One-Two-Three
The 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966 has moved on in the consciousness of even casual racing fans from the status of lore to legend. It has inspired books and spurred Hollywood to make movies about motorsports.
At Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters, 1966 stands as arguably the automaker’s greatest moment, a time when the racetrack and the boardroom operated on the same plane, with the same priorities. The 1966 Le Mans win has come to stand for American self-confidence, for the magical blending of the automobile as a national icon and as an instrument of speed, for the astounding bravery of the men who drove the GT40 Mark IIs in France on that June weekend, for Ford’s technological excellence, for Carroll Shelby’s determination, and even for Henry Ford’s vision in starting the company in the first place, thereby setting the entire glorious thing in motion.
The thing is, when you study the actual race more closely, you realize that Ford had it won almost from the beginning, when the French tricolor flag was waved and the drivers dashed from the pits to the waiting cars on the starting grid—the classic Le Mans start, which was jettisoned in 1970.
(In a tragic piece of Le Mans history, Belgian driver Jacky Ickx made a leisurely stroll to his Ford GT40 in 1969 and took the extra time to completely strap in while the rest of the field tore off. He started in last place and eventually won, but his gesture was a protest against the dangerous Le Mans start. His actions turned out to be prescient, when John Woolfe suffered a fatal crash in his Porsche in the very first lap.)
The main technical issue for the GT40 Mark II cars that would be entered in the race rested with their huge 7.0-liter V-8s. Ford was betting that speed would triumph over handling. The Ferrari 330 P3s were lighter and quicker in the corners, but their engines were half as big in terms of displacement. The Ferraris were going to get clobbered on the Mulsanne Straight. But the Fords were also going to have to slow all that extra weight down, and that could send them to the pits for extra brake changes, in addition to the additional stops to refuel.
But there’s a saying in automotive circles: “No replacement for displacement.” And on the Circuit de la Sarthe, the importance of velocity on the Mulsanne couldn’t be overestimated.
The new GT40s had been scaring the living bejesus out of their drivers for months before Le Mans. They were just so very fast. It was a real test of skill to manage all that surging power, those mountains of torque. During Le Mans practice several months earlier, a driver had been cranking out faster and faster laps—with times that would have been impressive in 2016 for the GT Pro class—until he lost control of the car and smashed it to pieces.
But the drivers all knew what they’d signed up for. Because Le Mans was defined by such high speeds, it was known for horrific crashes that maimed or killed drivers. Every single time you got into a Le Mans car, as you strapped in and made that first run through the gears, roaring under the Dunlop Bridge and into the turns known as the Esses that precede the Mulsanne, you took a good hard look at death. And death looked right back and laughed at you, taunted you, said you’d been a stupid, stupid man to pick this job and that the two of you might have a meeting scheduled, quite possibly out there in the French darkness at 200 miles per hour.
Ford and Ferrari both came to Le Mans in force. Eight new GT40 Mark IIs and sixteen drivers formed Ford’s army, while the Ferrari fleet consisted of seven 330 P3s and fourteen drivers. For the sake of comparison, the copiously funded Ford factory effort in 2016 would see four GTs and twelve drivers line up on the grid.
Objectively, you had to scrutinize those numbers and conclude that it was a Ford-Ferrari race and that everybody else would be a spectator.
And that’s the way it shook out. Henry Ford II served as the starter for the thirty-fourth running of the race, and in the first half, it was a battle between the Ferraris and the Fords, with the Ferraris leading. But by the time Henry II had helicoptered back to his hotel from the track to wait out the night, the rain had started to fall and the Ferraris had started to fail.
Fortunes had been reversed. Now it was Ferrari’s new car that was unreliable, while Ford’s machines could go the distance. Through the darkness, the Fords bolstered their lead, while the Ferraris collapsed.
By morning, it wasn’t even a race anymore. The Ferraris that were left in the contest had no chance of catching the Fords. So the 24 Hours of Le Mans boiled down to a series of frantic political conversations. It was in fact the second political conundrum to emerge during the race. Early on, the GT40 driven by Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon had been shredding Firestone tires. Ford and Firestone were tight, but McLaren—a racing innovator who had just taken the plunge with his own Formula One team—had a deal with Goodyear and was told that if he could convince the Goodyear reps in attendance to allow him to run on Goodyears, that was his call. McLaren didn’t hesitate, and after some quick discussions, he had four Goodyears on his and Amon’s GT40.
But daybreak brought the truly challenging politics to the fore—regrettably, they would undermine what could have been one of the most memorable finishes in the history of auto racing.
The Deuce had returned to the circuit, only to encounter a furious debate about how Ford should stage the finish. With winning almost in the bag, the idea was to have the three leading Fords cross the finish line at the same time, on the last lap of the twenty-four hours. This brought up an obvious question: Who should win the race?
In the pits and the paddock, the idea was that no one should. The result would be a tie between the top two cars. The GT40 driven by Ken Miles and Denny Hulme was in front of the Ford helmed by Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon, and another GT40 was a dozen laps farther back. This third car had been entered by Holman & Moody, which was sort of the Multimatic of its day, a specialist racing fabricator that constructed race cars for Ford.
Initially, the fix was in. Ford and the Shelby team were on board, even though they thought that Ken Miles should get a shot at winning the race outright, given that he had taken firsts at Daytona and at a rainy, deadly, chaotic Sebring race earlier in the season. The Holman & Moody GT40 was strategically permitted to catch up to the lead Shelby GT40s in the waning hours of Le Mans; the third car would finish a distant third, but the Fords would cross the line as a group. And then the technicality of all technicalities doomed Ford’s publicity stunt.
Race officials informed the racing teams that McLaren and Amon’s car had started farther back on the grid than Miles and Hulme’s. If the two cars crossed the line at the same instant, the McLaren-Amon GT40 would have traveled a greater distance in the twenty-four-hour period and would therefore be the winner. You win Le Mans by getting in the most laps during the time frame of the race.
That was what Ken Miles thought. But Ford had other ideas, and in any case, even when everyone figured out that the one-two-three photo for the finish wasn’t going to reflect an actual three-way tie, it was too late. Miles, a Brit who had come on board as a test driver for Shelby, had become a racing legend in southern California but hadn’t made a big name for himself on the world’s grandest stages. The year 1966 was his best shot, and he was dismayed that Ford would deny him the triple victory, of Daytona, Sebring, and Le Mans, for something as irrelevant to a driver as a photo op. He had driven hard for a day and a night and into another day.
Miles had bucked authority in his time with the Ford effort; he was a California guy and tight with Shelby. McLaren and Amon, meanwhile, were great drivers, and McLaren was increasingly an international racing celebrity. But they were from New Zealand, a faraway place no one in America had ever heard of. (It was close to Australia, right?)
In the end—and it was a bitter end that has always tainted the result—the drivers followed orders, and Miles came in second while McLaren finished first. It would be Miles’s last chance to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Just a few months later, he was killed testing a new GT40 prototype in California for Shelby—a faster and more durable model called the J-car. He was forty-seven years old. McLaren would also soon meet his end. He perished in a crash in 1970, also while testing a new car design. He was thirty-two.
Auto racing was appallingly dangerous in the 1960s. Numerous men had died in the years leading up to Ford’s win in ’66, but in those days, that was considered the price of doing business. It was one of the factors that animated Carroll Shelby’s dislike of Enzo Ferrari, but it wasn’t as if Shelby didn’t play along. The assumption was that if you were a driver, you didn’t just know the risks; you welcomed them. Winners didn’t just beat the competition—they beat death.
This nihilistic attitude would be forced out of racing by the Scottish driver Jackie Stewart in the 1970s. Stewart demanded that new barriers between the track and the fans be constructed, and that drivers be required to wear seat belts and more advanced helmets. By the 1980s, auto racing had become far safer.
The sad truth is that fans continually over-romanticize the racing era of the 1960s and ’70s. Motorsport was on an even footing with other major sports at that time, featuring competitors who captured the public’s imagination. Their exploits behind the wheel brought Hollywood stars into the game, men like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, who actually finished second overall at Le Mans in 1979, driving a Porsche sponsored by Hawaiian Tropic outfitted in wildly colorful livery. Speed had menace, danger, and sexiness—it was like a drug, for a culture that was suffused with drugs.
It took the heroes of this period, the drivers themselves, to force the changes that would give pro racers a much better chance to enjoy a full career and a long family life. The most terrifying tracks were tamed or retired. The racing teams and the manufacturers began to concentrate on driver safety as a first priority, building the car out from a safety cage that was designed to remain intact in a crash, while the entire vehicle shredded around the driver, absorbing the deadly energy of a impact. Racing went from being a glamorous cult of death to what it should have been all along—a sublime celebration of speed. To be sure, drivers still die at the wheel. But many more things have to go wrong than in the good old days, when a mere tire puncture could send a man to racing Valhalla.
In 1966, every driver who got behind the wheel expected, in some part of himself, to die. That was the most basic initial emotional obstacle that Miles and McLaren and all the other GT40 racers had to overcome. Soldiers in combat have to deal with something close to that. In 2016, every driver who got behind the wheel expected that his brilliantly designed and engineered car would save his life if the worst that could happen did take place.
Both states of mind freed the drivers to race. But in 1966, if you won Le Mans, your celebration on the podium meant that you toasted your survival. You drank not just to victory but to life. In 2016, if Ford’s drivers were the first GTE Pro competitors to take the checkered flag, they would toast a simpler victory. The stakes might not seem as high, but they’d still have driven very, very fast.