The Road to Le Mans:
Sebring and Long Beach
The Rolex 24 at Daytona had to be forgotten and filed away, but not without Ford Performance and Chip Ganassi Racing learning a couple of important lessons. Multimatic had to sort out the gearbox problems that had doomed the debut in Daytona.
Luckily, they were minor. It was an easy fix—the design of the dual-clutch six-speed was fine, but the durability of the failed actuator valves had to be sorted out. Other problems were just weird: damage to the massive carbon-fiber air diffuser that extends at track level from the GT’s rear, underneath the aerodynamic wing; a cut tire on the number 66 that appeared before anyone figured out it was compromised; and some electronic bugs. All of it could be chalked up to a battle plan that didn’t survive first contact with the enemy.
Meanwhile, the EcoBoost turbo V-6 looked solid as hell. The full team just had to make sure the drivers could shift gears and that crews wouldn’t commit screwups on pit stops.
Everyone also now knew that in competition, the GT was fast. This wouldn’t necessarily pay off for the U.S. drivers until they got to Le Mans. But for the European team, the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium in May, just about a month before Le Mans, would present a good opportunity to show the GTs at their quickest on a big European track with plenty of room to run. Daytona had to be learned from but filed away.
“In racing, it’s good to forget,” Joey Hand told me. This was hard-won wisdom. Hand was intimately aware of what happens when the brain starts to interfere with the driving. “I’ve had some big wrecks in my day. If something goes wrong, it’s going to hurt. But you’re not going to be quick if you’re concerned about that.”
This is something those who drive fast for a living are surprisingly good at: coming up with pithy words to summarize their way of life. Screenwriters have been giving characters lines like this forever. But somehow, when they come from a real driver, they sound fresh and wise.
Obviously, it isn’t just about the person behind the wheel. The car is a major factor. All other things being equal, as the lead-up to Le Mans progressed in late winter and spring of 2016, it became clear that the Ford GT was a car that could do it all. It was fast in a straight line, but it had fantastic handling in the corners—“it turns with braking really well; I can drive it on the brakes,” Hand said—and its limits extended beyond the boundaries competing cars could push for.
It was also an easy car to drive. “I jumped right in and felt at home right away,” Hand said. “It’s not just a badass-looking car.” But at base, Hand was a racing realist. “We’re the new kids on the block.” he said, “We have a lot of people who have done this before. But it’s our first time to Le Mans as a group, so we have to do everything right.”
After Daytona, which took place at the end of January, the North American GTs would stay in Florida for the 12 Hours of Sebring in mid-March. Then they had two California courses to look forward to: the Long Beach street circuit in mid-April and the Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca on May 1. These latter two were slower tracks with a lot of turns, where factors such as driving skill, brake durability, and fuel and tire strategy play a bigger role than raw speed.
Daytona had revealed that the car had issues—hardly a surprise, although the gearbox gremlins hadn’t shown up during extensive testing prior to the IMSA WeatherTech season kickoff, and other teams in various Le Mans classes were using the Ricardo transmissions that were giving the GT so much trouble.
But the car was also capable of scorching the track, surging straight into the lead pack when everything was properly firing, as Joey Hand had discovered at Daytona, when he was able to confidently mix in with the Porsche 911s and Ferrari 488s until the pit-stop mishap knocked his GT out of the race and off the lead lap. And Ganassi, despite all the problems, was in love with the GT.
“In this series, there’s always a new car,” he told me. “And with a new car, you look to have one that does what it’s supposed to do. And that’s what this car does. You make a change and something changes. You’re personalizing the car for the drivers and the conditions. Some cars won’t let you do that. This car does. It responds well to change, and that’s the sign of a good car.”
Ford rolled with the punches meted out by the early problems and setbacks and concentrated on getting ready for the remaining races in Florida and California before Le Mans, and on preparing for the European team’s April debut at Silverstone in England.
The six drivers Ganassi had ready to strap into their new GTs in Europe were enthusastic about the car, but of course part of getting the job was agreeing to stay on message—they weren’t going to complain about a brand-new ride that was under the media microscope as it made its run at Le Mans history.
The U.S. races that followed Daytona gave Ford and Ganassi the chance to sort out the GT’s mechanical issues and gave the North American drivers plenty of opportunities to lay down good laps. Sebring was a major improvement over Daytona; the numbers 66 and 67 cars finished eighth and fifth, respectively. It might have gone better for Richard Westbrook and the 67 car but for a slide off the track with only ten minutes remaining on the twelve-hour clock. Up to that point he had been battling for a podium position. The 66 car also ran well, but with Dirk Müller in the seat during a period of rain, the GT hydroplaned in the first turn of the course—which is notorious for its uneven, unpredictable surface—and spent two hours in the garage being patched up. A lucky red flag held the field in the pits, however, while the weather cleared, and by the time Müller, Hand, and Sébastien Bourdais’s ride was back on the track, a top ten was still in the cards.
The Ford brass wasn’t exactly ecstatic about finishing fifth and eighth, but it was an improvement after Daytona. In his post-race comments, Raj Nair focused on the GT’s reliability, which hadn’t been a repeat issue. Lingering in the back of his mind, as well, was the GT’s speed, which was a repeat virtue from Daytona. Ford and Multimatic had built the GT to be fast, aiming to win races from the lead, and in the United States, velocity had been a consistent plus for the cars in their first two races.
The Long Beach race the following month showcased some additional GT capabilities. It could handle well on a tight track. But the racecourse, laid out on city streets, didn’t allow the IMSA drivers to totally cut loose and hammer the cars down nice, long straightaways. For that they would have to wait for Le Mans and the Mulsanne, which, if the gearbox issues didn’t recur and the drivers could keep the GTs on the track and out of the paddock, could be an ace in the hole for Ford’s comeback. But although the gearbox malfunctions weren’t a challenge to overcome, racing has a way of throwing up new and often terrifying struggles, always when you least expect it.
The Bubba Burger Sports Car Grand Prix—definitely the oddest race name on the 2016 IMSA schedule—on the nearly two-mile, claustrophobic Long Beach circuit would see Ford Chip Ganassi Racing and driver Richard Westbrook briefly face down a team’s and a driver’s worst nightmare: fire.
It happened during practice laps on the Friday before the race weekend, when a fuel leak caused an engine fire as Westbrook was getting used to the GT on the legendary, and legendarily bumpy, Long Beach street circuit, which in the late 1970s and early ’80s hosted a Formula One race (won by Mario Andretti in 1977). More recently, it has been home to an IndyCar event. A fountain, complete with leaping dolphins, marks the middle of the course.
Westbrook was able to escape his burning GT no worse for wear, but the blaze was disturbing. No sooner had the team gotten a handle on the problems from Daytona, and enjoyed a glitch-free Sebring, than the worst threat imaginable cropped up. Pro drivers are mostly fearless, but they’re all terrified, down deep, of suffering the fate of Niki Lauda, the Austrian three-time Formula One champion, who in 1976 crashed at the German Grand Prix, at the Nürburgring track, and was disfigured by fire when he was trapped in his car. (Lauda recovered admirably from the trauma, which sent him into a short coma, by capturing the F1 championship the following year and again in 1984 after coming out of retirement. The Nürburgring remains an important track, but it’s no longer used in F1.)
It was ironic that the fire would knock Westbrook’s number 67 car out of qualifying, forcing him and his teammates to start at the back of the pack, because just a few days prior to the mishap, in a blog post for Dailysportscar.com, Westbrook had confessed his affection for the Long Beach circuit. “I love street circuits full stop, but Long Beach is a great one,” he wrote, before characterizing the tight-quarter racing as “more a case of one eye backwards, one eye forwards, rather than both eyes forwards.”
The burned car had to be repaired, and this was where the brotherhood of motorsport, or at least motorsport mechanics, entered the picture: both the Corvette and the Porsche teams offered to help Ford out.
By the time the 100-minute race was ready to start on Saturday, April 16, number 67 was back in action and would just miss out on third place, as Porsche took first, Corvette Racing placed second, and an impressive privateer Ferrari team from Risi Competizione captured third. It was a stunning result for Westbrook’s car, which had for all practical purposes been crippled just twenty-four hours earlier. “We fought at the sharp end all race long and finished on the lead lap,” he wrote in a blog post. “Daytona we were 30 laps down and nowhere.”
Sadly, a malfunction with the number 66 GT’s scissor-door hinge doomed it to making up lost laps and ultimately an eighth-place result. By this point, despite their optimism and faith in the GT, the drivers had every right to express frustration and maybe even blame bad luck: gimpy gearboxes, cut tires, a freak fire, spinouts in the rain, and a funky door. But even though they weren’t getting the payoff, the cars were running hard and fast. So they had to remind themselves of that, while focusing on the positives.
“I had fun out there,” Dirk Müller said after the race, brushing off the door problem with his number 66 car and preferring to dwell on his quick late lap of just under one minute, eighteen seconds. His teammate Ryan Briscoe would argue that the number 67 car, despite starting from the rear, was running so well that it could have nipped Ferrari for a podium opportunity.
Despite the good vibes coming from the drivers, the uneven and by some estimates disappointing results for the North American GT team were leading to considerable speculation that Le Mans in 2016 would be a nice commemoration of the 1966 win for Ford, but probably not an opportunity to drink any Champagne on Sunday afternoon after twenty-four hours of racing. As the end of April neared, the GTs had been pushed around in their racing class by Porsches, Corvettes, BMWs, and Ferraris. The car itself was a hot-looking piece of superlative technology, but it was taking its time serving up much more than a handful of impressive laps. Ominously, none of the races in the United States after Daytona had matched in duration what the GTs would confront in France, and for the European GTs, Le Mans would be the team’s first all-day, all-night contest.
What the motorsport pundits and Le Mans veterans had told me before the season started was ringing true. It wasn’t that Ford wasn’t ready to race, as Dave Pericak had put it several months earlier at the Detroit auto show—it was that Ford simply didn’t have enough experience in sports-car competition yet, on the national stage, with cars in this league. Maybe Raj Nair was right, and the retake–Le Mans campaign should have started in 2015. A real possibility of a Ford embarrassment loomed, when what the world had expected back in mid-2015 was a poetic coronation. Panic wasn’t really an option, so Ford Performance and Ganassi continued to focus on one race at a time.
And then the GTs’ luck started to turn, in a big way and at the best possible time.