You Want to Win
the Big Ones
In 1966, the only way to prepare for Le Mans was to have run it in the past or to arrive the week before to get in some practice laps, if you had never sampled the Circuit de la Sarthe in the flesh. This gave Le Mans a mysterious and somewhat unknowable quality—for almost the entire year, the course gave itself back to the citizens of France, who would drive at normal velocity down the Mulsanne Straight and never be forced to negotiate the Porsche Curves. Consider that: the racecourse with the fastest average speed in the world is, for much of the year, a cluster of downright boring, sleepy thoroughfares. You might see a truck. You might see a tractor. You might see somebody with a Ferrari—on vacation.
Numerous members of the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing team had Le Mans experience, but they wanted to tune up before the main event in June. This is where twenty-first-century technology gave them a leg up on the 1966 drivers. In 1966, Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon and their teammates had a GT40 to turn laps in; in 2016, Joey Hand and Ryan Briscoe had a full-on simulation of their Le Mans–bound GT car at Ford’s Performance Technical Center in North Carolina. What a difference five decades make.
The simulator was first activated in 2014, about two years before the 2016 Le Mans, and it’s used by Ford NASCAR drivers as well as the sports-car racing teams. Located in a 33,000-square-foot facility devoted exclusively to racing training and preparation, the simulator consists of a driver’s compartment that’s actuated by a computer-controlled system that can generate exceptionally realistic racing conditions. From the cockpit, the driver looks out at a vast curving screen whose images are delivered by five projectors.
“It’s an immersive experience,” Hand said, in a Ford Performance video released before Le Mans. “It’s as real as you can get. You’re trying to put the lap down. You’re huffing and puffing. You’re sweating.”
Beyond giving the drivers a chance to experiment with the unique performance characteristics of their car on the tracks they’ll actually be competing on, one of the key advantages of the simulator is its capacity to allow the team to play around with different vehicle setups and to discern which ones blend best with the skill of the driver, the technology of the car, and the peculiarities of a given track.
Raj Nair loved it. “It will help us push handling to the next level, so that our cars can be fast right off the trailer,” he said. He also liked that when the real-life cars couldn’t turn laps, the simulator could be used to make additional setup changes between practice sessions and race day. It was the ultimate preparation machine.
The Ford-Ganassi drivers needed all the preparation they could get, because even though some had Le Mans experience, the Circuit de la Sarthe is a racing anomaly, requiring a different competitive metabolism from what the Ford team had brought to other events. The truly tricky thing is that it’s possible to lapse into and out of full concentration at Le Mans, thanks to the Mulsanne. This gives the drivers a way to gather themselves on every lap, to simply put the hammer down and let the car fly. But it also means that they have to snap back into aggressive driving mode for the remainder of the lap.
The Circuit de la Sarthe is essentially composed of three sections. The long Mulsanne Straight is in the middle. Preceding it is the escape from the grandstand and pits area and the sharp right-hand Tertre Rouge corner leading to the straightaway. Then, the slam-on-the-brakes hairpin at the end of the Mulsanne sets up a sequence of turns—Indianapolis, Arnage, the Porsche Curves, and the Ford Chicanes—before the cars reenter the stands complex and start all over again. There isn’t much in the way of elevation change, so a great Le Mans lap boils down to setting a pace on the Mulsanne, then finding a good line through the curves, with a car that has an aerodynamic package that’s set up for straight-line speed, not to deliver strong downforce in turning.
In the twenty-four hours, the drivers will navigate the circuit well over 300 times, racking up nearly 3,000 miles in the process—a trip from Paris to Istanbul and back.
But Le Mans isn’t just twenty-four hours of turn, let ’er rip, turn-turn-turn, repeat. There are sixty other cars on the circuit. Drivers in the GTE Pro class have to contend not only with the prototype-class field made up of much faster cars, but also with GTE Am machines that are slower. Traffic issues, especially during the early stages of the race, should not be underestimated.
For all the cars in the GTE Pro class, there will also be a potentially endless series of tweaks and adjustments once the race is under way. Practice and qualifying can give a team a good sense of what’s working and what isn’t. Have we adjusted the angle of the rear wing correctly to provide enough downforce to keep the car solid in the corners but not make it slow on the straights? Are we comfortable with the tire compounds we want to use? Of course, the race itself always throws up new challenges and forces the team to ask itself dozens of unanticipated questions.
“The important thing is to have a plan,” Chip Ganassi told me on the day before the race. “The other thing to do is to be able to change your plan.”
Rain means tire changes, but dry doesn’t mean that only one type of tire will be used; a team might put different tire compounds on to enhance speed or handling. The aerodynamics may have to be adjusted. A driver may have to push hard if he falls off the pace, affecting the fuel strategy. Electronic glitches can show up. And that’s just the routine stuff. All bets are off if the car is damaged in a minor mishap, as Ford learned at Daytona, when a broken rear diffuser ended up shredding a tire before anyone noticed that it was a problem.
Of all the teams converging on Le Mans in June, Ford’s had the least preparation for this intricate, exhausting undertaking. The first prototype GT race car had been rolled out only thirteen months earlier. There had been precious few testing opportunities on the track—known as “shakedowns”—prior to Daytona, so Ganassi and his drivers were still learning the car. Only Ferrari was in a similar boat. Corvette, Porsche, and Aston Martin were all running proven cars. And over the course of four races in the United States and now two in Europe, the competition in the GT classes had been fierce. It had been the best season for sports-car racing in years, a thriller for the fans but commensurately nerve-racking for the drivers and teams.
The guys who would don the helmets for Ford-Ganassi were holding up best; the ups and downs of racing were familiar to them, and like most pro athletes they found value in evening out their highs and lows, fully cognizant that as sports-car drivers, they were running not just small marathons in individual races but a yearlong stretch that would determine whether they had done their jobs.
On the executive front, Dave Pericak’s intense, hypercompetitive nature and devotion to the Blue Oval were taking a toll, but he was closing in on the big prize. When I saw him the day before the official start of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, he reminded me that, win or lose, Ford still had a full IMSA/WEC season to complete. But Ford hadn’t built a new GT to take an IMSA or WEC crown, and Le Mans was not just another race on the schedule. If sports-car trophies were all Ford wanted to bring back to Dearborn, the carmaker didn’t have to design and build an entirely new car and expose itself to the risks and embarrassments it had already faced.
Raj Nair meandered over to join us. He was mellower and more cheerful than Pericak, but he was also hedging. Pericak was on a mission, but Nair was a pragmatist. He knew that Ford had implicitly over-promised with a new GT and the Le Mans return, and he was prepared to under-deliver. He had also found out the hard way that although the GT program had come together almost flawlessly in 2015, the 2016 racing season had really kicked the car and the team around. Nair was about the same size as Pericak—neither was a big guy—but he was dressed in more monochromatic clothes, mostly dark blue. Pericak had on his blindingly white Ford Performance polo shirt. Nair was his usual funny self, down deep a Midwestern kid who loved cars and was living a dream at Ford, but also a tad evasive, reluctant to make eye contact when I brought up the abandoned Mustang plan. Pericak had the ability to stare right through you, so concentrated was his intensity. The first few times I experienced it, I found the stare unnerving. But I quickly realized that Pericak was a true-believer type who also happened to have a generous heart . . .
Nair was more diplomat than soldier, an important foil to Pericak’s battlefield commander. It wasn’t easy to discern what Nair really thought. But there was no question that he was constantly assessing the odds, like a good engineer, and—like a good business leader—trying to figure out how to deal with numerous contingencies. He and Pericak made an interesting pair.
If Pericak was determined, and Nair diffident, then Chip Ganassi was a weathered realist who wasn’t required to serve up any messages about Ford’s run at history. In person, Ganassi was taciturn and borderline gruff, but as soon as you thought he wasn’t even remotely interested in answering your questions, he would loosen up and engage in a little freestyle speculation on the GT’s chances, or the team’s performance prior to Le Mans, or the whole mad adventure that was motorsports.
The curious thing about Ganassi was that although he had been a successful driver, he didn’t act much like a driver anymore. That peering-into-the-future driver stare didn’t appear in his eyes. He also didn’t make promises or call his shots. After I had been following the GT and its return to Le Mans for a year, it struck me that Ganassi was the critical player in the drama who least yearned to win the race. And that was reassuring. It meant that as the thousands of decisions piled up from January to June, he would be able to handle the pressure and manage the overload. Winning wasn’t an endgame for Ganassi—it was simply the result of proper planning and solid execution. The right drivers plus the right car plus the right strategy—plus a bit of luck—would bring the likelihood of a Le Mans victory into view. Then it was just a matter of pushing to that next level.
Le Mans is not a commitment to be taken lightly. The race consumes an entire week, and it happens in the fairly remote countryside southwest of Paris. Literally right next to the track section and stands there’s an airfield, home to the famous Dunlop Bridge that drivers pass under as they begin a lap around the Circuit de la Sarthe. So if you have a private jet, a personal airplane, or access to a helicopter, you can zip right down from the City of Light. For kicks, I investigated a charter chopper, recalling that that’s how Henry Ford II commuted to Le Mans in 1966. The estimate was about five grand for the ride.
It requires two trains to make the trip from Paris, so I decided to rent a car. My Renault Captur, a small diesel SUV, was both my chariot and my bedroom (for a night), and the car and I enjoyed our two-hour drive down and back, predominantly on the A11 motorway, which rolls past Versailles and Chartres and through the vast wheat fields of France’s breadbasket.
Because I was just there to watch the race and talk with Ford’s executives and the Ganassi drivers and team members, I had it relatively easy. The competitors, however, while negotiating their way into and out of the facilities, trying to get used to the cars and the circuit, would be compelled to participate in the many festivities and local customs and traditions that have evolved over almost a century’s-worth of annual twenty-four-hour races.
When I’m asked to describe Le Mans, I usually say it’s the Burning Man of motorsports. It has that flavor of a mass of people who are passionate, even obsessive, about something, gathering in an obscure corner of the world and staying awake all night, while various musical acts perform and everyone waits for an exciting, climactic event. But on a more mundane level, Le Mans is sort of like a mass camping trip with a car race in the middle. There’s even a small carnival, complete with a full-size Ferris wheel.
Ford CEO Mark Fields was on his second trip to Le Mans when I caught up with him on Saturday. He was really into the whole crazy scene. “You won’t believe what I saw when we were driving in this morning,” he said, excitedly. “An Aston Martin—parked next to a pup tent! A pup tent! I took a picture.”
That is Le Mans. I myself saw a $300,000 orange McLaren supercar parked next to a camper—and took a picture. There were Porsches everywhere, and next to those Porsches were tents. Ford and Ford owners had brought a massive contingent of the previous-generation, mid-2000s vintage GTs, along with lots and lots of Mustangs. On the drive back to Paris after the race, I was passed by a line of three Ferraris.
All the tents and campers and mobile homes and temporary shelters, some large enough to house big-screen TVs and requiring portable generators, are actually sensible. Hotels in and around Le Mans are booked up well in advance, and there aren’t that many of them to begin with. And if you are staying off-site, traffic can be horrible getting into and out of the parking areas. Once I was in, I decided I was in for the long haul—forty-eight hours in total, from Friday to Sunday. It was plenty of fun. On the first night, a group of boisterous young Frenchmen who had parked their pickup truck behind my car were both drinking heavily and preparing to cook some food on a small charcoal grill. When I told them I was from the United States, their apparent leader asked me why I was driving a shit car like the Renault and then expressed his undying devotion to Cadillac. So strong was his devotion that he had the Cadillac shield tattooed in full color across his chest, with an American eagle perched on top; in the talons of one foot the eagle held Arnold Schwarzenegger’s machine gun from the movie Commando, and in the other, Sylvester Stallone’s serrated survival knife from Rambo.
“I love America,” he said, and given what I had already seen, that sounded like an understatement.
“America! Fuck, yeah!” his chorus of compatriots added. That sounded like an understatement, too. We discussed all things Yank for several minutes before I ducked inside my Renault for a few hours of sleep.
Le Mans builds to its conclusion, and the building began several days before the Saturday start. It’s a bit like a prizefight. The teams have to subject their cars to a technical assessment by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO), called “scrutineering,” on the Sunday and Monday of the week before. If they pass, they can turn practice laps and go through eight hours of qualifying on Wednesday and Thursday. Qualifying involves at least two drivers from each three-man team completing at least one timed lap in a twenty-minute run around the circuit, according to FIA/WEC regulations. The circuit is so long that numerous cars can be qualifying at the same time. If a car can’t complete its run—owing to mechanical failure—then it won’t qualify. The two best lap times for each driver are averaged to establish a “reference time,” and the fastest reference time wins the pole. Everyone else lines up sequentially behind that car. It all wraps up with a traditional drivers’ parade on Friday.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of hard-core racing fans, day-trippers, and those exhibiting merely idle curiosity about a race that runs for an entire day drifted into and out of the venue. Apart from the sprawling campgrounds, the semipermanent areas around Le Mans provided abundant distractions. There’s an entire Le Mans museum chronicling the multiple decades of the race. There’s also what’s referred to as a village, which is really more of a food court—serving an immense amount of beer. The village is mixed with a shopping mall, complete with a Rolex shop in the middle and, in 2016, a jumbo screen broadcasting the European Cup soccer tournament. Scattered around are the food trucks, where you can get your crêpes filled with Nutella or spiked with Grand Marnier.
The manufacturers erect immense hospitality facilities, exclusive two-level temples from which friends and family can get a good view of the cars as they exit the Mulsanne Straight and make their runs through the turn complexes and back to the stands and the pits and paddock. Some of the automakers—Audi, Porsche—that have won Le Mans and come back every year, competing in multiple classes, occupy huge, permanent structures festooned with their brand logos. There they host elaborate multicourse dinners before, during, and after the race, and loyalists can grab a drink, a snack, or a coffee at all hours when the twenty-four-hour clock is officially ticking down.
For the media the amenities weren’t quite as lavish. The publishers of the Michelin Guide series, the renowned evaluator of the world’s finest restaurants, set up a lounge directly above pit row and kept the wine, beer, and Champagne flowing, along with restorative coffees. Deep into the night on Saturday and Sunday morning, servings of rillettes, the tasty pâté-like spread that’s the signature dish of the region, were set out. It was all quite civilized, a contrast with some of the staggering drunkenness on display outside the stands; at one point, I saw a gentlemen with a head wound, covered in dried mud from what I assumed was a fall, ordering yet another beer at one of the many bars in the village section, then wobbling off in search of joy and mayhem. Le Mans is a twenty-four-hour party, stretched out to forty-eight or even seventy-two, depending on your stamina, enthusiasm, and willingness to rough it in the French countryside.
But the racing teams were worried that the actual race was going to be anything but festive. There was a good chance that lousy weather would make conditions difficult. In the weeks leading up to Le Mans, France had been hit with biblical rains. In Paris, the Seine had overflowed its banks, and the Louvre had been forced to close and move 7,000 artworks to higher floors. The forecast for the Le Mans weekend predicted a deluge sometime after the start on Saturday, followed by clearing and sunshine on Sunday. It often rains for Le Mans, but the timing of the wet is everything. Early rains can disadvantage the faster cars, preventing them from establishing an early lead. The field gets bunched up, as the heavier GT cars mix in with the prototypes, sometimes taking the most powerful and exotic Le Mans machines out of their front-running status. Rain at night means the track will take longer to dry out, preventing teams from getting off wet tires and back onto racing slicks, another disadvantage for the faster cars. And rain during practice and qualifying can both limit performance and curtail the drivers’ critical preparation of themselves for the circuit.
When I asked Joey Hand on Friday about the weather forecast, he said the right thing—that Le Mans is Le Mans, and you have to work with what you’re given. But he also knew that the GTs were running better in dry conditions, and he admitted that the team would prefer it if most of the race were dry. I neglected to ask him whether the Ford simulator in North Carolina could realistically represent a soggy Circuit de la Sarthe.
By Friday, however, Ford’s biggest challenge wasn’t Mother Nature. The problem was that the GTs had improved their lap times around the Circuit de la Sarthe by far more than the race organizers had expected.
At the beginning of June, it had been the Corvettes that turned the fastest laps. A GTE Pro–class car can get around the circuit in less than four minutes, and both Corvettes entries did it in 3:55. The GTs weren’t as quick, but when official qualifying rolled around in the week before the race, the situation had been reversed. Now the GTs were the fastest cars in the field over the two-round qualifying period, while the Vettes were the slowest.
The Corvettes weren’t too far off their practice-week pace of 3:55 (they would never add a full second, reaching 3:56). But both the GTs and the new Ferrari 488 blitzed the circuit at pace no slower than 3:52—and one car, the number 68 GT, nearly broke 3:51.
In sports-car racing, the governing authorities don’t want one type of car design or engine configuration to run away with a race. They also don’t want the gaps between classes to get too small or too great. So during qualifying, the ACO kept track of who was fast, who was slower, and why. It did this during practice, and it also took into account previous performance in races. Then the overseers of competitive fairness determined whether “balance of performance,” or BOP, adjustments would be required of the teams, based on a formula that is developed by analysis of the data.
BOP adjustments had already been ordered for the Corvettes, after testing a week before Le Mans qualifying had revealed what the ACO decided was excessive speed. But were the adjustments too much? In qualifying, the Vettes were four and a half seconds slower around the circuit than the quicker Ford GTs.
Most of the GTE Pro field fell in for BOP tweaks before Saturday, and for most of Friday afternoon, a controversy bubbled up, threatening to tarnish Ford’s assault on history. All four GTs were very fast in qualifying, with the number 68 car taking the pole position. The Ferraris were also quick, but the Corvettes and Aston Martins were unexpectedly slow. The Porsches had been hit with the same BOP adjustments as Corvette during testing.
This meant that the ACO was going to compel Ford and Ferrari to make changes, while Corvette, Porsche, and Aston Martin would be allowed to set their cars up for more speed. The core problem was the variety of machines running in GTE Pro. Ford and Ferrari had low-slung supercars, the Fords using the 600-horsepower EcoBoost twin-turbo V-6 engine and the Prancing Stallion teams saddling up the new 606-horsepower twin-turbo V-8.
Aston Martin had a big 480-horsepower V-8 under the hood, up front. Corvette had a potent V-8, also up front. Porsche had its famous Boxster six-cylinder power plant, but it was located over the rear-drive wheels. Porsche’s aerodynamic design, when you got right down to it, dated to the 1960s, when the rear-engine Porsche 911 had first appeared. It was among the most durable and effective sports-car designs ever, but both Ford and Ferrari were using state-of-the-art, twenty-first-century aerodynamics, with the bodywork on the GT and the 488 adding to the downforce. Corvette’s design for the C7.R was relatively new, and while the Aston’s styling was longer in the tooth, it was contemporary.
The grumbling over the BOP situation reached its loudest pitch toward nightfall on Friday, June 17. The ACO would have to decide by the end of the day whether to assess penalties. In the media center, there were mutterings that Ford had played chicken with the racing authorities and up until Friday had gotten away with it. The accusations cut both ways. There were rumors that the ACO wanted to pit Ford against Ferrari, to put a sharp point on the revival of the 1966 contest. But Ford’s Raj Nair suggested that some competitors—not Ferrari—had held back in qualifying. Dave Pericak told reporters at Le Mans that the suddenly slow Vettes were suspicious.
There wasn’t anything on trial here besides good sportsmanship. It wasn’t against the rules to run slower prerace laps, but it wasn’t in the spirit of the competition. Teams were supposed to show what they had, turning laps as close as possible to what they would generate at race time.
After discussions, the ACO instructed Ford to reduce the turbo boost that its engines were producing. Both Ford and Ferrari were also ordered to add weight to their cars—twenty-two and thirty-three pounds, respectively. Corvette, Porsche, and Aston were allowed to adjust a technology called a restrictor plate to permit their uncompressed-air-breathing, non-turbo motors to inhale more oxygen. And Ferrari and Corvette were given a tiny bump in the amount of fuel they would be permitted to use (at Le Mans, fuel strategy is essential, because teams don’t have an unlimited quantity). Obviously, with the ACO and the teams meeting to go over the BOP issues on Friday night, it would be impossible to figure out before the race began whether the field had been aligned. The next time the GTE Pro cars took to the circuit, they’d be warming up to race for real. Porsche’s head of motorsports, Frank-Steffen Walliser, was profoundly upset and complained emotively about the BOP. Some reporters said he was practically in tears.
But that wasn’t the end of it, because anytime there’s a BOP controversy, there’s talk of gamesmanship. Ford was swiftly accused of sandbagging—initially holding back on lap times, then letting it rip when it came to qualifying. With that strategy, there would be no BOP issues until it was too late to deny the quick GTs the pole, as well as another three good starting spots on the grid.
This didn’t make much sense to me, given that such a move would have brought the at-times unpleasant internal politics of motorsports into the picture and tarnished Ford’s run for glory. However, I did wonder whether in the two European races leading up to Le Mans, the GTs had been held back, not showing their true potential until Le Mans loomed. I knew, after all, that on the fast Daytona track, when the GTs were healthy, they turned in blistering lap times. It also stood to reason that the lightweight GTs, making 100 more units of horsepower than the Vettes, should be smoking fast, particularly on the Mulsanne.
Besides, it appeared that everyone was fooling around a bit. Ford couldn’t understand why Corvette was so slow and said as much. The Ferraris, which had been setting the track on fire in Europe up to Le Mans and were considered by Ford’s drivers to be very quick, were abruptly slower than the GTs. For its part, Porsche appeared to be making the best of a difficult situation while hoping for enough rain to slow everybody else down.
Balance of performance itself was coming under criticism. The leveling-of-fields approach is controversial. It makes for technically tighter racing, but it also bunches up fields and creates the potential for crashes. Then there was the obvious question of why the ACO would allow so many different kinds of cars and engines into GTE Pro—and then hold back the faster cars. A more staggered race would be the outcome, presumably with the Fords and Ferraris out in front, followed by Corvettes and Porsches, which switch off positions, depending on whether they are negotiating the Mulsanne or the curves that follow.
In the end, the teams took it all in stride, and the controversy didn’t overshadow the race. We’d later learn that the BOP changes were probably justified—and hadn’t hurt anyone’s chances (although I certainly heard complaints, even months after the race was over). But it all made for a tense sideshow as Friday drew to a close.
Qualifying had gone well for Ford, the BOP controversy notwithstanding. The number 68 car took the pole for GTE Pro, after Dirk Müller turned in a 3:51 lap on Wednesday night. Lousy weather on Thursday kept anyone from besting Müller’s time. The other three GTs, numbers 69, 67, and 66, were close behind, in the second, fourth, and fifth positions, respectively.
The number 68 GT’s qualifying run had been hairy until the tail end, when Müller had only fifteen minutes in which to manage an impressive lap; his fellow drivers, Joey Hand and Sébastien Bourdais, had been challenged by traffic issues, as the German driver later recounted.
“The car felt really good,” Müller said, although he admitted that he, too, was struggling with traffic. But then his team manager offered words of encouragement—on the radio—and Müller buckled down. “It was a cool lap.”
Throughout Friday there was palpable tension in the Ford camp that had nothing to do with BOP. Adjacent to the very cozy paddock at Le Mans, Ford had a lounge and hospitality area for drivers, executives, race-team members, and guests, including members of the media. It was two stories of Ford blue, with catered food and a coffee bar, plus plenty of monitors on which to watch the race and keep track of the GTs’ positions. A short walk away, adjacent to the track, Ford had erected an altogether more ostentatious hospitality structure, also two stories, with an outdoor viewing balcony, several bars, and again plenty of monitors. It was a substantial step up from Daytona, where Ford hospitality had been just a row of tents, and it showed how committed the automaker was to its Le Mans comeback.
Ganassi, the drivers, and both Pericak and Nair were hanging around, attending to a run of press events that the ACO had scheduled. You could tell that they were all trying to relax—trying to force themselves to relax. For the drivers, training had kicked in. They knew how to chill. For Ganassi, experience was key. He knew how to put on a game face before a big race. The Ford brass also tried to keep the mood low-key. Winning wasn’t a demand in this environment.
But the weight of the moment was heavy. The sensible effort that everyone was making to remain calm was exerting its own kind of strange force. I could feel it. It wasn’t a sense of pressure. It was more a sense of dawning realization: We could actually do this. We could win Le Mans fifty years after Ford’s greatest racing triumph ever.
Joey Hand called it “anxiousness”—not nervousness. Everyone just wanted to get out and start racing; they all wanted to begin to do what they came to do.
The glitches with the cars had been addressed. The GTs had set a blistering pace. The drivers that made up the individual teams for each of the four cars now knew one another well and had forged bonds of camaraderie in the cockpit. The crews were seasoned, after a total of six races on two continents. By Friday morning, you also knew that Ganassi had a game plan, and that he could quit sweating his strategy.
The weather was good. A misty dawn was followed by a beautiful morning: cool but sunny, with low gray-white clouds scattered through a thin blue sky. Conditions were mostly dry, although there was a lot of mud and standing water in the parking areas and campgrounds. Rain was expected toward nightfall, but the morning and early afternoon on Saturday would be dry. A perfect start was in the cards. By nine a.m., the stands were already beginning to fill in with fans jockeying for spots. Outside the stands, a thousand camp chairs were being unfolded and positioned on knolls and hillocks and close to fences. The revelers of the previous night shuffled around in their small backpacking tents and started to prepare for another full day and night of pleasure. The guy with the Cadillac tattoo and his mates gathered up their gear and changed into fresh clothes.
The eighty-fourth installment of the 24 Hours of Le Mans would commence by mid-afternoon. Casual fans were completely psyched. They’d picked up on the GT story and were eagerly anticipating Le Mans, but some were still coming to grips with how patchy the first Ford IMSA/WEC racing season had been. Motorsport junkies were a bit more jaded. The pole was a good sign. But it was also symbolic.
Chip Ganassi was the least impressed of all. “Am I happy to have the pole?” he asked, rhetorically. “Sure, you’re happy to have the pole.”
It was vintage Ganassi. We were sitting across from each other in the Ford paddock unit, drinking coffee. The race would start in just over twenty-four hours. But he wasn’t going to go out on any limbs.
“But in terms of competitiveness, the pole doesn’t mean anything,” he added, with a slight grin. “It’s great, it’s a nice PR thing. It looks great as a headline going into the race.”
But Ganassi was clearly pleased to have a quartet of cars to work with. “If you have one car, you have one strategy. I don’t know what your chances are of doing well with one car, but with four cars, they’re at least four times better.”
What he meant was that with one car, a team can tackle the race from only a single angle. Maybe they run fast; maybe they hang back. To avoid wrecking the car, they hold off on making any big moves until the sun rises and the race has only a few hours left. Regardless of what they choose, they come up with a plan and are bound by it.
Ganassi had a lot more options. He could run two GTs hard and hold two back, or he could unleash them all. He could send one out fast and make the field chase it, trying to break down a few competitors at the expense of one of his four cars. Or he could use two cars to do that and break down more competitors. He could box in another car and make its hapless driver overextend himself trying to get out. The list of possibilities went on and on. With four cars, Ganassi had more choices than any other team captain in the GTE Pro class.
The grid wasn’t formed until just before race time, and the start was vastly different from that of 1966. For one thing, a Ford family member didn’t wave the French flag to send the drivers off, as Henry II had in 1966. A sleekly attired Brad Pitt, in smoky sunglasses and a slick, artful haircut, did. There also wasn’t a “Le Mans start.” In 1966, the drivers had to run to their cars at the start, firing them up and rocketing off from pit lane without even strapping in first. This ended in 1969. In 2016, the field was led around by a safety car, until the green flag dropped and true racing could be unleashed.
But before all that, there were more rituals. Two hours before race time, the cars moved into position, pushed by their crews, with the prototypes in the lead. It was an impressive sight, the colorful liveries polished to a high gloss, a wild tapestry of colors spread out beneath the spectators in the stands: in GTE Pro, the Fords were in the all-American red-white-and-blue, while the Ferraris, of course, were rosso corsa, racing red, and the Corvettes were a lurid yellow. Huge sponsor logos occupied the background, those of well-known global icons like Dunlop, Porsche, and Rolex alongside obscure French brands unknown to the international audience watching the race on TV and the Internet.
Bibendum, known as “Bib”—the Michelin Man, in English—bobbed along the grid. He was a very French mascot, adorable, and not nearly as tall as I had expected.
Then came the national anthems of the nations that were participating, highlighted by Brits singing along enthusiastically to “God Save the Queen.” When the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played, I scanned the stands for Americans doing the American thing, hats off and a hand on the heart, but I didn’t spot any. Many, of course, were down at the Ford hospitality tent, out of my view.
An hour before race time, flag bearers—mostly young women in snug cream dresses, pink scarves, and high black stiletto heels—stationed themselves around the starting grid. So French. I wondered how a team feels about its chances if it has a man, not a woman, holding its national flag.
Ominously, with the final hour before the start ticking down, the skies darkened and storm clouds moved in, ahead of schedule. The rain started to fall just as the “Marseillaise” was struck up. The women in the white dresses were attended to by a squadron of umbrella wranglers. A French military helicopter buzzed the stadium at 2:15.
The cars were fired up, but already there was trouble for Ford. The number 67 GT was rolled off the grid and back into the garage. Pericak told me that it was his only moment of real terror. Was it an isolated problem, or were all four cars beset by the same fault? Yet again, it was a gearbox issue, but the other three cars weren’t affected. Ford-Ganassi’s strength-in-numbers strategy was already challenged—and an official lap had yet to be turned.
During warm-up laps, the cars started to throw up modest rooster tails of spray. They were all running slicks, but as the rain intensified, each slipped back into its starting-grid spot and the crews came out with rain tires on rolling racks and speed wrenches hooked up to air compressors on carts.
The number 67 GT was still in the garage. The crews calmly made the change from slicks to rain tires, but the grid was chaotic, a blur of activity. The sixty cars tied the record for the size of the field. Officials, photographers, and the now-damp flag bearers were mixed in with helmeted pit-crew members in fireproof racing suits. The Patrouille de France, the precision team of the French air force, ripped across the sullen sky, the eight jets in a tight V formation, trailing plumes in the blue, red, and white of the French tricolor, only to have them rapidly blurred by the rain.
At three o’clock precisely, the din of five dozen high-performance machines being brought to roaring life at once cut through what had become a downpour. Millions of dollars of primo racing technology was getting drenched. The headlights came on, white for the prototypes, yellow for the GT cars. Windshield wipers were activated.
“It rattles your teeth to be on the grid,” Brad Pitt said afterward, with the reverence that Le Mans often and unexpectedly brings out.
The true teeth rattling had to wait for a while, however. The start was awkward and slow, and it still lacked the number 67 Ford GT. The safety car led a sluggish, soggy procession around the Circuit de la Sarthe, with laps being counted off at a pace drastically below what kicked in once the race officials determined that the course was safe enough for flat-out racing. These machines weren’t designed to go thirty miles per hour.
It took nearly an hour for the officials to make their determination. Race marshals were literally on the circuit with brooms sweeping away the puddles in the curves and corners as the field turned agonizingly poky laps behind the Audi safety car. The number 67 GT, gearbox repaired, left the garage at last, but it was already two laps down. When the safety car finally peeled off, the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans had become the 23 Hours of Le Mans.