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The Feud that Created America's Greatest Race Car

The true story behind 'Ford v. Ferrari' and the 1966 Le Mans.





By Ezra Dyer
Oct 8, 2019


It all started with a business deal gone bad. In 1963, Henry Ford II, "the Deuce," decided he wanted Ford Motor Company to go racing. The only problem: Ford didn't have a sports car in its portfolio.


The quickest way to acquire a sports car, the Deuce thought, was to buy Ferrari, then a race car company that only sold street-legal machines to fund its track exploits.

Ford sent an envoy to Modena, Italy, to hash out a deal with Enzo Ferrari. The Americans offered $10 million, but as the negotiations neared their conclusion, Ferrari balked at a clause in the contract that said Ford would control the budget (and thus, the decisions) for his race team. Ferrari, known otherwise as “Il Commendatore,” couldn’t stomach the surrender of autonomy, so he bailed, sending Henry Ford II a message the Deuce didn’t often hear: There was something his money couldn’t buy.

In lieu of the sale, Ford decided to direct his company’s cash and engineering toward petty revenge. He decreed Ford would start its own race team, with the singular goal of beating Ferrari in the world’s most prestigious race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

“These two guys were larger than life,” says A.J. Baime, author of Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. “Here you have arguably the most famous and powerful CEO in America, Henry Ford II, up against Enzo Ferrari—the most narcissistic man to walk the earth, but deservedly so, because he was a genius. You couldn’t write it better.”

The clash of these titanic egos would propel Ford to design America’s greatest race car: the GT40. An unstable engineering mashup of California hot-rod ethos and high-speed NASCAR expertise, the GT40 failed to finish Le Mans in 1964 and 1965, but bold testing innovations and a never-before-seen brake strategy had them primed for 1966. Weeks before the start at Le Mans, Henry Ford II handed race program boss Leo Beebe a handwritten note: “You better win.”





The 1966 Superperformance GT40 Mark II

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The 1966 GT40 Mark II is more comfortable than you might expect. Designed for long-distance driving, the seat is soft and ventilated. Forward visibility is excellent. Somehow there’s plenty of interior room, considering the tiny exterior dimensions. If Le Mans circa 1966 amounted to a frantic 3,000-mile road trip, this seems like the car you’d want to do it in. But the moment you fire up the mid-mounted 427-cubic-inch V-8, you’re reminded this is a race car, capable of modern race-car speed—more than 200 mph—in 1960s analog form. No power steering. No power brakes. No electronic safety systems. A hundred miles per hour in third gear feels like you’re in a sidecar strapped to the Space Shuttle and you’re not even halfway to top speed. The guys who ran these things down the Mulsanne Straight at 210 mph, at night, on 1966-spec tires, after driving for four hours straight, must’ve been brave. Or crazy. Or a heady mixture of both.

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This car, a Superformance GT40 Mark II, is a “continuation car,” a street-legal re-creation of the winning 1966 Le Mans car. In fact, this particular GT40 Mk II was used in the new film Ford v. Ferrari, based on the legendary story. Watch the trailer, in which Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby takes Henry Ford II for a hell ride. This is that car. It’s magnificent. And like both the 2005–2006 Ford GT and the current GT model released in 2017, the Superformance owes its existence to that long-ago battle of egos between two stubborn industrialists. The 1966 GT40 Mk II feels like such a fully realized race machine, it’s hard to believe it started out as a half-baked effort that was not only uncompetitive, but dangerous.

It might seem like a foregone conclusion that Ford, an international car-building colossus at the height of its powers in the 1960s, could crush a small independent company like Ferrari on the race track, but that was far from a given. As countless car companies have learned, money doesn’t directly translate to victory.

“They spent a lot of money, but that was no guarantee you’d win a race,” says Preston Lerner, author of Ford GT: How Ford Silenced the Critics, Humbled Ferrari and Conquered Le Mans. “[Ford] also had to bring in the right people to win. They had to have the mechanics, the race organization people, the drivers. It could’ve been a glorious failure.”

And in 1964 and 1965, it was. Ford’s new race car was fast, but they couldn’t figure out how to make it last for 24 hours. Gearboxes broke. Head gaskets blew. The aerodynamics were a mess, too, with cars developing so much lift they’d see wheelspin at 200 mph. After two aerodynamically unstable GT40s crashed during testing in 1964, one test driver, Roy Salvadori, quit. “I opted out of that program to save my life,” he said.

And the brakes were a constant problem. Ford engineers calculated that when a driver hit the brakes at the end of Le Mans’ Mulsanne Straight, the front brake rotors would spike to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit within just a few seconds, causing the rotor to fail. Trying to slow a 3,000-pound car from 210 mph, every three-and-a-half minutes, for 24 hours was a new problem in racing. “Dan Gurney told me that everything he did driving that car was about saving the brakes,” Lerner says. “At the end of the Mulsanne, he’d back off well before the brake zone and coast down so he wasn’t scrubbing 180 mph all at once.” Carroll Shelby told Baime: “We won [Le Mans] on brakes.”





Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon’s #2 Ford Mk II opposite Richard Attwood and David Piper’s #16 Ferrari 365 P2 Spyder at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans.

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That’s because Phil Remington, an engineer on the Ford team, devised a quick-change brake system that allowed the mechanics to swap in new pads and rotors during a driver change, meaning drivers didn’t have to worry about making the brakes last beyond their stint. Other teams cried foul about the GT40’s pit-stop advantage, to no avail. “They complained that it was breaking the rules,” says Baime. “But there were no rules.” And that wasn’t the only area where Ford was pushing boundaries.

To ensure their engines could survive Le Mans, Ford ran them on a dynamometer operated by a program that simulated performance and durability. They logged the RPM and shift points of a lap around Le Mans, and then had computer-controlled servo actuators “drive” a test engine in exactly the same way in a lab, even simulating pit stops with periodic shutdowns. The engineers would run an engine until it exploded, examine what went wrong, and fix the next iteration. Eventually, when the engineers could make a 427-cubic-inch V-8 last for almost two back-to-back Le Mans simulations, they decided their design was hearty enough.

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Henry Ford

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And in 1966, it actually was, with Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon’s #2 car leading a dramatic 1-2-3 Ford victory at Le Mans. The next year, Ford returned to France and won again. With repeat wins in hand and the Deuce’s ego assuaged, they withdrew official Le Mans factory support after the 1967 race—but still won in ’68 and ’69, with privately owned GT40s claiming victory each year.


Over the span of a few years, Ford had unveiled the Mustang, won at Le Mans, and vanquished its fuddy-​duddy image. Some of the GT40’s engineering lessons might have translated to Ford’s street cars, particularly the computer-driven durability testing, but Ford considered the Le Mans program a marketing exercise rather than a quest for innovation.




Enzo Ferrari

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Manufacturers are still willing to spend big on internal race programs. During Audi's recent reign of dominance at Le Mans, the company spent about $250 million per year on its race team, and Ferrari reportedly spends $500 million each year on its Formula One program. It's hard to say if those massive budgets translate to car sales, but most Audi customers probably haven’t heard of the R18 e-tron quattro, the last Audi to win Le Mans. Racing is still integral to brands like Ferrari, but mainstream companies like Audi and Toyota struggle to justify the high price tag.

It’s estimated Ford spent $25 million or more on their way to victory at Le Mans. They even burned $1 million in 1968 before withdrawing financial support from the race program. The GT40 itself was obsolete by 1970 (Ford hasn’t had an overall victory at Le Mans since 1969), but the car’s story continued.

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REVIEW: Ford v Ferrari

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By: David Phillips | 6 hours ago


Like most anyone reading RACER.com, I approached Ford v Ferrari with trepidation. The trailers I’d seen promised Hollywood’s usual testosterone-fueled crash-fest portrait of motorsports. Nor was I encouraged when I stumbled into a VIP showing of the movie’s “short” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum last May in time to hear Matt Damon tell an adoring audience that, in researching his role, he’d quickly learned Carroll Shelby was universally loved by the motorsports community…

On the other hand, I couldn’t help but be heartened when the erstwhile Ken Miles (Christian Bale) noted that the winner’s traditional post-Indy 500 drink of milk began when Wilbur Shaw quenched his thirst with a bottle of buttermilk.

So yesterday morning when my son’s partner invited me to a sneak preview of Ford v Ferrari, I readily accepted her invite hoping for the best, expecting the worst. As the day unwound, two friends put me in what (IMHO) turned out to be the proper frame of mind. “Remember, racers hate racing movies for the same reasons police hate TV cop shows and doctors can’t stand hospital dramas: they’re so not true to life,” said one. “Whenever my climbing partner and I see a mountaineering movie, he gets all hot and bothered,” opined another. “‘They’re doing it all wrong. That would never happen in real life,’ he says. Me? I don’t worry about the details; I just enjoy the movie for what it is: a movie not a documentary.”

In part because of my friends’ observations, in part because 90% of the racing “action” comes in the final third of the movie and in part because of the talents of Messrs Bale and Damon (and their colleagues both in front and behind the cameras), I turned-down the boost on my inner racer last night and allowed myself the luxury of being entertained by Ford v Ferrari. And against all odds, I enjoyed the experience. I found myself not only liking but caring about Shelby and Miles, two guys I never met but who – by most accounts – rank among racing’s least likable and least-liked if widely respected characters.

Knowing what fate had in store for him (at Le Mans and in the ultimate sense), I couldn’t help but root for Bale’s Miles, the WWII tank commander turned fierce racer and development driver par excellence, despite his flinty and self-destructive character. And not unlike the Senna documentary, I experienced a growing sense of dread as Ford v Ferrari moved toward its inevitable conclusion.

Damon milks the role of the similarly iconoclastic Shelby to the max, whether going toe to toe with Henry Ford II and the other Ford ‘suits’ or committing humorous acts of legerdemain in pursuit of victory at Le Mans. Did Shelby actually subtly sabotage the Ferrari effort in the pits? Who cares? As played by Damon, you have no doubt The Snake would have.

Sure the racing segments are, in the main, hokey, from the Ford GT’s 220 mph speedometer, to Miles and a predictably swarthy Lorenzo Bandini exchanging dagger-eye glares while roaring along the Mulsanne Straightaway. And what’s with the film’s fixation on 7000rpm? One of Isaac Newton’s oft overlooked laws of motion? A wink of appreciation to that mid-60s epic Redline 7000? Speaking of winks, wink and you’ll miss the frame or two of Miles’ co-driver at Le Mans… a fellow named Dennis Hulme who, at least, fares incrementally better than Lloyd Ruby.

But I digress into racer-geek mode. In the big picture, Ford v Ferrari captures the essence of two seriously hardcore racers; likewise, while exercising poetic license with the timeline, the film offers a revealing look into the exhausting, thankless and dangerous development work that went into one of America’s most glorious international racing triumphs, along with the reptilian politics behind it.


Ford v Ferrari, Le Mans, RACER Stuff

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8 Meters: Triumph, Tragedy and a Photo Finish at Le Mans

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In a war fought by titans of industry – one from Michigan, the other from Maranello – on the roads of rural France, the battle for sports car supremacy came to a head in 1966 when three of Ford Motor Company’s GT40s beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the closest endurance racing finish of all time. Exactly half a century later, “8 Meters,” a new documentary produced by Kahn Media, explores what really happened on those final, fateful laps.

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FORD ARCHIVES BARES BACKSTORY BEHIND FORD vs FERRARI AT LEMANS

DEARBORN, Mich. –Ever since word leaked out early this year, Ford fans have been eagerly awaiting the release of a new feature film dubbed “Ford vs. Ferrari, which is centered around Ford winning the famous 1966 Le Mans race. To add some historical facts to Hollywood’s interpretation in the movie,


Ford Motor Company hosted a special event at the Ford Archives, housed inside the Ford Engineering Laboratory building on its Dearborn campus. There, select members of the media were joined by Ford’s Global Motorsports Director Mark Rushbrook, and even Edsel Ford II.



Ford set up a display of rarely seen artifacts from the Le Mans GT40 racing program, and included on-site was the actual GT40 that was used in the creation of the film, joined by a production 2019 Ford GT and another race-version Ford GT. Once the initial tour lead by Ford Heritage Brand Manager Ted Ryan concluded, attendees were allowed to inspect the displays set up at the Archives to witness the comprehensive collection of LeMans history Ford has saved. Drawing big interest were the 1966 and 2016 Le Mans trophies, original and confidential Ford GT Sports Car Project files, and the actual documents negotiating the deal for Ford to purchase Ferrari.



In 1963 Ford tried to buy Ferrari, a move that Enzo Ferrari first approved, then backed out at the last moment (the actual telegram was on display). After spending considerable company time and resources on due-diligence for the purchase, then-Ford CEO Henry Ford II didn’t take too kindly to the deal falling through, so he formed Ford Advanced Vehicles in 1963, and then later commissioned Shelby American and Holman & Moody to work with the company to build and perfect Ford race cars that would become capable of dethroning Ferrari at the Le Mans 24-Hour race in France.

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After two years of trials, failures and not earning the Le Mans championship for 1964 and ’65, every senior employee that worked on the project received a 3x5 card before the 1966 race that was handwritten from Mr. Ford that read, “You better win – HF.”



One of the employees who saw that card was Mose Nowland, retired Ford Racing engine engineer, who spent 57 years with the company, including assisting on the LeMans GT program in 1966 and 1967. Nowland was also present at the Ford Archives for this program and shared some of his stories from being on the Le Mans GT40 engine building team. He recalled a time when he had flown to find a fix for two race-prepped engines in two different locations (one at Holman & Moody and the other at Shelby American), just as the cars were being loaded up for the Le Mans race. Mose employed some floating trout fishing line to help prevent oil leakage from the cylinder heads onto the exhaust manifolds.



Listening to little-known stories from Ryan and Nowland and being able to see original documents and artifacts from the Le Mans program brought an air of authenticity to the release of “Ford vs Ferrari” on November 15th, 2019. No matter how exciting any movie race footage or the Hollywood spin of this story might be, the ability to see, touch and hear some of the history behind that great race at the Ford Archives was highly insightful and entertaining in and of itself.

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