Disaster at Daytona
For Ford, the lead-up to the Rolex 24 at Daytona in late January 2016 was a combination of pressure cooker and hype-a-palooza. Inside and outside the often-insular world of motorsports, everyone had become obsessed with the company’s attempt to repeat history with the captivating and exceptionally sexy GT. That created steady external pressure, matched and exceeded by the internal pressure Ford put on itself.
Expectations seemed to outpace even what the carmaker had anticipated. Speculation about the company’s return to endurance racing had been a constant thrum prior to the GT’s reveal in Detroit in early 2015. After that, excitement picked up at a frantic pace, stoked by Ford as well as by fans and the media. Nobody was really calculating the odds, which said that a Le Mans win was a long shot after Ford’s decades away from factory-supported endurance racing. The history that Ford was trying to repeat was also being overlooked: Ford may have won in 1966 but only after a dismal showing in 1964 and 1965.
Lurking behind all of this, of course, was the reality that Daytona would be the GT race car’s first true test. In June, Ford had released a short video officially announcing what many had suspected: the GT would return to Le Mans. The film was thrilling and a bit out there. The Le Mans–winning car from the 1960s watches a grainy newsreel of itself and its legendary victory, then magically morphs into the new number 66 GT race car, fires up its engine, and blasts through the streets of Paris. En route to Le Mans, about two hours southwest of the French capital, the new GT frightens a rearing stallion, a cavallino rampante—throwing an obvious gauntlet down for Ferrari.
The imagery was exhilarating, the stuff of fanboy fantasies. But it also established a very high bar for Daytona.
And Daytona, when you talk about the cars hitting the track, is no pool party. This massive racing facility, located about two thirds of the way up the Florida peninsula, between Orlando and Jacksonville, is America’s premier motorsports venue. It was the vision of Bill France, the patriarch of NASCAR, who dreamed of an epic venue for that unique creation of American racing, stock cars. Every February, it hosts the greatest NASCAR race of them all, the Daytona 500.
Constructed in 1959, the NASCAR track is a gigantic two-and-a-half-mile tri-oval, whose banking enables cars to achieve viciously high velocities. In qualifying, NASCAR competitors routinely top 200 miles per hour. The design of the banking allows physics to serve speed. As the cars slingshot around the turns, they are pressed down into the track rather than sliding off it.
Endurance racing is a completely different game from NASCAR competition, but it’s also deeply wound into the Daytona DNA. Three major endurance races make up the so-called Triple Crown of this subset of motorsports, and Daytona is the only one besides Le Mans that goes for twenty-four hours (the third, Sebring, also in Florida, is a twelve-hour-long contest).
In fact, Daytona and Le Mans are the only twenty-four-hour races on the combined schedule of the North American IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship (sponsored by a company that makes expensive custom floor mats for cars and trucks) and the FIA World Endurance Championship in Europe.
Both Daytona and Le Mans run for a grueling full day, but they are distinguished by their courses. Le Mans is run over a combined road and racetrack course of eight and a half miles. Its most famous section, the fabled, terrifying Mulsanne Straight, is, at 3.7 miles, longer than the entire Daytona road course of 3.5 miles. It is why Le Mans is Le Mans. If you give a 600-horsepower GT car an uninterrupted expanse of nearly four miles to use as a drag strip, you are going to witness the type of velocity that freaks out most grown-ups. Put a 1,000-horsepower prototype car out there, and freaking out is no longer an option. The driver’s eyes must stare ahead with a combination of professional precision and defiance of death—and trust that the car won’t spin fatally out of control at some point.
A Ford engineer who worked on the original GT40 cars that captured the one-two-three victory expressed flat astonishment the first time he drove a normal road car around Le Mans’s Circuit de la Sarthe, so named because it is located in the Sarthe département, which takes its name from the Sarthe River, a tributary of the Loire. He couldn’t image how drivers would have the fortitude to push a car to 200 miles per hour on what was to him a long, two-lane county road, lined on either side by trees.
The Mulsanne isn’t as hairy as it once was. In 1990, a pair of chicanes, or crimps, were added to the infamous straightaway, which the rest of the year is a public road, to get the drivers on their brakes before they hit speeds of 250 miles per hour. Two drivers, Jean-Louis Lafosse and Jo Gartner, had died in crashes in the 1980s. Gartner’s car was shattered when it collided with a telephone pole. Lafosse’s car was destroyed when it suffered a mechanical breakdown on the track and slid from one side to the other, guardrail to guardrail. Two race marshals were injured, and Lafosse’s body was mutilated.
Daytona provides, in many respects, the next best (or worst) thing, in the form of those huge, arcing banks on the tri-oval, as well as a back straight that’s broken by a quick, crisp bend known as the Bus Stop. It’s here that drivers will try to make their lap times, taking a racing line through the turns that’s as direct as possible.
Imagine you’re required to attack this section of track over and over again, each time applying the sort of precise yet slightly imbalanced, edgy pressure that high-performance cars live for. Your machine, from tires to engine to gearbox, is at a limit. The once-glossy and colorful exterior is grimed with filth. You are sore and thirsty. You have stopped smelling anything but exhaust and racing fuel, and you can’t remember a time when the scream of an engine created to evoke the battle cry of an angry animal wasn’t filling your ears. It could be light. It could be dark. It could be raining. And still you must hit the Bus Stop and make your lap time, for an hour or more on each of your stints, until you hand the car over to one of your fellow drivers. Over the course of an entire day, by the clock, you and your codrivers could each be in the car for eight grueling hours, depending on the total duration of the race. “You’ve got to put down the laps,” is what the drivers say.
In the back of your mind, you know that in endurance racing, deaths have come not because a driver pushed too hard, lost the grip and the car’s rear, and drove straight into a wall, to perish in a 200-mile-per-hour fireball. Deaths in endurance racing have rather come because the driver drifted for a millisecond, lost that critical focus on the next moment of life, the next 100 feet of track, the consciousness that existence for a driver is defined not by the past, and not by any future that can be considered, but by a sort of barely extended present. You have no yesterday and you have no tomorrow. You have the next five seconds of now.
In endurance racing you know that, in this context, you also die because the car breaks. It’s as if the horse is shot out from under you. One moment, you are as melded with a machine as you can be, wrestling the engine and the gearbox, the endlessly oversteering tires, but trusting in the bond. You’re feeling good about life because this is, after all, what you’ve lived for since you slipped on a helmet for the first time and drove a go-cart, fast, at age ten. The next moment, part of your car explodes and shreds into bits of carbon fiber, alloy, and rubber, and you’re looking for a place to crash or trying to use pure instinct to avoid killing your fellow racers.
Only once the initial trauma has subsided do you get to think about the imminent possibility of burning to death, assuming you’re still alive and haven’t lost an arm or a leg. Often, you can’t even crawl from the wreckage. You have to be pulled. Bleeding. Dazed. Thankful.
Didier Theys, a Belgian who won Daytona twice, in 1998 and 2002, was the first real driver I ever met, and he acquainted me with the look I now associate with trained drivers—the gaze that out of habit is just slightly dislocated from the present, occupying instead a point in the future at the limit of vision. After all, at 140 miles per hour a driver is covering something like sixty-eight yards every second.
They say time travel is impossible, but professional drivers do it for a living. The increments are tiny, however. But they’re repeated in a rhythm, like a pulse. This is what’s simultaneously numbing and exhilarating about motorsport. The track itself is a defined experience, and the “racing line” is discovered relatively early in a race and scored with black tread marks from the abused tires. As a driver, you know where to go. But because you’re going there so fast, you follow a simple rule: your hands on the steering wheel follow your eyes to the future.
This is a fundamental principle imparted by professional driving instructors. It sounds easy, but in practice it’s extremely difficult. When driving, even on a track, we tend to manage a car in its current state. We feel the corner we’re taking, or we deal with the second-by-second pace of acceleration. What we really need to be doing is borrowing the car’s position from its future and creating a cognitive map, swiftly drawn, of the quickest trajectory to that position.
I’ve come to believe this can’t really be taught, that drivers like Theys are born with an ability to process the present as contingent on a future that’s just at the precipice of now. Because this doesn’t drive them crazy, and they make a living from their talent, they can move through normal space and time. But when you look at the way they see, you can witness a kind of dislocation. Steve McQueen’s character, Michael Delaney, put it best in Le Mans, the 1971 film whose objective was to capture the reality of motorsport with an emphatic, exceptional realism: “Racing’s important to the men who do it well. When you’re racing, it’s life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.”
When I met Theys he was retired, but this condition of waiting struck me as eternal. The air of anticipation was also permanent. He didn’t exactly live in the now. He lived in the now immediately after the now, beheld with his handsome blue, piercing eyes. He could describe that imminent now in practical detail, because he would have to drive through it at 200 miles per hour and do it in one piece—again, and again, and again.
People like this are often just as quick with their humor as they are with their driving.
“What was your favorite race?” I asked Theys, knowing that he had run in three Indianapolis 500s and had finished third at Le Mans in 1999. The backdrop for this conversation was the raceway at Watkins Glen, in upstate New York, a big, fast track beloved by club racers and pros alike.
“The ones you win!” he exclaimed.
By its nature, Daytona is a study in contrasts, on two levels, when the Rolex 24 is being run.
First is the transformation of NASCAR’s speed palace—and Daytona is surpassed only by Talladega, in Alabama, in velocity if not provenance—into a road course. NASCAR uses only the large track on the outside, the tri-oval, while the road race combines that with the winding course that sits on the infield. And it’s not just the racing layout that changes. For the weekend of the Rolex 24, this redneck Elysium just off one of Florida’s less fashionable stretches of beachfront attracts the moneyed, middle-aged aristocracy that favors endurance racing in America. (Things are far more egalitarian in Europe, as I would learn six months later at Le Mans.) The Daytona 500 features hulking stock cars, while the Rolex 24 showcases out-there prototypes and sleek GT cars. The only connecting threads in 2016 were the Corvette team, which included GT racers that share a corporate stable with the Chevys that run in the Daytona 500; and Ford, which had a similar NASCAR link. Otherwise, the Rolex 24 is Porsches, Audis, Aston Martins, and of course Ferraris.
And the Ferrari presence is one that defines how different sports-car racing is from the snarling hoedown that is NASCAR.
Other manufacturers and teams provide amenities for their fans and competitors during the Daytona marathon. But Ferrari has a raised red-and-white temple overlooking the track’s first turn, at the end of a patio section attached to the pits. Several thousand square feet of viewing platforms, enclosed and both heated and air-conditioned, are filled with Ferraristas for the duration of the race, most of them decked out in Ferrari-logo attire and attended to by a staff of waitresses and bartenders who are participating in their own marathon of hospitality. They’ll keep at it for the full twenty-four hours, even though all but the most die-hard supporters of Maranello, Italy’s most famous enterprise, will retire after nightfall to nearby hotels.
In a month, the speedway will be turned over to the rollicking, proudly redneck bacchanal that is the Daytona 500. But for the twenty-four-hour race, in addition to the impressive Ferrari presence, there’s also an abundance of Rolex. The watchmaker, founded in the early twentieth century, sells the world’s most widely coveted luxury timepieces. Indeed, there are finer watches that you can strap on your wrist—Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet—but Rolex has heft and the wherewithal to sponsor motorsport. It also has the investment-grade status. A Rolex is money in the bank, backed by credibility in the paddock. In this respect, it’s rivaled only by TAG Heuer, with its longtime Formula One association.
The country-club atmosphere at Daytona for the endurance race is the ideal environment for Rolex, and the Swiss firm knows it. Enormous green and gold signage rules the speedway, creating a branded vibe amid the roar and thrust, the sonic dissonance, that’s as soothing as what one might encounter at another sporting event synonymous with Rolex and class: the Wimbledon tennis tournament in England.
The Rolex 24 winners enjoy perhaps the best reward in the world of speedway competition. The members of each team to win its division are given a Rolex Daytona chronograph, probably the sexiest timepiece on the planet these days. Rolex is legendary for such automatic timepieces as the Submariner divers’ watch and the Datejust, a dress watch favored by several U.S. presidents, but for some time now its most collectible watch has been the Daytona, named for the speedway and the endurance race. It was famously worn by Paul Newman, a semipro racer, and Daytonas that evoke the timekeeping tool Newman favored for his talented wrist, from the proper vintage, bring in the most money of any contemporary Rolexes at auctions. A new Daytona will run you $15,000. Some drivers at the Rolex 24 own several. One driver has seven; he wears the piece from his first win and has distributed the rest to friends and family. Chip Ganassi wears a gold and stainless-steel model.
The funny thing about the drivers at the Rolex 24 is that although many have run in other racing categories, driving vehicles ranging from open-wheel Indy cars to snarling NASCAR beasts, most perceive how prestigious the Daytona race is and what a cosmopolitan contrast endurance racing in general presents to more provincial brands of competition.
“NASCAR is Walmart,” Scott Atherton, the president of IMSA, told me. “And I mean that in the most admiring way. But sports-car racing is Nordstrom.”
In after-race interviews, for example, you can tell that the guys who won watches are psyched, while the ones who didn’t are, well, disappointed, like kids who missed out on a primo toy at Christmas. This prestige is one of the more distinctive elements of the Rolex 24. It reminds you that endurance racing, with Le Mans as the crown jewel, has lodged itself in the collective aspirations of professional drivers everywhere; only Formula One and the Indy 500 carry the same cognitive heft.
Not that glistening stainless-steel Swiss chronographs, Ferrari’s ad hoc spectators’ Parthenon, Ford’s own hospitality party just a few hundred feet away, and a steady parade of handsome, risk-taking drivers can overcome the blood, sweat, grime, smoke, and sometimes even fire that define the Rolex 24 race itself. A driver can spend a couple of hours in the car, or he could be in it for fourteen, depending on how his team parcels out the stints. (Although total drive time is capped, the IMSA rules are more focused on ensuring that a driver spends a minimum amount of time behind the wheel in a stint, typically about an hour.) Each car that finishes, of course, stays on the track for the duration, limited only by the amount of fuel it can take on—each team is given a defined amount of fuel that has to last for the whole race—and the necessity of replacing mechanical components, such as brakes, or switching tires. The racing authorities’ rules aim to bring the cars from each team into some kind of competitive parity. Fuel capacity for each type of car, for example, is controlled so that in a given class all the competitors will be able to turn the same number of laps before refueling—more or less, because a driver can always push his luck.
There’s a classical dimension to endurance racing. Remember that the first marathon, run in ancient Greece in 490 BC, when the Greek messenger Pheidippides brought Athens news of a victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon, was undertaken not for athletic glory but to inform a civilization that it wouldn’t be conquered. The runner’s journey ended right before his own death, with a single word, “victory.”
Endurance racing, at a vital strategic level, is all about breaking your competitors’ cars and, by association, their will. But at its base level, a race like Daytona presents a simple racing objective: complete as many official laps as possible in the time frame of the event. But we’re not talking about flipping on the cars and letting them run. An endurance race is an improvisational undertaking. As in warfare, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.
The best place to take this in at the speedway is from pit lane, long after night has fallen, when the cars have been running for over twelve hours. Everyone’s soul is tested during this treacherous period. This is when mistakes, big mistakes, are made, after the fans have dropped off to sleep in the RVs in the infield or, if well heeled, have headed back to hotels by the beach.
The drivers, racing teams’ majordomos, and most important, the pit and garage crews get few breaks. Sure, off their stints the drivers can duck into their own rock-star-style RVs for a shower, food, some shut-eye. But the crews go all day and all night and into the next day. If you ask, most drivers will tell you that at the twenty-four-hour races in particular, it’s hard to sleep and tough to eat properly. Many drivers concentrate on staying hydrated, because drinking fluids is easy. And they have to be constantly prepared to jump back into the car.
The images from pit lane are, for the uninitiated, borderline hellish. Shattered things are everywhere, space is tight, and the endless drone of engines being pushed to their limit is oppressive. You wear earplugs or sound-canceling headphones when you wander amid the carnage and dodge the carts and negotiate the narrow lane behind the pits that holds loads of fresh tires.
You watch your step, because there are hoses everywhere. You stay out of the way. You could be grievously injured: pit crashes aren’t unheard of, and the crews wear full fire-protection suits and racing helmets for a reason. The explosive wail of a 600-horsepower engine being revved as a car drops off its hydraulic jacks after receiving four new tires and a fresh tank of fuel is enough to make your eardrums detonate and spurt blood. The first time I ever experienced this—stupidly, without earplugs—I thought I’d never be able to listen to music again. I pictured future conversations with my kids punctuated by an elderly, “Huh?”
A car race takes arena rock and turns it up well beyond eleven. And although it is noise, not music, it creates a kind of crude symphony that does something music can’t do. It grabs you in the gut. Pete Townshend of The Who—who had his hearing obliterated in the 1970s by the violent decibels of gigantic Marshall amplifier stacks—wasn’t going to windmill his arm off against the strings of his guitar. But a GTLM car, despite its multitude of safety features, when out of control could shred a person and then incinerate what was left. Drivers know this. In motorsport the possibility of death—horrible, mutilating death—is a given. Doctors who have examined killed racers have expressed grim wonder at how the human body could be so gruesomely traumatized.
In the hours just before dawn, everything starts to break: machinery, bodies, the will to go on. Much like soldiers at war, the drivers and crew have to fall back on their training. The adrenaline rush takes you only so far. Sixteen hours into the race, beat drivers are sleeping where they fall, some using stacks of tires as rude mattresses and pillows. They don’t shed the fireproof racing suits; they don’t even lose the helmets. The ones who are awake steal smoke breaks far from the fuel canisters. It will probably take two or three showers to wash off the race and a week or more to physically recover from an entire day in the pit-lane trenches.
The work of fixing what’s broken never ends. During one of my late-night strolls through pit lane, I saw two guys devoutly focused on using a blowtorch to rid a tire of debris it had picked up on the racetrack. Blobs of molten rubber had dried on the tarmac, forming a morass of black shapes. Cars that had utterly failed were wheeled back to the paddock by packs of men bent in concern and humiliation; the cars then disappeared into a garishly lit repair bay to be ripped apart by mechanics.
But even in this stygian context, the pride of profession is evident. Another crew member polished the filth from wheels. At least a small part of the car should look shiny and new. Amid the marathon of insanity, while the roaring peloton of cars made its way around the track, again and again, professionalism was never forgotten. Everyone here does this for a living.
On the brilliantly sunny start day of the Rolex 24 in January 2016, the Ford GTs attracted more attention prerace, when the fans get to mass onto the track for a walk-around, than anything else in competition. With their pleasing angles and new red-white-and-blue racing livery, the GTs stood out, even alongside the exotic prototype cars.
The motorsports world had been salivating for months. The website Sportscar365 called the upcoming racing season “a five-way factory fight between Porsche, Corvette, BMW, Ferrari and newcomers Ford,” heralding “a potential new golden age for GT racing in North America.”
“The GT Le Mans category has been the most competitive, most intriguing category I’ve been in, in the last seven, eight, nine years,” BMW Team RLL co-owner Bobby Rahal told the publication.
And Ford was ready. Or thought it was ready, after months of testing, of taking the prototype GTs and making them into track-ready race cars. There had been few problems, and the verdict from the drivers was that the GT was fantastic. Even the funkier elements of the new turbo V-6 EcoBoost—the blats and burps and whirs that had struck some early obsessives watching guerrilla video of testing on YouTube—seemed to be winning everyone over as the engine was tuned.
“We don’t want to be overconfident,” said Raj Nair, Ford’s chief technical officer and overseer of both this new GT program and the previous generation from the mid-2000s, in a video Ford posted online.
“We’re almost kind of worried about how good it’s going,” he added. That would turn out to be an ominous statement.
The race started at precisely 2:40 p.m., but the lead-up consumed the entire morning and early afternoon, as fans were given the chance to walk the starting grid, check out the cars, and meet the drivers in person. The Ford GTs were the undisputed stars of the show, but the yellow Corvettes and red Ferraris drew their share of attention. Under the calm winter sun of central Florida, the machines glistened, pristine in their prerace preparation. By roughly this time tomorrow, they’d be encrusted with tire fragments sucked up from the track. Some would be gouged and dented from battle. A few would have their carbon-fiber fronts and flanks shredded by collisions with walls and other cars.
Half of Ford’s team and half of its race cars were on hand. (The rest were preparing for the FIA World Endurance Championship in Europe.) Like the cars, the drivers looked luminous in their racing suits. One thing almost everyone notices about pro drivers right away is they aren’t big guys. Some are tall, but none are really tall. And most are wiry and short, five foot six, five seven, five eight. This is self-selection and the Darwinism of racing. Big dudes don’t fit in the cars, and they add weight.
Joey Hand, thirty-six at the time, was in the number 66 car. I got to know him a bit during the season and had grown accustomed to his bent nose, which reminded me of the poet Frank O’Hara’s. But Hand has no poetic brooding in him; he’s a driver who’s cool and cheerful when not in the seat. He was joined in the 66 car by forty-year-old German driver Dirk Müller, a Le Mans veteran who won at Daytona in 2011 when racing for BMW; and Sébastien Bourdais, a bespectacled Frenchman, like Hand thirty-six years old, with half a dozen Indy 500s and three second-place Le Mans results in the top prototype class with Peugeot.
Thirty-four-year-old Australian Ryan Briscoe and forty-year-old Englishman Richard Westbrook were in the number 67 car, as was thirty-four-year-old German driver Stefan Mücke. Briscoe had come over to Ganassi’s team after a win at Daytona with Corvette Racing in 2015. Westbrook had run Daytona and Le Mans numerous times with Corvette, and joined Briscoe in defecting from the General Motors factory team to the new Ford factory team. Mücke’s last four runs at Le Mans in a GT car had been with Aston Martin.
All these GT drivers were in the Platinum category, the highest designation in competitive racing, and within each car they’d split the driving between them more or less equally.
In the pits, Chip Ganassi paced inside the Ford Performance tent, while his guys monitored data on screens and stayed on the radio with the drivers. It took me almost the entire spring and early summer racing seasons to nail Ganassi down long enough to chat about the pressure, but when we got our chance, he came through.
Ganassi is a native of Pittsburgh, still lives there, and has that taciturn steelworkers’ town in his blood. He has a reputation for chewing up journalists and spitting them out. He’s solidly built, even a bit paunchy, and his default expression is flinty. After fooling around with motorcycle racing, he started driving race cars professionally in his late teens and had some good results in his five outings at the Indy 500, including an eighth-place finish in 1983. A wreck a year later would send him into retirement, however, and into what in retrospect is clearly his true calling: founder, owner, and CEO of Chip Ganassi Racing.
In that role he’s raced in the IndyCar Series and captured four Indy 500 victories. He has also run in NASCAR, in addition to endurance racing. In person, he alternates between a calculating taciturnity and what might best be described as sudden jollity. Ganassi has figured out, it seems, all the moving parts of what it takes to be a successful racing-team owner. And there are many moving parts. But even he was taken aback by what he’d gotten himself into with the Ford Le Mans campaign.
“I had no idea the amount of passion that this program stirred in people,” he told me. “A lot of people remember the Ferrari-Ford battle. But I gotta be honest, if Ford had come back to Le Mans with a car that had a different shape to it, I don’t think it would be as interesting.” Then he laughed, loudly and freely.
“If they’d come back with something different—oh, I don’t know, a Mustang or something—I don’t think it would be as exciting! Call me crazy, but that’s what I think.”
This is how Chip Ganassi deals with his anxiety. He brings out his secretly wicked sense of humor, which combines with the pressures of the moment to reveal small truths, along with what he thinks about those truths. Talking to him, I was reminded of a great poker player, who stares you down through bet after bet on a big pot, with the chips piling up, never much changing that expression, making you think there’s nothing going on in that head, no possibility of a bluff.
And then when he has you, when you abruptly realize he had held the good cards all along and was just reeling you in, free of emotion, he cuts loose with the broad smile and the big guffaws as he throws down his winning hand and rakes in your chips. Thanks for playing the game, kid. Thanks for playing my game.
At Daytona, Ganassi’s big issue with the GTs had nothing to do with the cars. The problem was that he hadn’t been able to assert his usual control over the effort, and that this caused some chafing. He probably expected it, given the scale of Ford’s ambition. But he didn’t like it.
Henry Ford III, only thirty-three, hung back behind the racing professionals, expressionless but probably nervous as hell. Yet the burden of Ford’s 1966 achievement really wasn’t on him alone—the road to Le Mans was far more than a one-man show this time around.
The Audi R8 safety car led the field around for a few laps, the green flag was waved, and they were off. The 2016 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship had begun.
The GTs came out with guns blazing. Both the number 66 car, with Hand at the wheel, and the number 67, driven by Briscoe, turned fast laps. In short order, they were in the lead pack. But just as Ford fans were settling into that situation, disaster struck—not after hours of racing, but right away.
Briscoe’s number 67 car developed a gearbox problem—it was slipping from fifth to sixth gear. In his 2016 debut with Ganassi, in the hottest ride to hit endurance racing in a decade, Briscoe found himself unable to downshift after only about twenty-five laps. This meant he had no power when he needed it, to get out of the corners or to take it to the straights. For an agonizing half hour, the car sat on pit lane. But it couldn’t be repaired there and had to be pushed back to the garage.
Henry Ford III looked on pensively, a tinge of concern playing across his features, but he continued to greet reporters warmly. Ganassi, by contrast, was grim-faced. He had lots of work to do on the track. Not only was his organization handling the GTs, now in crisis, but he also had a car in the next class up, the so-called prototypes. That car would be his last in that dance, which he had already won six times at Daytona, most recently in 2015. He wouldn’t be back in that class in 2017. So he wanted to go out with a bang, repeating victory in 2016. That meant he had to manage the GT situation, while also keeping one eye on the prototype race happening on the track at the same time.
But the number 66 GT was performing well for the moment, in the afternoon sunshine. While Briscoe and 67 were out, number 66, driven by Joey Hand, surged into second place in the GTLM class, dueling with Ferrari.
Once the 67 car was in the garage, it became clear that it wouldn’t be returning to the race anytime soon. The problem was going to take a while to fix. Briscoe and his teammates had to wait it out.
The fact was that the 67 car had been having problems all week, through the qualifying rounds. In the garage, the rear spoiler was pulled off and a hulking crew member knelt on the massive carbon-fiber diffuser, before that too was removed. Replacement parts were hauled in. The tires came off, and the process of dismantling the entire rear end commenced.
The car had looked glorious just a few hours earlier, sleek and powerful, like a superhero. Now, it resembled a crippled combatant being treated at a field hospital.
Gearbox failures are vexing but not uncommon in endurance racing, where gears are being constantly and harshly shifted under extreme stress. The GTs’ gearshifts, in fact, had been a source of preoccupation for fans who had watched the car undergoing testing on YouTube videos for months before Daytona. The sound was like a sledgehammer striking an anvil, and when it was joined by that of the belching turbocharged V-6 engine, it caused fans’ heads to spin. “The New Ford GT on Track Sounds Violently Sick” was a Jalopnik headline after the videos aired.
An agonizing forty-five minutes after the failure, Briscoe was running again in the 67 car, but he was in fifty-third place overall, and he had an impossible amount of ground to make up over the next twenty-three hours. Unfortunately, the number 66 car was also in trouble. Hand’s car pitted at lap forty-two, and while the crew was undertaking a usually routine brake replacement—a process that should take only about two minutes—a brake line was damaged. The video feeds showed brake fluid dribbling onto pit lane, leaking like urine. It was a pathetic sight, and it ultimately put the 66 car well back on laps as well—and that was before it, too, had a gearbox failure and had to be pushed back to the paddock bays.
The 66 came back out with twenty hours to go, but though the race had really barely begun, the lap deficit for the GTs was already insurmountable. Both were running dead last in the GTLM class. Sure, they were fast, but they weren’t durable, and the combination of durable and fast is what wins the Rolex 24. Through the night and into the next day, Ganassi’s drivers turned fast lap after fast lap, slowly chewing their way up the standings, passing slower cars in the next class down and hoping that a few Porsches, BMWs, and Ferraris would hit their own patches of trouble—which, as it turns out, they did.
The Corvettes, on the other hand, were tanks. By the last half hour of the race, both cars and their drivers were given permission to go full out, and the finish was close, a drag race, with one Vette winning by a nose.
It was Ford versus Chevy versus Ferrari, old rivals taking one another on at the debut and the pinnacle of the U.S. endurance-racing season. On paper it sounded fantastic. But on the track, Daytona was a grueling disappointment for Ford—a monumental emotional blow. The numbers 66 and 67 GTs finished seventh and ninth in their class, respectively.
A week after the Daytona catastrophe, there was still plenty of postgame chatter about the GTs that had both spent so much precious time in the garage instead of turning lead laps on the track.
Two basic views emerged. One held that the cars’ struggles were to be expected. Sure, we’d seen the GT taking test laps, and while the turbocharged six-cylinder sounded pretty nasty at times, the car hadn’t looked as if it were going to break down.
Nor did Ford Performance suggest that there were any looming problems. At the Detroit auto show, just weeks before the GTs’ Daytona debut at the Rolex 24, Ford Performance’s boss, Dave Pericak, put any naysayers’ questions to rest, decisively: “We are ready to race,” he declared.
But Chip Ganassi was grumbling. There were too many cooks in the kitchen for his taste, too many points of view on the car. This was a marquee effort, and his struggle at the head of the racing team was to square what had to happen on and off the track with the rapidly building media frenzy around the GT and Ford’s return to Le Mans. Adding to Ganassi’s problems was his management of two semi-independent racing teams on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
He later confessed that he had worried about all this before Daytona and that his nightmares had come true. The highly accelerated timetable for getting the GT racing, in the United States and Europe, had been grating on him. But he was dealing with it. That’s what you do when you run the second-most-successful racing organization in history. You deal with the bullshit and move on.
By any reckoning, the Rolex 24 was going to be a tough start for the car. Yes, the GT had been bred for the track, with the race car and the road car developed simultaneously. The GT had thoroughbred written all over it—it looked shockingly more ferocious than anything else in the GTLM class, including the privateer Dodge Vipers and the new Ferrari 488s. It certainly struck anyone with eyes as more race car than the Corvettes that had been dominating the class. Compared with the GTs, the bright yellow Vettes were almost like NASCAR machines; a huge, supercharged V-8 sat under the hood, but the Vettes’ drivers and crews had to compensate for all that oomph and weight up front. Still, the Corvettes had shown that they were both pretty fast and superlatively reliable. What they lacked in flamboyance and daring design, they more than made up for with their solid nature. Simply put, they didn’t break.
Fans of the GT also noted that when the cars were running free of trouble, they ran very, very fast. Raw speed in a straight line and quickness into the corners equaled a perfect endurance-racing car—as long as the durability actually came through. In fact, how fast the GTs could consistently go would create a minor controversy and some grumbling during the season, especially in Europe—and that grumbling would burst into public view just one day before Le Mans.
The other view that emerged after Daytona was the argument that the car wasn’t ready for prime time, and that Ford had been served a bit of karmic comeuppance, after promoting its return to endurance racing quite avidly for a year. The mutterings I heard around the car-show circuit prior to the Rolex 24 suggested that Ford was not in for an easy time; even though Ferrari wasn’t running a factory team, it was debuting its own mid-engine sports car, and the drivers working for the privateer outfits were some of the best in the business.
“They’re going to bleed red”—that was how Ferrari’s drivers would approach the lead-up to Le Mans and their somewhat involuntary role as the foils to Ford’s efforts to revisit upon Ferrari the humiliation of 1966.
As it turned out, Ferrari just missed out on a third-place finish at Daytona. The 488s were quick, but they couldn’t hang with the Corvettes on the huge, banked curves and straightaways of the NASCAR sections of the track, where the Vettes’ power plants found drag-racing heaven. The in-car video feeds told the story, as the TV and radio commentators were happy to remind anyone tuned in over the course of the twenty-four hours. “Just listen to the sound of a big American V-8 at full, growling, heavy-metal song,” one said.
The GTs, meanwhile—those very pretty, very technologically advanced GTs, custom-sculpted from carbon fiber by Multimatic—had languished in the Ganassi garage, their carefully crafted red-white-and-blue body panels scattered around the cars as mechanics dug into the internals and engineers looked on with consternation and concern.
I wasn’t surprised the GTs had problems. Practice is practice, and racing is racing. It’s a truism in motorsports, especially apt in endurance racing, where the format is intended to break the cars. One of the Porsche 911s at Daytona, after running impeccably for over twenty hours, basically exploded. It was pushed back to the garage to finish out the race in a widening puddle of engine oil oozing from its destroyed flat-six.
The GT was without question a fast car. It goes without saying that racing requires fast. The Vettes had it flat out. The Ferraris had it in the twisty parts. But the GTs had it everywhere. And they weren’t that much slower than the 1,000-horsepower prototypes they shared the Daytona course with. In fact, one of the two GTs posted the fastest GTLM lap time for the entire race, and both cars turned some of the fastest laps on the track as they fought to catch up from their deep deficits. But the 1965 GTs were fast cars, too. The reliability, however, was up for debate; the GTs that had taken on Le Mans that year were all retired.
Would the story of the GT end with an epic victory, as in 1966? Or was Daytona a bad omen?
Dave Pericak had thought the GTs were ready to race. A twenty-two-year veteran of Ford, Pericak wasn’t a guy to make lighthearted declarations that he intended to twist around later when they didn’t pan out. He was all business, all the time, although he was also quick to grin, and his determination never seemed to cause him misery. Ford had given him responsibility for probably its most important vehicle, the Mustang, and had asked him to oversee as chief engineer the creation of a new model for 2015.
“Dave did a great job with Mustang,” Mark Fields told me. “So we put him in charge of Ford Performance.”
No big deal, right? His job before had been to not screw up the most famous sports car Ford had ever created, and now he was being asked to not screw up one of the biggest returns to racing in the history of the sport. And not only the CEO was watching; the entire Ford family was, as well.
A compact, intense man, Pericak shares with professional racers that ability to peer deeply into the future, to imagine not just the next curve but the endless deluge of them that makes up an endurance race that starts in daylight, runs through the darkness, and concludes long after the sun has risen.
“We were very happy with how the car performed,” Pericak told me. “But we were very disappointed with its durability.”
He admitted that the entire return to Le Mans to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the win was run “at light speed,” and he showed plenty of humility when he said he wished the program had had more time. But I heard the frustration in his voice—the sense that Ford Performance and Multimatic had let down the drivers and the company.
“I take everything personally,” Pericak said, holding back on throwing blame around. “The way the cars struggled tore me apart inside, but I don’t let it get me down. Outwardly, there’s not a bigger cheerleader for the team than me.”
The critical failure with the number 66 and 67 cars turned out to be minor and race-day fluky: a small actuator had failed. But Pericak pointed out that it was actually better for the GTs to share a fault than to have separate ones. Different problems would double the troubleshooting. A bad gearbox could be fixed, and without forcing a switch in transmission suppliers, in the four GTs that would, as Pericak said, in a return to his brand of straightforward, borderline-cocky language, “stage an assault on Le Mans.”
But his confidence wasn’t being restored without some shame. Ford had been promoting the GT and its return to racing for a year. The drivers were among the best in the business, on both sides of the Atlantic. Chip Ganassi Racing knew what it was doing. For months, the drivers had been praising the car. They were ready to go. But almost immediately, the GT wasn’t.
“I told Chip and the team that they had done an amazing job,” Pericak said. The next part came without a beat. “But we owe them a durable race car.” The next part came even faster. “There’s never been a car more born to race than this one. And we all have skin in the game.”
But nobody from Ford left Daytona either soaked in Champagne or sporting a new Rolex watch.
The game would now move on to the 12 Hours of Sebring in March. For Pericak, for Ganassi, for the Ford brass, and for the GTs, the pressure would be cranked up about as high as it could go. After all, they were out to repeat history.