Return to Glory

by Matthew DeBord

  A magical moment occurred at eight o’clock. Three Ford GTs were once again running one-two-three at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. But there were nineteen hours of racing to go, as the sun began very slowly setting over the usually quiet French countryside, now vibrating with the stupendous roar of high-revving engines. Back in Dearborn, they were starting to believe.

  Before the race started, it wasn’t entirely evident that they did, although the man at the top was setting a good example. About two hours into the race, I had ducked out of the media center and headed back down to the Ford paddock unit.

  Mark Fields was hanging out with Bill Ford, both men outfitted in Ford Performance–branded gear and looking remarkably relaxed, a contrast to the edge I’d experienced with Nair and Pericak the day before. But everyone at Ford had a job to do. And the job of Fields and Bill Ford was to keep it chill, confident in the racing effort, while duly noting that they had committed an enormous sum of money to repeating history. I had asked around about how much and was told that I wouldn’t believe if it I were told the truth. Or those I asked simply made something up. But running a single car for an endurance-racing season can cost between $1 million and $5 million, depending on the racing class, and those teams aren’t building their cars from scratch. A run-of-the-mill new vehicle can cost a carmaker $1 billion to develop, so the actual racing aspect of the Ford return to Le Mans might have been the cheapest part of the whole deal (drivers might make only $25,000 for winning a race).

  Fields immediately reminded me that Le Mans was the culmination of a process that Ford had set into motion when it had unveiled the new GT in January 2015. He had come to Le Mans later that year to announce the IMSA/WEC effort, but he hadn’t been able to attend the Daytona debut for Ford Chip Ganassi Racing at the Rolex 24, owing to a conflict with a classic-car auction in Arizona, for which Ford was a major sponsor, bringing along a vehicle to be auctioned for charity.

  “Raj and I had a deal,” Fields said. “He’d go to Daytona, and I’d go to Barrett-Jackson.”

  Fields missed attending the disastrous debut in person—and although it probably wasn’t his greatest test in leadership at Ford, it was still a test.

  “Raj and I were texting back and forth, and he texted me the results. Then we talked, and we agreed that this is part of racing. If we, as a senior team, went back to the racing team and chewed their butts out, said, ‘Goddammit, why did this happen?’ we wouldn’t have gotten the passion and motivation we need to be a winner.”

  Fields is one of those guys who never stop smiling, but it never seems smarmy, or as if he’s trying to fool you into believing he’s sincere. He’s also always thinking, but not in a forced diplomatic way, to make sure he’s on message. He was a tough guy from New Jersey who went to Harvard Business School after Rutgers and thrived at Ford because he was smart. He’s not investment-banker or management-consultant smart, not that vicious kind of smart; he’s warm smart.

  “I came to Ford because of the people,” he said. “Because of the community.”

  In Detroit, Fields proved over time that he cared deeply about the company and about what cars mean to those who adore them passionately—even though he freely admits that he isn’t a “car guy,” that he isn’t a Bob Lutz or Lee Iacocca or really even a Mark Reuss.

  “I don’t have grease in my veins, but I love cars and trucks,” he said.

  That’s a good thing, because Fields, an intense person who has learned how to employ his soft side with exactly the right amount of charisma, has a deep, emotional understanding of how to manage the ups and downs of other intense people.

  He knew that Nair and Pericak were freaking out after Daytona. And he knew that Pericak in particular would beat himself senseless over the GT’s messy coming-out party. And so he did what he always does now when confronted with a crisis, large or small, rele­vant to Ford’s core business, Ford’s future, or a Ford undertaking that is fraught with risk and unknowns—such as returning to the 24 Hours of Le Mans after a nearly five-decade absence.

  “I’ve always run to the fire, taken the difficult assignments,” he said.

  But running to the fire in this instance was only part of what Fields did. He also channeled Alan Mulally. “‘You went to Harvard Business School,’” they would say to me. “‘You must have wanted to be CEO of Ford all along.’ No, I just wanted to be the marketing manager for the Ford division.”

  Now he was CEO, but he wasn’t going to be a demanding jerk. Fields was going to be a business guy who understood what makes an engineer’s heart beat in his chest, and what makes an engineer’s blood boil, and what would make an engineer lose sleep and yell at his kids. And he wasn’t going to let those guys suffer alone. He was going to do what Mulally had taught him: he was going to empower them to see problems clearly and move rapidly to solve them.

  After Daytona, you could tell that Pericak got it. I imagined the fall-on-my-sword moment with Nair and Fields. But the Ford CEO wasn’t going to go there. As Nair had said before Daytona, things had been going too well. There is no glory without struggle.

  “It’s part of racing,” Fields continued, as the roar of engines shot across the hundred yards of weathered French concrete that separated the Ford paddock unit from the stands. “You do the analysis. You say here’s what went wrong and here’s how we fix it. And you make sure you improve for the next race.”

  It was Mulally in a nutshell. The charts on the GT race cars had all been green. And then—Boom! A gigantic block of red. Fields was seasoned when it came to crisis. He embraced the trouble and saw it as a chance to bring the team together. If Pericak, Nair, Ganassi, and Larry Holt at Multimatic could get through this, the Le Mans assault would be stronger.

  While we talked, Fields’s choice was playing out in real time. And Ford was winning.

  Everything was green now. Even the balky number 67 car had a chance to get back into it.

  I like Mark Fields and I always have liked him. He’s living proof that by reinventing your expectations, you can put yourself in a position to be great. Ford Performance and Ganassi needed Fields’s effortless yet hard-won self-confidence and affirmation back in January, because at that point, the only people who really grasped that racing is hard and unpredictable were the drivers.

  Even Chip Ganassi seemed to think that the Le Mans campaign wasn’t starting out the way he thought it should—but for him it was more of a chain-of-command thing, and Chip Ganassi wasn’t clearly at the very top.

  “What I was most nervous about going into Daytona—and my nightmares came true—is that it was an adjustment for me and my team to be involved with a program with so many people touching the car that don’t come under my direct command,” Ganassi told me at Le Mans. “That was a challenge, a learning curve there. That was the tallest order of the spring, but it’s behind us.”

  Ganassi also wasn’t looking beyond Le Mans. “We’re fully focused,” he said. “We’re here to win the race. I’m not planning next year. We’re here to win this race this weekend.”

  He admitted that post–Le Mans, win or lose, the season would then revert to the mundane process of running races, weekend after weekend. “As big as those other races are, this is the one you want to win.”

  For me, that crystallized what the impending twenty-four-hour ordeal meant not just for Ganassi but for everyone at Ford. It was easy to argue that the GTs existed as new cars in a racing season, and that somehow it would be acceptable for them to in fact repeat the history of the GT40s and spend two years failing to win Le Mans while all the kinks were worked out.

  “Everybody,” Ganassi said, “wants to win the big ones.”

  He added, “The most competitive games attract the most competitive teams. It’s an honor to be here. But you’ve still got to do the obvious things right. Take the tires off, put the tires on. Put the fuel in. Don’t hit anybody. You’ve still got to the run the race. Even
with all the fanfare and hoopla. You still have to just race. We’re all in the middle of a chess game, and at three o’clock on Sunday at Le Mans, somebody is going to say ‘checkmate.’”

  Fields was in a similar state of mind. Before Saturday, June 18, 2016, I’d never seen an American CEO so fully and contentedly ensconced in the process of winning. But we talked for half an hour, about two hours into the race, and he never once looked up at the standings, which were displayed around the paddock unit on flat-screen monitors, constantly updated. He was along for the ride and glad to be a passenger. It was Pericak who was out in the trenches, in his racing suit and with the headset on, obsessing. And Fields knew Dave could handle the stress.

  “I hope we win,” Fields said, as we were shaking hands before I headed back to catch up on the race. “But if we don’t, we’ll learn some things.”

  Then he brought it right home: “And we’ll be back next year.”

  I had been steadfast in my objectivity about Ford’s chances since I had started following this story, back in mid-2015, when the company confirmed that it would return to Le Mans. What I really wanted was competition, drama, six months of adventures and misadventures on and off the track. You know, a good story.

  But I had to admit it, as I walked back to the stands: I wanted Ford to win. The symbolism was just too rich, too heady. In 2009, the American auto industry had been down, out, and looking as though it might not get back up again. Ford had been in better shape than GM and Chrysler but not in great shape. It had been, as Fields had put it, “harrowing.” And yet we were all, seven years later, coming off the best sales year in the history of the U.S. auto market—17.5 million new cars and trucks had rolled off dealer lots—and Ford was back at Le Mans with a true factory effort for the first time since 2010 (privateers had run the second-generation GT back then). Heck, General Motors was here, as well, with the Corvette Racing team.

  I was having my own “America! Fuck, yeah!” moment. I was thinking about getting a tattoo of the Circuit de la Sarthe on my forearm before I left France.

  But I didn’t want Ferrari to throw in the towel, and as night arrived and the race moved into a period when the nerves start to fray, the adrenaline begins to ebb, the drivers try but fail to sleep, and the cars begin to feel and show the deleterious effects of lap after lap after lap, Ferrari lived up to its legendary status as the greatest racing marque to ever turn a wheel in competition.

  With midnight closing in and sunrise six hours away, with a nearly full moon casting white light across the blissfully dry Circuit de la Sarthe, it was Ford-Ford-Ferrari-Ford on the lead lap. Only the number 82 Risi 488 stood between Ford and a full repeat of the 1966 result. But that Ferrari 488 was one hell of a car. And as night passed, dawn arrived, and pursuit of glory in France continued into Sunday afternoon, we’d learn that Giancarlo Fisichella is one hell of a driver.

  Chapter 14

  Fifty Years to the Day

  Attrition always becomes a factor on the Circuit de la Sarthe. In 2016, in the prototype classes, cars were on and off the track, in and out of the garage, all night long. I devoted only one eye to the class that would ultimately claim the Le Mans title outright, but Toyota seemed impressive. I noted that no Japanese manufacturer had won Le Mans since Mazda in 1991.

  The Michelin lounge had a convenient view straight down into the Ford pits, so I meandered over for a snack and to see whether the Ganassi crews could get their drivers in and out quickly and cleanly in the darkness.

  The food had been delightful for the whole of my time at Le Mans. At races in the United States, I was used to urns of stale coffee, soda machines, maybe some bland sandwiches rolled out for lunch. The only deviation since I had dived into both the car-show circuit and the sports-car racing season in January had been a cocktail party thrown by an organization of journalists I belong to, the International Motor Press Association, at the conclusion of the New York auto show in April.

  In France there were sandwiches, but they were made of mouthwatering French ham and tasty cheese and they were delicately sliced into narrow rectangles. There were other cheeses and fruits. Young men and women in black suits, white shirts, and black neckties would happily pour you a Coke or a beer or a glass of wine or some Champagne. There was espresso or cappuccino on demand. At one point, two chefs arrived to prepare elaborate little haute cuisine concoctions that could be nibbled from small cups. If you wanted to, you could grab a copy of the red Michelin Guide to take home; there were about 100 neatly arranged on a bank of shelves.

  Overall, though, Le Mans was frankly looking a bit shabby. The press facilities appeared as if they hadn’t been significantly updated since the 1970s. The worn concrete stands did not mimic those in the shiny speed palaces of America. But this was still France—food mattered.

  As it turned out, the timing of my snack was serendipitous, because the number 66 GT was sitting in the pits. It sat motionless for much longer than would have been normal for a refueling or a tire change, especially for a car that was fighting to hold onto third place in the GTE Pro class. At Le Mans, tire changes and refills can’t happen simultaneously, and the engines have to be turned off when fuel is taken on. Teams warm new tires up in special ovens beforehand, so they hit the cars hot and are ready to rock without a warm-up lap, a boon at night when the temperatures fall. But something unrelated to tires and fuel was keeping the number 66 at bay.

  The problem was a malfunction with the electronics that should have kept the green “66” on its flank illuminated. Unable to identify the car, the marshals had ordered it into the pits, where crew members in racing suits, helmets, and gloves had frantically disassembled and were reassembling the components.

  It was a serious infraction to have any aspect of the lighting system fail at night. This was an endurance race, and a healthy chunk of it, some eight hours, was run in darkness. A car that didn’t have reliable lights was obviously failing a critical test.

  I’d later find out that the 66 wasn’t the only GT experiencing electronics issues. But it was the only one of the three on the lead lap that would get knocked off because of them.

  The fix on the 66 car was fiddly and time-consuming. The crewman who was completing the repair was dealing with tiny screws smaller than pushpins and a precise, narrow screwdriver in the middle of the night, with a helmet on. The pits are well lit at Le Mans, but it was still a comically delicate crisis to be suffering through. From where I watched, the crewman was doing a brilliant job. He didn’t drop a single screw.

  I later learned that this episode was classic Le Mans. A glitch that no one had planned for showed up in the middle of the night. The fix had to be figured out fast, and a solution had to be improvised. And then a mechanic or crew member had to execute it, under the most glaring pressure imaginable.

  After about ten minutes, the problem was finally corrected, and the GT roared off into the night. But now it was two Fords versus one Ferrari on the lead lap.

  Ferrari seized its chance to lead the GTE Pro class before twelve hours of racing had been completed. The number 68 Ford came into the pits for a brake change—something that had to be done at some point during the twenty-four hours of racing—dropping well behind the number 82 Risi 488, which went on to open a sizable time gap. The number 69 GT moved into second place, but it had its own brake change to deal with at some point.

  Overnight, the Fords chased the Ferrari, while elsewhere in GTE Pro, the AF Corse Ferrari 488 crashed and later retired from the race, and one of the two Porsche 911s running in the class blew an engine. These mishaps and incidents—along with those in the other classes—might have brought out the safety car in previous years, but Le Mans now employs slow zones, requiring cars to reduce speed in affected parts of the circuit, dipping to fifty miles per hour when there’s an accident or a problem on the circuit. The race marshals monitor progress through these areas, and the circuit itself is equipped with a signa
l system to alert the drivers to slow down or suffer a penalty. (One of the secret skills in winning Le Mans is remaining constantly aware of the rules, so that a minor infraction doesn’t undo hours of work.) The implementation of the slow zone keeps the race moving, but it makes catching up with a fast car from a deficit of even a single lap difficult, because you can’t run flat out.

  The Risi Ferrari fought hard, but the Fords were able to stay in touch, and by sunrise, the number 68 GT had closed the gap and was in the Ferrari’s mirrors. Then disaster struck: the charging Ford was assessed a drive-through penalty for failing to shut off its engine during refueling in the pits; it would have to make a slow detour through pit lane, entering, then exiting, without stopping, losing a bit of time. The number 69 GT might be Ford’s only hope, but it would have to make up ground on the Risi Ferrari.

  Sunrise also brought carnage, as the return of daylight sent a signal through the prototype class to get on it and go for the black-and-white flag. For the GTE Pro drivers, this was a risky patch, where they had the potential to get involved in crashes as the faster prototypes start to fight it out. For the lead Ferrari and the Fords, however, nothing bad happened. And the Fords started to use their speed.

  The pass came, naturally, on the Mulsanne Straight, with Joey Hand in the number 68 car, which had stormed back from its penalty. The American slipped around the Italian driver Matteo Malucelli and stepped on it hard to get in front of the 488. Hand wasn’t in the simulator in North Carolina. This was reality, on the most famous racing stretch on planet Earth.

  We’re going to win from the lead.