when it came to qualifying. With that strategy, there would be no BOP issues until it was too late to deny the quick GTs the pole, as well as another three good starting spots on the grid.

  This didn’t make much sense to me, given that such a move would have brought the at-times unpleasant internal politics of motorsports into the picture and tarnished Ford’s run for glory. However, I did wonder whether in the two European races leading up to Le Mans, the GTs had been held back, not showing their true potential until Le Mans loomed. I knew, after all, that on the fast Daytona track, when the GTs were healthy, they turned in blistering lap times. It also stood to reason that the lightweight GTs, making 100 more units of horsepower than the Vettes, should be smoking fast, particularly on the Mulsanne.