The GT40
If given the opportunity, I could probably jump into the new Ford GT race car and get around the Circuit de la Sarthe in passable fashion. It’s not that different from the road car, or from any other modern supercar that’s been modified for racing. The tricky part would be getting used to driving in a racing suit, wearing a helmet and gloves. The car has a dual-clutch transmission that makes shifting gears fairly simple; there’s no clutch on the floor. It has power steering. There’s even a hydration system, for sending fluids along a tube to the helmet. The biggest challenge would be getting comfortable in the snug interior, but I’m not a big guy, and tight little sports cars have never been a problem for me.
The GT40 that raced at Le Mans is a completely different story. To a twenty-first-century sensibility—to people raised on technology, never far from central air-conditioning—the rudimentary nature of a 1960s race car is borderline appalling. Cars were basically all engine and tires, with the body shaped as tightly around those two elements as possible. Driver comfort and ergonomics matter nowadays, but in the mid-1960s, if you complained that a car wasn’t comfortable, you could quit being a real driver and explore job prospects for chauffeurs. The GT40 was true to this harsh ideal. The enormous engine filled the entire rear of the car. The tires were huge. The rest of the car, including the driver, was just along for the ride.
And what a ride it was. At 2,682 pounds, the GT40 was only slightly heavier than a Mini Cooper, the small car recently created by BMW as an homage to the influential original Mini designed by Alec Issigonis in the late 1950s. But Mini Coopers don’t put out 485 horsepower, or attempt to surpass 200 miles per hour on the Mulsanne Straight. There were several reasons the GT40 won Le Mans four years in a row in the mid- to late 1960s, and speed was definitely one of them. The car was just so, so fast.
There’s a place called Classic Car Club in Manhattan—a sort of hyper-elevated rental-car agency for automotive enthusiasts who are willing to pay big bucks to have new McLarens and vintage Porsches at their disposal. Operating out of a warehouse on the Hudson River, with an Airstream trailer for an office, Classic Car Club also has a replica GT40. It’s not the real thing, but a close approximation, done up in the famous Gulf livery that motorsports enthusiasts are obsessed with, a combination of turquoise and orange.
The first thing you notice about the GT40 is that it’s small. You expect such a historic machine, even a copy, to be imposing—but it isn’t. That’s because it’s about the size of a modern compact sedan and is essentially a thin shell of aerodynamic sheet metal wrapped around a lightweight skeleton, with a massive V-8 engine dropped in behind the driver’s head. Enormous tires complete the picture.
It’s a beautiful thing, but in a way blunt. You can gaze upon a sculptural Jaguar E-Type—which Enzo Ferrari called the most beautiful car ever—or a fiberglass-bodied Corvette from the Boogie Nights era of the 1970s, or a Porsche 911 from the 1980s, or a Lamborghini Miura, or a Dino Ferrari (named for Enzo’s deceased son), or even many of the lovely Ferrari road cars designed by Pininfarina and built in the 1950s and ’60s that now fetch tens of millions at auctions, and you may respond as if you’re appreciating an authentic piece of fine art.
I’ve never been able to do that with the GT40. Its beauty is more rude, purposeful. The new GT, by contrast, is a stunner, with a far more attractive design than its illustrious forebear had. The flying buttresses and the tightly sweeping lines of the rear end guarantee that. It’s a car with drama.
The GT40 has often been described as “industrial.” It contrasted vividly with the Ferrari 330 P3, at least visually. Under the hood, the rival cars for the 1966 running of Le Mans were very different, with Ford’s immense 7.0-liter V-8 outclassing the 330’s 4.0-liter V-12. But on the outside, the 330 P3 was everything that makes a Ferrari a Ferrari. (The P stands for “prototype,” which in the 1960s was the vehicle class that, as today, aimed for outright wins in Le Mans and other endurance races; the GT40 would also compete in this class, even though it carried the “GT” name.) The 330 was, naturally, rosso corsa, but it was also an elegant combination of the fine-boned and the utterly burly, with a delicate and curvaceous front end flowing boldly up to form the powerful front fenders before tucking in over the doors, then surging upward again to form the even more powerful rear haunches. The windshield was almost a half bubble, and the roof curved smoothly down over the engine compartment in a fastback style, ending at the integrated rear spoiler. It was a magnificent essay in Italian racing design, visual poetry carved from aluminum.
Next to that the GT40 looked like a slab of metal, albeit with a pair of arrogant hood scoops. The 330 P3 delivered the impression that it would obliterate all comers on the track, simply by conquering them with beauty. Its sheer prettiness was daunting. And its predecessors had set a standard, winning Le Mans from 1960 to 1965. That run included triumphs in the face of Ford’s first efforts with its new GT cars, the early Mark I versions, which tackled Le Mans unsuccessfully in 1964 and 1965. (Those cars ran with smaller engines, displacing 4.2 liters.)
What really distinguished the GTs from the Ferrari aesthetically was that the Ferraris were holistic in their design and engineering attitude, with the bodywork and the engine and the wheels and tires all adding up to a create an impression far greater than the sum of their parts. The GTs, meanwhile, were designed and built in England, with Ford engines provided; they could be more accurately described as “platforms” for racing, relying on a tried-and-true formula. A small, lightweight, aerodynamic chassis was combined with a big engine to produce speed, and lots of it. Sure, there were also reliability and handling to consider, but the basics were the basics. Besides, Ford didn’t have time to overthink the design, and as it turned out, the platform supplied an unexpected level of flexibility.
The initial GT40s, the Mark I models, were a disappointment, performing poorly in 1964, with Le Mans a total wash. This was when Carroll Shelby joined up, displacing his former racing partner, John Wyer, the Englishman who had overseen the first GT40 Le Mans campaign.
Shelby was an experienced driver—he had won Le Mans in 1959, in an Aston Martin—and an automotive innovator. His first creation was the AC Cobra, an utterly bonkers car that was both devastatingly attractive and comically fast. As the Mark I racers were faltering in 1964, Shelby’s Cobra won the GT class. That car was something of a general template for the first GT40s, in that it was a lightweight AC roadster with a 4.7-liter Ford V-8 under the hood up front. And it got Shelby—a Texas chicken farmer, who had a taste for speed, the talent to construct great cars and win races in Europe, and an iron will forged from overcoming a sickly childhood—noticed in Dearborn.
In addition to the Cobra and the GT40, Shelby would develop a series of high-performance Mustangs for Ford. These cars have lived on in Ford’s contemporary portfolio since the early 2000s, with big engines and Cobra badging. Along the way, Shelby, who passed away in 2012 at the age of eighty-nine, also participated in the development of one of the wildest sports cars ever conceived in Detroit, the Dodge Viper. The long-hooded, low-to-the-ground beast debuted in 1992, with a massive 8.0-liter V-10 cranking out 400 horsepower, which at the time was dismaying power.
Shelby notoriously had a bum heart, even as far back as the early 1960s. But that didn’t stop him from taking up the charge for Ford to beat Ferrari at Le Mans. Shelby knew what the secret was to a winning Le Mans car, but his knowledge wouldn’t yield victory until 1966, two years after the first GT40 Mark I hit the Circuit de la Sarthe. For several years, Shelby would struggle with unreliable early versions of the GT40.
One of the secrets he had hit upon was in the brakes. More accurately, it was how quickly the brakes could be changed. Again, as with so much about Le Mans, it came down to the Mulsanne Straight. It was just over three and a half miles, run at speeds clocking at 200-plus miles per hour. At the end of it, a tight corner forced drivers to saw their speed in half. Again and again, the brakes were subjected to perhaps the single most demanding challenge for brakes ever devised.
The stresses were so severe in the 1960s that the rotors—the cast-iron plates that the calipers clamp onto to slow the car—could crack. And a race car without brakes isn’t much of a race car. Braking really is the secret sauce of competitive driving; the pros don’t hold back on speed when they have the chance to run flat out, but on winding, twisting road courses (as opposed to high-speed ovals), they need superb and reliable brakes, because they quite literally slam them down without hesitation. From Shelby’s perspective, the brakes made all the difference.
With the driver and a full fuel load of just over forty gallons, the GT40s weighed about 4,000 pounds, and most of the weight was engine. As Shelby explained, the kinetic energy built up on the Mulsanne, and the braking demand on the hard corner at the end of it, would destroy the brakes in two or three hours.
“You really had to manage the brakes, because at the end of the Mulsanne Straight they would be cold and then subjected to tremendous heat as you slowed from 220 mph,” said Chris Amon, who had shared the driving with Bruce McLaren in the winning GT40 in 1966.
So Ford had a choice: design a longer-lasting braking system or figure out how to change the brakes faster. The latter won out. Shelby credited Phil Remington, whom he called an “old hot rodder,” with coming up with a way to switch out the brakes in a minute. Endurance races in the 1960s pivoted on little things like that.
Shelby’s tale of what actually captured the Le Mans wins back then is also indicative of how the mid-1960s assault was a frustrating, fitful undertaking. The 1964 and 1965 cars weren’t equal to the monumental task at hand. Life was indeed slower in those days, even as America raced the Soviets to put a man on the moon. Memos were still typed. People sent letters in the mail. Computers were the size of rooms. Air travel was a novelty, although a new global “jet set” had arrived. A working day was peppered with coffee breaks and smoke breaks, and executives often retired for the afternoon after their three-martini lunches. Henry Ford II didn’t hold back on the cigarettes or the scotch. His goal wasn’t to beat Ferrari immediately. It was to beat Ferrari soon, and then to keep on beating him, and to prove that Ford’s technologies were just as good as the best the Europeans had to offer.
Ford was prepared to be patient, although the dismal outings of the GT40 Mark I in 1964 and 1965 did bring about the most apparent major change to the car, which was the increase in engine size. Enzo Ferrari didn’t worry about this enough, although his lieutenants knew that it would be hard for any European manufacturer, not just Ferrari, to keep pace with the monster American power plants.
For Shelby and the rest of the engineers continuing to labor away at Henry II’s Le Mans objective, the bigger engine was a given.
The GT40 Mark II was, eventually, the game changer. Speed hadn’t been the issue for the Mark I—it was on paper and in testing faster than the 330 P3. Reliability was. All three GT40 Mark I cars failed to finish Le Mans in 1964.
In 1965, the first two Mark II GT40s with the 7.0-liter V-8 journeyed to the Circuit de la Sarthe, joined by several examples of the Mark I entered by non-Ford-factory teams. None finished—the race was won by a North American Ferrari team founded by Enzo’s old friend Luigi Chinetti—but Shelby now knew how he could fix the GT40’s key mechanical problem. The new V-8 was, understandably, a fuel hog, making for too many pit stops. So it had to get lighter. The GT40’s aerodynamics also had to be improved, to keep it on the track, and the gearbox would need to be upgraded to handle the malevolent torque that the big engine was capable of sending to the rear wheels. The GT40 had been steadily tweaked for three years, demonstrating that the basic architecture of the car was solid and that Ford hadn’t been bingeing on hubris in believing that it was possible to go from nowhere to the winner’s circle in endurance racing.
The changes could all be swiftly achieved, in time for the beginning of the 1966 season, at the first-ever twenty-four-hour race at Daytona. The Florida race would be the ideal test for the Mark II headed into Le Mans, and the revamped car lived up to Shelby’s and Ford’s ambitions. Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby drove the car to victory, and anticipation built for a Ford-Ferrari rematch in France six months later.
The bottom line was that Shelby, with Ford’s backing, had refused to give up on the car. Maybe there was some personal animosity between the crusty Texan and Enzo Ferrari, a residue from Shelby’s racing days. (According to A. J. Baime’s book Go Like Hell, Shelby considered Enzo a reckless, win-at-all-costs taskmaster, unconcerned about the lives of his drivers.) But ultimately, the creation of the most famous Le Mans racer of all time was deeply American. Problems arose, and problems were solved. The car got better. It was prepared to win.