Return to Glory

by Matthew DeBord

  Besides, it appeared that everyone was fooling around a bit. Ford couldn’t understand why Corvette was so slow and said as much. The Ferraris, which had been setting the track on fire in Europe up to Le Mans and were considered by Ford’s drivers to be very quick, were abruptly slower than the GTs. For its part, Porsche appeared to be making the best of a difficult situation while hoping for enough rain to slow everybody else down.

  Balance of performance itself was coming under criticism. The leveling-of-fields approach is controversial. It makes for technically tighter racing, but it also bunches up fields and creates the potential for crashes. Then there was the obvious question of why the ACO would allow so many different kinds of cars and engines into GTE Pro—and then hold back the faster cars. A more staggered race would be the outcome, presumably with the Fords and Ferraris out in front, followed by Corvettes and Porsches, which switch off positions, depending on whether they are negotiating the Mulsanne or the curves that follow.

  In the end, the teams took it all in stride, and the controversy didn’t overshadow the race. We’d later learn that the BOP changes were probably justified—and hadn’t hurt anyone’s chances (although I certainly heard complaints, even months after the race was over). But it all made for a tense sideshow as Friday drew to a close.

  Qualifying had gone well for Ford, the BOP controversy notwithstanding. The number 68 car took the pole for GTE Pro, after Dirk Müller turned in a 3:51 lap on Wednesday night. Lousy weather on Thursday kept anyone from besting Müller’s time. The other three GTs, numbers 69, 67, and 66, were close behind, in the second, fourth, and fifth positions, respectively.

  The number 68 GT’s qualifying run had been hairy until the tail end, when Müller had only fifteen minutes in which to manage an impressive lap; his fellow drivers, Joey Hand and Sébastien Bourdais, had been challenged by traffic issues, as the German driver later recounted.

  “The car felt really good,” Müller said, although he admitted that he, too, was struggling with traffic. But then his team manager offered words of encouragement—on the radio—and Müller buckled down. “It was a cool lap.”

  Throughout Friday there was palpable tension in the Ford camp that had nothing to do with BOP. Adjacent to the very cozy paddock at Le Mans, Ford had a lounge and hospitality area for drivers, executives, race-team members, and guests, including members of the media. It was two stories of Ford blue, with catered food and a coffee bar, plus plenty of monitors on which to watch the race and keep track of the GTs’ positions. A short walk away, adjacent to the track, Ford had erected an altogether more ostentatious hospitality structure, also two stories, with an outdoor viewing balcony, several bars, and again plenty of monitors. It was a substantial step up from Daytona, where Ford hospitality had been just a row of tents, and it showed how committed the automaker was to its Le Mans comeback.

  Ganassi, the drivers, and both Pericak and Nair were hanging around, attending to a run of press events that the ACO had scheduled. You could tell that they were all trying to relax—trying to force themselves to relax. For the drivers, training had kicked in. They knew how to chill. For Ganassi, experience was key. He knew how to put on a game face before a big race. The Ford brass also tried to keep the mood low-key. Winning wasn’t a demand in this environment.

  But the weight of the moment was heavy. The sensible effort that everyone was making to remain calm was exerting its own kind of strange force. I could feel it. It wasn’t a sense of pressure. It was more a sense of dawning realization: We could actually do this. We could win Le Mans fifty years after Ford’s greatest racing triumph ever.

  Joey Hand called it “anxiousness”—not nervousness. Everyone just wanted to get out and start racing; they all wanted to begin to do what they came to do.

  The glitches with the cars had been addressed. The GTs had set a blistering pace. The drivers that made up the individual teams for each of the four cars now knew one another well and had forged bonds of camaraderie in the cockpit. The crews were seasoned, after a total of six races on two continents. By Friday morning, you also knew that Ganassi had a game plan, and that he could quit sweating his strategy.

  The weather was good. A misty dawn was followed by a beautiful morning: cool but sunny, with low gray-white clouds scattered through a thin blue sky. Conditions were mostly dry, although there was a lot of mud and standing water in the parking areas and campgrounds. Rain was expected toward nightfall, but the morning and early afternoon on Saturday would be dry. A perfect start was in the cards. By nine a.m., the stands were already beginning to fill in with fans jockeying for spots. Outside the stands, a thousand camp chairs were being unfolded and positioned on knolls and hillocks and close to fences. The revelers of the previous night shuffled around in their small backpacking tents and started to prepare for another full day and night of pleasure. The guy with the Cadillac tattoo and his mates gathered up their gear and changed into fresh clothes.

  The eighty-fourth installment of the 24 Hours of Le Mans would commence by mid-afternoon. Casual fans were completely psyched. They’d picked up on the GT story and were eagerly anticipating Le Mans, but some were still coming to grips with how patchy the first Ford IMSA/WEC racing season had been. Motorsport junkies were a bit more jaded. The pole was a good sign. But it was also symbolic.

  Chip Ganassi was the least impressed of all. “Am I happy to have the pole?” he asked, rhetorically. “Sure, you’re happy to have the pole.”

  It was vintage Ganassi. We were sitting across from each other in the Ford paddock unit, drinking coffee. The race would start in just over twenty-four hours. But he wasn’t going to go out on any limbs.

  “But in terms of competitiveness, the pole doesn’t mean anything,” he added, with a slight grin. “It’s great, it’s a nice PR thing. It looks great as a headline going into the race.”

  But Ganassi was clearly pleased to have a quartet of cars to work with. “If you have one car, you have one strategy. I don’t know what your chances are of doing well with one car, but with four cars, they’re at least four times better.”

  What he meant was that with one car, a team can tackle the race from only a single angle. Maybe they run fast; maybe they hang back. To avoid wrecking the car, they hold off on making any big moves until the sun rises and the race has only a few hours left. Regardless of what they choose, they come up with a plan and are bound by it.

  Ganassi had a lot more options. He could run two GTs hard and hold two back, or he could unleash them all. He could send one out fast and make the field chase it, trying to break down a few competitors at the expense of one of his four cars. Or he could use two cars to do that and break down more competitors. He could box in another car and make its hapless driver overextend himself trying to get out. The list of possibilities went on and on. With four cars, Ganassi had more choices than any other team captain in the GTE Pro class.

  The grid wasn’t formed until just before race time, and the start was vastly different from that of 1966. For one thing, a Ford family member didn’t wave the French flag to send the drivers off, as Henry II had in 1966. A sleekly attired Brad Pitt, in smoky sunglasses and a slick, artful haircut, did. There also wasn’t a “Le Mans start.” In 1966, the drivers had to run to their cars at the start, firing them up and rocketing off from pit lane without even strapping in first. This ended in 1969. In 2016, the field was led around by a safety car, until the green flag dropped and true racing could be unleashed.

  But before all that, there were more rituals. Two hours before race time, the cars moved into position, pushed by their crews, with the prototypes in the lead. It was an impressive sight, the colorful liveries polished to a high gloss, a wild tapestry of colors spread out beneath the spectators in the stands: in GTE Pro, the Fords were in the all-American red-white-and-blue, while the Ferraris, of course, were rosso corsa, racing red, and the Corvettes were a lurid yellow. Huge sponsor logos occupied the ba
ckground, those of well-known global icons like Dunlop, Porsche, and Rolex alongside obscure French brands unknown to the international audience watching the race on TV and the Internet.

  Bibendum, known as “Bib”—the Michelin Man, in English—bobbed along the grid. He was a very French mascot, adorable, and not nearly as tall as I had expected.

  Then came the national anthems of the nations that were participating, highlighted by Brits singing along enthusiastically to “God Save the Queen.” When the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played, I scanned the stands for Americans doing the American thing, hats off and a hand on the heart, but I didn’t spot any. Many, of course, were down at the Ford hospitality tent, out of my view.

  An hour before race time, flag bearers—mostly young women in snug cream dresses, pink scarves, and high black stiletto heels—­stationed themselves around the starting grid. So French. I wondered how a team feels about its chances if it has a man, not a woman, holding its national flag.

  Ominously, with the final hour before the start ticking down, the skies darkened and storm clouds moved in, ahead of schedule. The rain started to fall just as the “Marseillaise” was struck up. The women in the white dresses were attended to by a squadron of umbrella wranglers. A French military helicopter buzzed the stadium at 2:15.

  The cars were fired up, but already there was trouble for Ford. The number 67 GT was rolled off the grid and back into the garage. Pericak told me that it was his only moment of real terror. Was it an isolated problem, or were all four cars beset by the same fault? Yet again, it was a gearbox issue, but the other three cars weren’t affected. Ford-Ganassi’s strength-in-numbers strategy was already challenged—and an official lap had yet to be turned.

  During warm-up laps, the cars started to throw up modest rooster tails of spray. They were all running slicks, but as the rain intensified, each slipped back into its starting-grid spot and the crews came out with rain tires on rolling racks and speed wrenches hooked up to air compressors on carts.

  The number 67 GT was still in the garage. The crews calmly made the change from slicks to rain tires, but the grid was chaotic, a blur of activity. The sixty cars tied the record for the size of the field. Officials, photographers, and the now-damp flag bearers were mixed in with helmeted pit-crew members in fireproof racing suits. The Patrouille de France, the precision team of the French air force, ripped across the sullen sky, the eight jets in a tight V formation, trailing plumes in the blue, red, and white of the French tricolor, only to have them rapidly blurred by the rain.

  At three o’clock precisely, the din of five dozen high-­performance machines being brought to roaring life at once cut through what had become a downpour. Millions of dollars of primo racing technology was getting drenched. The headlights came on, white for the prototypes, yellow for the GT cars. Windshield wipers were activated.

  “It rattles your teeth to be on the grid,” Brad Pitt said afterward, with the reverence that Le Mans often and unexpectedly brings out.

  The true teeth rattling had to wait for a while, however. The start was awkward and slow, and it still lacked the number 67 Ford GT. The safety car led a sluggish, soggy procession around the Circuit de la Sarthe, with laps being counted off at a pace drastically below what kicked in once the race officials determined that the course was safe enough for flat-out racing. These machines weren’t designed to go thirty miles per hour.

  It took nearly an hour for the officials to make their determination. Race marshals were literally on the circuit with brooms sweeping away the puddles in the curves and corners as the field turned agonizingly poky laps behind the Audi safety car. The number 67 GT, gearbox repaired, left the garage at last, but it was already two laps down. When the safety car finally peeled off, the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans had become the 23 Hours of Le Mans.

  Chapter 13

  We’re Going to Win

  from the Lead

  The immediate battle among the prototypes consumed everyone’s early attention. Prototypes can turn laps thirty seconds faster than the GT cars, so it wasn’t long before they pulled away and some gaps opened up. Dirk Müller made good on the pole position and led the GTE Pro class in the number 68 Ford GT. His first fast lap in the wet was 4:23, much slower than in the qualifying run. Olivier Pla and Richard Westbrook trailed in the numbers 66 and 69 cars. The Fords were mixed in with the Ferraris and Porsches. The number 67 car was out of it, but with a mountain of time for the field to climb before Sunday afternoon, anything was possible.

  By 5:30, a pattern had emerged that defined the race for the GTE Pro class. It was 1966 all over again, because for one Ferrari driver, it was personal. The number 82 Ferrari 488, a privateer car supported by Houston-based Risi Competizione, was giving Richard Westbrook in the leading number 69 Ford GT all he could handle. At the wheel for Risi was Giancarlo Fisichella. No slouch on the Circuit de la Sarthe, Fisichella had two previous wins in this class, in 2012 and 2014, for the AF Corse team, which was also running Ferrari 488s this year. But the forty-three-year-old Italian was also a Formula One veteran, so he was one of motorsport’s elites. For him, there was pride on the line.

  And at 5:30, the weather was finally cooperating. The afternoon sun was out, the temperature had gone up, and it had become a lovely, breezy day for racing. The track was drying out, and the tires were heating up. The lap times were going down, and in GTE Pro, it was getting tight. It was Ford versus Ferrari, with the Corvettes and Porsches out of the lead action. The Porsches had been OK in the rain, but when the roads dried out, they simply couldn’t find any speed, and the Corvettes’ velocity hadn’t shown up yet, despite the BOP tweaks to their restrictor plates.

  With the summer solstice just a few days away, it was hours until nightfall, so the drivers got in some hard racing before the teams settled in to battle the darkness. And they raced hard: the Risi Competizione and AF Corse Ferraris took it to the GTs, moving into second and third positions, keeping the number 69 car fighting to hold its lead, while relegating the number 68 car to fourth.

  But that lineup didn’t last. The AF Corse Ferrari had to pit, with a mechanical problem, and the number 82 Risi 488 surged into the lead. Le Mans was a dogfight between the Blue Oval and the Prancing Stallion—and at this relatively early juncture, before the sun had set, it was clear that both carmakers had built machines with enough speed to keep matters lively. No lead would be safe for long.

  It wasn’t lost on anyone that the extremely impressive Ford Performance–Chip Ganassi Racing factory team with four cars was locked in a high-velocity duel with a pair of privateer teams wearing Ferrari red. The AF Corse team had been a Le Mans stalwart for years; Amato Ferrari (of no relationship to the car family) had launched AF in the mid-1990s, after retiring from a moderately successful racing career. Risi Competizione was the brainchild of Giuseppe Risi, who started his team about the same time as AF Corse took off and has been connected with Ferrari ever since. The privateer teams don’t have the same level of funding as the factory teams, but because Ferrari hasn’t run a factory effort at Le Mans in decades, the privateers are the company’s proxy. For Risi, both Fisichella and his fellow driver Toni Vilander hold the top driver classification, Platinum, and the team itself is well financed.

  Nevertheless, it seemed as if a couple of Italian pirates were trying to spoil the party of America’s second-largest automaker, as it fought to revisit what has gone down in history as the greatest humiliation Ferrari had ever experienced on a racetrack. At Ferrari, less successful road cars could be forgotten. But the loss at Le Mans in 1966 has never gone away. At Ferrari, existence begins and ends with racing. You may dream your entire life of owning a Ferrari, and you may become successful enough to buy one. But only a select few ascend the pantheon of speed that compelled Enzo Ferrari to build and sell cars to the public in the first place. Those people are the real drivers.

  Even though the Ferrari factory abandoned Le Mans in the 1960s,
the company’s sports cars were always good enough on the track to continue with endurance racing, through the privateer teams. Giuseppe Risi was outspoken on this topic—he felt that it was the private teams that sustained sports-car racing when the big car companies shifted their focus. Without him and Amato Ferrari, there might have been no opportunity for Ford to stage its Le Mans comeback in 2016. Without them, Le Mans might have faded away.

  And as the opening stage of the 2016 race drew to a close, ­Giuseppe Risi’s number 82 Ferrari 488 was leading Le Mans. But the Ford teams weren’t going to just sit back and take it.

  “Our strategy was to win from the lead,” Joey Hand told me later.

  And why not? If you have four of the fastest cars, why fool around with late passes? Le Mans is an endurance race, and perhaps the biggest part of enduring its twenty-four hours, in the modern incarnation of the event, is to deliver monumental speed for a day and a night and another day. Ford’s message was blunt: outrun us if you can. And only the Ferraris appeared capable of doing that.

  There were two of them taking it to Ford. But even with a car off the lead lap, Ford still had a one-car advantage. If one of the Ferraris slipped back, it would be like a fox in the midst of a wolf pack, running for its life. So that was what it was all about—and what it would all be about, as one Ferrari and three Fords hurtled toward dusk.

  Over the early evening, the Risi Ferrari opened up a lead, but Hand, in the number 68 GT, ran it down and took the lead. Then, at about 7:40 p.m., Ryan Briscoe’s number 69 GT slipped past the number 82 Ferrari on the Mulsanne to take second place. Hand was still running first. So it was now Ford, Ford, Ferrari, one, two, three. The number 66 Ford was in fourth, while the number 67 car lagged after a return to the pits several hours back for additional repairs. The dry racing was clearly helping the quick cars. The Corvettes were struggling, and Porsche had fallen far back and lost a car to the garage. Aston Martin was intermittently in the mix. But this was a race for turbocharged supercars making 600 horsepower. The big V-8s were a sideshow.