Silverstone,
Laguna Seca, and Spa
The biggest difference between the Ford GT’s European and American racing debuts was the climate. Daytona had been an awful outing, but the Florida sunshine was warm and benevolent. The six-hour race at Silverstone took place in mid-April, and the weather was initially looking as if it was not going to cooperate. On April 16, a day before the race, the temperature climbed only into the mid- to high thirties Fahrenheit, and a snowstorm blew through the seventy-year-old venue, about sixty miles north of London in the English Midlands.
That meant difficult conditions and rain tires during qualifying, but the Ford drivers made the best of it, even though one of the two cars endured yet another gearbox issue that limited its shifting to third and fourth gears—fortunately, right in the GT’s sweet spot, so that a strong lap time could be recorded. Even with the glitch, Ford qualified in third and fourth positions. Both Pericak and Nair, who were on hand for the European debut, were pleased, although both guys were haunted by memories of the Daytona disaster and the gearbox issues that had destroyed Ford and Ganassi’s chances for a headline-grabbing return to big-time sports-car racing.
Just as building both the GT race car and the road car more or less simultaneously, on a time-crunched schedule, initially looked like a colossal undertaking but actually went quite smoothly, the organization of two racing teams, running under different regulations, with the Atlantic Ocean between them, deploying four cars and twelve drivers—not to mention crews for each car—was in practice not that big a deal. Chip Ganassi admitted that there were challenges, but he was quick to note that his people knew what they were doing, and that Ford’s support was invaluable. Both the IMSA and the WEC teams were regularly checking in with each other, and of course both Ford and Multimatic had operations in Europe. Bearing the brunt of the struggle to bring four cars to Le Mans was Pericak, who by mid-spring was in full globe-trotting mode, jetting between coasts in the United States, with frequent touchdowns in Detroit, and making jaunts to Europe. Remarkably, the Le Mans campaign wasn’t his only job; because he was running all of Ford Performance, he was also overseeing Ford’s NASCAR efforts in 2016.
Silverstone turned out to be a decent first outing for the GTs in the World Endurance Championship. The number 67 car, driven by Olivier Pla for the final stint, just missed a podium finish, coming in fourth in a race that was cut short by rain. The number 66 car was close behind, in fifth. Ferrari took the top two spots, and Aston Martin Racing nabbed third.
Competitive themes were emerging on both side of the Atlantic. In the United States, it was Ford struggling to catch up to Corvette as it dealt with the reliability of the GT—a classic confrontation in America, with the Blue Oval taking on a traditional rival in General Motors’ Chevy. In Europe, the looming battle was between Ford and Ferrari, a classic in its own right, as it evoked the 1966 Le Mans showdown. That matchup seemed more logical, given the similar technological natures of the GT and the Ferrari 488, both mid-engine supercars with turbochargers. For the U.S. confrontation, Corvette Racing’s wealth of experience was paying off, as the team was coming to the track with a car that had notably less power than the GT.
After Silverstone, the action shifted back to the United States. The Ford-Ganassi team had already moved the operation almost 3,000 miles west, from Florida to Long Beach. Now the team headed for northern California and the Continental Tire Monterey Grand Prix, on the first Sunday in May. The race was a two-hour test.
The Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca is a two-and-a-quarter-mile track that opened in the 1950s and over the decades has come to be loved by professional drivers and club racers alike. It’s a technically challenging course, with eleven turns in total, including the Corkscrew, an incredibly tricky left-right combo that drops 109 feet from top to bottom. That section has made the course legendary; drivers effectively spend an entire lap preparing to tackle it. The beauty of Laguna Seca—which was constructed on a dry lake bend; hence the name—is that it can be driven fast or relatively slowly, by racers of widely varying levels of skill. On balance, however, it’s one of those tracks that, on paper, set up better for less powerful cars that are optimized for handling. It’s not surprising that it’s a favorite of Mazda Miata owners doing “spec” racing of their peppy, low-horsepower roadsters. The Porsche 911 looks, on paper, to be the perfect true race car to bring to Laguna Seca, while the 600-horsepower GT would seem to have too much unused oomph under the hood.
In 2016, the prototype classes and the GT classes were broken up, so that half of the prototype group ran with half of the GT group; this was required by the limited amount of pit space at the venue. Over the two hours of racing, the fans weren’t treated to the usual bonkers straight-line speed of the prototypes, but the racing in the GTLM class, with the Fords battling Ferraris, BMWs, Porsches, and Corvettes, was just about ideal.
The Monterey Peninsula is one of my favorite places on earth, a region of surpassing beauty, with vineyards everywhere, the crashing surf of Big Sur to the south, and the Pebble Beach golf course on the coast. The Laguna Seca race in this environment is a real looker. It’s genuinely easy to observe the racing on the track, because the drivers are compelled to do a lot of, well, driving. It isn’t necessary for a car to make a lot of pit stops, and with an abundance of turns, there are plenty of chances to work quick passes. The two-hour length of the race is also perfect from a fan’s perspective—a sprint rather than a marathon.
The race was excitingly covered on television by Fox, with plenty of cameras inside the cars and around the course. It was like watching hot lap after hot lap, with none of the yawning distance between beginning and end that you confront with Daytona, Le Mans, or even the six-hour races I was familiar with from going to Watkins Glen in upstate New York, another stop on the IMSA sports-car schedule. Watching live racing outside the big oval setups (such as the Daytona 500 and Indy 500) can be like watching a golf tournament. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, so TV coverage makes for a more educational experience. You see everything important, the big passes and the accidents and mishaps, and you also get some insight in real time from the racing teams.
At the outset of the race, in the GTLM class, Corvette, BMW, and Porsche engaged in considerable dueling—and the Porsches looked sharp, as expected. But Ford and Ferrari were out in front, holding the top three spots. And just over an hour into the race, it started to become clear that Ganassi’s strategy was to pit as infrequently as possible, maxing out track time at the risk of running dry on gas and overdoing it with the tires. On a perfectly sunny and dry day, the GTs would wear slicks for the entire race and monitor the degradation of grip closely as the constant turning and drifting chewed away the rubber. One of the quirks of the track is that there’s sand everywhere off the paved surface, so the turns can get slippery, and tires can pick up grit if they slide off—grit that can take a few laps to get rid of.
With just over two minutes to go in the race, Richard Westbrook in the number 67 car was pushing the envelope on fuel consumption. With just a single pit stop in two hours, would he be able to get the GT home for the checked flag? He had to pull it off for Ford’s first win of the season, as Hand and Müller’s number 66 car was too far back to overcome the Ferrari of Scuderia Corsa, a privateer team trailing Westbrook in second.
When Westbrook finally made it across the line, at the North American team’s last outing before Le Mans, a page was decisively turned for Ford Chip Ganassi Racing. Both GTs had run immaculately, with no mechanical issues or snafus in the pits. The GTs had qualified in the two and three slots, right behind the Scuderia Corsa 488, which had grabbed the pole. And the EcoBoost V-6 was revealed to be a secret weapon of sorts. Under the hood of a GTLM machine, it could run hard for two hours in the California sun with only a brief break for fuel. This sent a powerful pre–Le Mans signal. In France, you win Le Mans by staying out of the garage and out of the pits.
The entire Ford team was practically giddy. Henry Ford III (briefly misidentified in an on-screen credit by Fox as Ford’s “President and CEO,” rather than the Performance division’s marketing head), Westbrook, and codriver Ryan Briscoe struck a thumbs-up pose for photographers with the Michelin Man mascot (the GTs were running in Michelin racing tires).
Ganassi’s engineers were also ready to reveal how they’d come up with their cunning, race-winning strategy. Brad Goldberg told Racer.com that the guys working to get the number 67 car ready in the days before the race had actually practiced getting in as many laps as possible without a fuel stop. Racer.com also got a nice scoop on where the whole fuel-saving strategy had originated—at Daytona, remarkably. With the number 67 car knocked out of that race, Briscoe could use his IndyCar, open-wheel racing chops, where fuel strategy is paramount, to give Westbrook (“Westy” to his fellow drivers) a lesson in how to stay off the gas without losing pace or position.
Hilariously, Westbrook got so good at this that by the time the opportunity arose to use his new skills, he executed too well. Ganassi’s engineers revealed that he had had only enough left in the tank after the race to manage a post-race cool-down lap.
After Laguna Seca, the scene shifted from the baked-brown hills of California to the lush foliage of the Ardennes forest in Belgium, site of the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. Silverstone had given the Ford team confidence, but the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps was a proper preparation for Ford Chip Ganassi Racing’s European squad, a test in which the two European GTs would rack up well over 600 miles on the roughly four-and-a-half-mile Spa-Francorchamps circuit before the finish.
It was going to be a tough race by any estimation, on a track that a lot of pros call their favorite. Spa has it all: dramatic elevation changes, huge sweeping turns, tight hairpins, and a long strip of asphalt known as the Kemmel Straight. The circuit is physically spectacular, but as with the Nürburgring in Germany, its history is one of death, mayhem, and carnage. The circuit has been tamed since its grim heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, but even with changes that brought Formula One back in 2007, Spa is still deeply respected by drivers. The most harrowing section is the downhill-then-uphill corner called Eau Rouge (“red water,” so named because it crosses a stream that has high iron content), perhaps the most admired piece of twisted asphalt in the entirety of motorsport. “If you take away Eau Rouge, you take away the reason why I do this,” remarked the late, legendary Ayrton Senna, three-time Formula One champion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Eau Rouge has been a controversial section of the circuit for decades, a place where the old attitude of cheating death in very fast machines for fame and glory still holds authentic currency. The corner inspires fear, awe, and desire in equal measure because it has to be taken at high speed to prepare for the long run down the Kemmel. The downhill sweep intensifies acceleration, while the uphill sweep ends blind, so it’s difficult to aim for an exit point. The entire sequence is both disorienting and thrilling.
Eau Rouge is where the most harrowing, bad thing yet befell a Ford GT, one that made the gearbox gremlins of Daytona and the freak fire in Long Beach seem like trifling distractions.
Stefan Mücke was at the wheel of the number 66 car, fresh off an engine repair in the pits, when he rounded Spa’s first, ultra-tight corner, La Source, and started his run to Eau Rouge and its uphill successor, Raidillon. Mücke was in good form, energized by a duel with his own teammate, the British driver Harry Tincknell in the number 67 car (yes, drivers on the same team will often compete with one another). With about an hour to go, Marino Franchitti had taken over the controls in the 67 GT and was on the lead lap, fighting for a podium spot. Mücke had ground to make up, and he was going to start strong coming out of Eau Rouge.
But the track had other ideas. Afterward, Ford Performance and Ganassi Racing determined that debris on the racecourse had cut Mücke’s tire. The result was that the 67 GT spun completely around, screeching, amid plumes of white tire smoke, until first the rear and then the side and front struck a tire wall and were totally shredded. Hanks, hunks, and slabs of the GT’s exquisite bodywork were strewn across the track, while a miraculously uninjured Mücke sat inside what was left of his car, and several prototypes dodged the wreckage.
A tense few seconds passed before the crew back in the pits discovered that his radio still worked. “I’m OK,” he said. The word was passed to Franchitti, who breathed a sigh of relief, and the safety car was brought out to escort the bunched-up field around the carnage, as crews swept up the remains of the number 66 GT.
Mücke was only bruised and required just a short medical evaluation. The GT had done what a race car is designed to do in a crash—intentionally shatter to absorb the force of the impact and prevent anything deadly from getting to the driver. Nevertheless, the accident was by far the most unnerving and spectacular of the entire sports-car season so far. It instantly reminded everyone not just of Spa’s reputation, but that in Ford’s campaign to make history, lives were on the line. Far fewer drivers are maimed or killed than in decades past, but even in the twenty-first century, motor racing remains dangerous, and drivers still die at the wheel. And Spa-Francorchamps has been particularly gory. The most infamous incident occurred in 1966, when racing legend—and early advocate for better motorsport safety—Jackie Stewart crashed during a Formula One race and ended up in a farm structure off the course, unable to escape his mangled car while being sprayed with fuel.
The race at Laguna Seca had allowed Ford to leave the United States and head for Le Mans on a high note, exactly as the team had hoped. And although a second-place finish in only the European team’s second outing, on a beast of a track, was a fantastic presaging of potential glory on the Circuit de la Sarthe, Mücke’s crash meant that one of the four GTs destined for action in southwestern France would have to be put back together, if Ford still wanted to take on the legacy of 1966 full force. Strength through speed was Ford-Ganassi’s guiding principle, but strength in numbers was a close second.
When I caught up with Dave Pericak after Laguna Seca and Spa, with just over a month to go before Le Mans, he was a changed man from when I had last spoken with him, after the Daytona meltdown. Then, he had almost pledged his considerable reputation on reversing what had gone down in Florida, determined to give the drivers a reliable race car.
“How am I feeling?” he said. “I’ve finally got some validation that the roller-coaster ride is all worth it. The plan is working, and the team is resilient.”
The Laguna Seca win and the second at Spa had obviously given him a second wind, just in time for the big show at Le Mans.
“We need one last push of energy,” he said, before conceding that the season was taking a toll. “Our people are tired, man.”
Pericak had also gotten plenty of exposure to all the other teams that would be gunning for Ford in the Circuit de la Sarthe. “You can’t underestimate anyone,” he said. “The competition is the best it’s ever been. But now we understand everybody’s strengths and weaknesses.”
Then he got back to hammering home the message: “We want everybody in our rearview.”
The crash at Spa had freaked Pericak out, but he rapidly noted that it had nothing to do with the GT’s mechanicals and everything to do with a piece of debris on the track that had killed a tire on one of the wildest turns in racing. “Everybody was concerned,” he said. “But once we assessed that Stefan wasn’t hurt, we could dig into the data. We were pretty confident that the car was OK, and Michelin looked at everything after the crash.”
Pericak’s legendary intensity had finally found a more even register, part cheerleader, part engineer, and part student of history.
“We’re fortunate to be going back to Le Mans with four cars,” he said. But he also knew that for Ford the stakes were only getting higher, with both a win and a solid podium finish on either side of the Atlantic.
“The entire senior leadership will be there,” he said. He wasn’t kidding, either. Mark Fields, Bill Ford, and Henry Ford III were all going to attend. And Henry III’s father, Edsel II, was making his first return trip to Le Mans since he had accompanied his own father, Henry II, in 1966.
I didn’t get the sense that Pericak was overly worried or overconfident in this final chat before the team would head for France. Nor did I detect any sense of intimidation. Later, at Ford’s paddock hospitality center at the track in France, I would see a guy who was beginning to think that a dream might become reality. He was allowing himself to relax into the possibility of winning, and he was doing this because the technical aspects of the Le Mans campaign had fallen into place. His internal checklist, which he was constantly running and rerunning in his head, was delivering the calm required for him to grin rather than grimace.
Chip Ganassi would be a slightly different story, knowing as he did that he’d never undertaken a Le Mans effort before. It was a remarkable hole in his résumé as a team owner—the second most successful in history, after the older Roger Penske—although he had run the race, in 1987, in a car that failed to finish. Prior to the 2016 season, Ganassi had won virtually everything else with his team, including the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500. This obviously didn’t make him cocky. Although he had the best setup an owner could ask for going into Le Mans, as a former pro driver, Ganassi understood that while past results can be a useful guide, a twenty-four-hour race was purpose-built to undermine happy endings.
But Pericak had undergone a modest transformation. A devoted Ford man who had become a minor celebrity thanks to his turn in the Mustang documentary A Faster Horse, he had stretched into a new role and become the intensely focused face of Ford’s return to endurance racing glory.
There was no doubt about it: Pericak was looking forward to having the Ford brass turn out in force at Le Mans. He was running his own race and making his own bid for history. And although he had been on a rocky ride, by his own admission, the plan that he and his team had created with Ganassi and Multimatic only about 400 days earlier was about to peak.
Destiny was now just over the horizon. The inexorable march of time would carry the GTs to a reckoning. On June 18, the sun would rise over a quiet farming town in southwestern France, where, at the end of a motorway bordered on both sides by waving oceans of wheat destined for the nation’s baguettes, the toughest race in the world would happen. The starting grid would form on Saturday, just before three o’clock in the afternoon; the honorary starter would send them off, and by three o’clock Sunday, the world would know whether 2016 would echo 1966. Fifty years later, the scene was the same, more or less. The names had changed, and so had some of the technology, but not enough to alter the simple fact that a car race consists of cars going fast.
Well, most of the names had changed. At least two were the same, separated by half a century and several generations: Ferrari and Ford.