We’re Going to Win
from the Lead
The immediate battle among the prototypes consumed everyone’s early attention. Prototypes can turn laps thirty seconds faster than the GT cars, so it wasn’t long before they pulled away and some gaps opened up. Dirk Müller made good on the pole position and led the GTE Pro class in the number 68 Ford GT. His first fast lap in the wet was 4:23, much slower than in the qualifying run. Olivier Pla and Richard Westbrook trailed in the numbers 66 and 69 cars. The Fords were mixed in with the Ferraris and Porsches. The number 67 car was out of it, but with a mountain of time for the field to climb before Sunday afternoon, anything was possible.
By 5:30, a pattern had emerged that defined the race for the GTE Pro class. It was 1966 all over again, because for one Ferrari driver, it was personal. The number 82 Ferrari 488, a privateer car supported by Houston-based Risi Competizione, was giving Richard Westbrook in the leading number 69 Ford GT all he could handle. At the wheel for Risi was Giancarlo Fisichella. No slouch on the Circuit de la Sarthe, Fisichella had two previous wins in this class, in 2012 and 2014, for the AF Corse team, which was also running Ferrari 488s this year. But the forty-three-year-old Italian was also a Formula One veteran, so he was one of motorsport’s elites. For him, there was pride on the line.
And at 5:30, the weather was finally cooperating. The afternoon sun was out, the temperature had gone up, and it had become a lovely, breezy day for racing. The track was drying out, and the tires were heating up. The lap times were going down, and in GTE Pro, it was getting tight. It was Ford versus Ferrari, with the Corvettes and Porsches out of the lead action. The Porsches had been OK in the rain, but when the roads dried out, they simply couldn’t find any speed, and the Corvettes’ velocity hadn’t shown up yet, despite the BOP tweaks to their restrictor plates.
With the summer solstice just a few days away, it was hours until nightfall, so the drivers got in some hard racing before the teams settled in to battle the darkness. And they raced hard: the Risi Competizione and AF Corse Ferraris took it to the GTs, moving into second and third positions, keeping the number 69 car fighting to hold its lead, while relegating the number 68 car to fourth.
But that lineup didn’t last. The AF Corse Ferrari had to pit, with a mechanical problem, and the number 82 Risi 488 surged into the lead. Le Mans was a dogfight between the Blue Oval and the Prancing Stallion—and at this relatively early juncture, before the sun had set, it was clear that both carmakers had built machines with enough speed to keep matters lively. No lead would be safe for long.
It wasn’t lost on anyone that the extremely impressive Ford Performance–Chip Ganassi Racing factory team with four cars was locked in a high-velocity duel with a pair of privateer teams wearing Ferrari red. The AF Corse team had been a Le Mans stalwart for years; Amato Ferrari (of no relationship to the car family) had launched AF in the mid-1990s, after retiring from a moderately successful racing career. Risi Competizione was the brainchild of Giuseppe Risi, who started his team about the same time as AF Corse took off and has been connected with Ferrari ever since. The privateer teams don’t have the same level of funding as the factory teams, but because Ferrari hasn’t run a factory effort at Le Mans in decades, the privateers are the company’s proxy. For Risi, both Fisichella and his fellow driver Toni Vilander hold the top driver classification, Platinum, and the team itself is well financed.
Nevertheless, it seemed as if a couple of Italian pirates were trying to spoil the party of America’s second-largest automaker, as it fought to revisit what has gone down in history as the greatest humiliation Ferrari had ever experienced on a racetrack. At Ferrari, less successful road cars could be forgotten. But the loss at Le Mans in 1966 has never gone away. At Ferrari, existence begins and ends with racing. You may dream your entire life of owning a Ferrari, and you may become successful enough to buy one. But only a select few ascend the pantheon of speed that compelled Enzo Ferrari to build and sell cars to the public in the first place. Those people are the real drivers.
Even though the Ferrari factory abandoned Le Mans in the 1960s, the company’s sports cars were always good enough on the track to continue with endurance racing, through the privateer teams. Giuseppe Risi was outspoken on this topic—he felt that it was the private teams that sustained sports-car racing when the big car companies shifted their focus. Without him and Amato Ferrari, there might have been no opportunity for Ford to stage its Le Mans comeback in 2016. Without them, Le Mans might have faded away.
And as the opening stage of the 2016 race drew to a close, Giuseppe Risi’s number 82 Ferrari 488 was leading Le Mans. But the Ford teams weren’t going to just sit back and take it.
“Our strategy was to win from the lead,” Joey Hand told me later.
And why not? If you have four of the fastest cars, why fool around with late passes? Le Mans is an endurance race, and perhaps the biggest part of enduring its twenty-four hours, in the modern incarnation of the event, is to deliver monumental speed for a day and a night and another day. Ford’s message was blunt: outrun us if you can. And only the Ferraris appeared capable of doing that.
There were two of them taking it to Ford. But even with a car off the lead lap, Ford still had a one-car advantage. If one of the Ferraris slipped back, it would be like a fox in the midst of a wolf pack, running for its life. So that was what it was all about—and what it would all be about, as one Ferrari and three Fords hurtled toward dusk.
Over the early evening, the Risi Ferrari opened up a lead, but Hand, in the number 68 GT, ran it down and took the lead. Then, at about 7:40 p.m., Ryan Briscoe’s number 69 GT slipped past the number 82 Ferrari on the Mulsanne to take second place. Hand was still running first. So it was now Ford, Ford, Ferrari, one, two, three. The number 66 Ford was in fourth, while the number 67 car lagged after a return to the pits several hours back for additional repairs. The dry racing was clearly helping the quick cars. The Corvettes were struggling, and Porsche had fallen far back and lost a car to the garage. Aston Martin was intermittently in the mix. But this was a race for turbocharged supercars making 600 horsepower. The big V-8s were a sideshow.
A magical moment occurred at eight o’clock. Three Ford GTs were once again running one-two-three at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. But there were nineteen hours of racing to go, as the sun began very slowly setting over the usually quiet French countryside, now vibrating with the stupendous roar of high-revving engines. Back in Dearborn, they were starting to believe.
Before the race started, it wasn’t entirely evident that they did, although the man at the top was setting a good example. About two hours into the race, I had ducked out of the media center and headed back down to the Ford paddock unit.
Mark Fields was hanging out with Bill Ford, both men outfitted in Ford Performance–branded gear and looking remarkably relaxed, a contrast to the edge I’d experienced with Nair and Pericak the day before. But everyone at Ford had a job to do. And the job of Fields and Bill Ford was to keep it chill, confident in the racing effort, while duly noting that they had committed an enormous sum of money to repeating history. I had asked around about how much and was told that I wouldn’t believe if it I were told the truth. Or those I asked simply made something up. But running a single car for an endurance-racing season can cost between $1 million and $5 million, depending on the racing class, and those teams aren’t building their cars from scratch. A run-of-the-mill new vehicle can cost a carmaker $1 billion to develop, so the actual racing aspect of the Ford return to Le Mans might have been the cheapest part of the whole deal (drivers might make only $25,000 for winning a race).
Fields immediately reminded me that Le Mans was the culmination of a process that Ford had set into motion when it had unveiled the new GT in January 2015. He had come to Le Mans later that year to announce the IMSA/WEC effort, but he hadn’t been able to attend the Daytona debut for Ford Chip Ganassi Racing at the Rolex 24, owing to a conflict with a classic-car auction in Arizona, for which Ford was a major sponsor, bringing along a vehicle to be auctioned for charity.
“Raj and I had a deal,” Fields said. “He’d go to Daytona, and I’d go to Barrett-Jackson.”
Fields missed attending the disastrous debut in person—and although it probably wasn’t his greatest test in leadership at Ford, it was still a test.
“Raj and I were texting back and forth, and he texted me the results. Then we talked, and we agreed that this is part of racing. If we, as a senior team, went back to the racing team and chewed their butts out, said, ‘Goddammit, why did this happen?’ we wouldn’t have gotten the passion and motivation we need to be a winner.”
Fields is one of those guys who never stop smiling, but it never seems smarmy, or as if he’s trying to fool you into believing he’s sincere. He’s also always thinking, but not in a forced diplomatic way, to make sure he’s on message. He was a tough guy from New Jersey who went to Harvard Business School after Rutgers and thrived at Ford because he was smart. He’s not investment-banker or management-consultant smart, not that vicious kind of smart; he’s warm smart.
“I came to Ford because of the people,” he said. “Because of the community.”
In Detroit, Fields proved over time that he cared deeply about the company and about what cars mean to those who adore them passionately—even though he freely admits that he isn’t a “car guy,” that he isn’t a Bob Lutz or Lee Iacocca or really even a Mark Reuss.
“I don’t have grease in my veins, but I love cars and trucks,” he said.
That’s a good thing, because Fields, an intense person who has learned how to employ his soft side with exactly the right amount of charisma, has a deep, emotional understanding of how to manage the ups and downs of other intense people.
He knew that Nair and Pericak were freaking out after Daytona. And he knew that Pericak in particular would beat himself senseless over the GT’s messy coming-out party. And so he did what he always does now when confronted with a crisis, large or small, relevant to Ford’s core business, Ford’s future, or a Ford undertaking that is fraught with risk and unknowns—such as returning to the 24 Hours of Le Mans after a nearly five-decade absence.
“I’ve always run to the fire, taken the difficult assignments,” he said.
But running to the fire in this instance was only part of what Fields did. He also channeled Alan Mulally. “‘You went to Harvard Business School,’” they would say to me. “‘You must have wanted to be CEO of Ford all along.’ No, I just wanted to be the marketing manager for the Ford division.”
Now he was CEO, but he wasn’t going to be a demanding jerk. Fields was going to be a business guy who understood what makes an engineer’s heart beat in his chest, and what makes an engineer’s blood boil, and what would make an engineer lose sleep and yell at his kids. And he wasn’t going to let those guys suffer alone. He was going to do what Mulally had taught him: he was going to empower them to see problems clearly and move rapidly to solve them.
After Daytona, you could tell that Pericak got it. I imagined the fall-on-my-sword moment with Nair and Fields. But the Ford CEO wasn’t going to go there. As Nair had said before Daytona, things had been going too well. There is no glory without struggle.
“It’s part of racing,” Fields continued, as the roar of engines shot across the hundred yards of weathered French concrete that separated the Ford paddock unit from the stands. “You do the analysis. You say here’s what went wrong and here’s how we fix it. And you make sure you improve for the next race.”
It was Mulally in a nutshell. The charts on the GT race cars had all been green. And then—Boom! A gigantic block of red. Fields was seasoned when it came to crisis. He embraced the trouble and saw it as a chance to bring the team together. If Pericak, Nair, Ganassi, and Larry Holt at Multimatic could get through this, the Le Mans assault would be stronger.
While we talked, Fields’s choice was playing out in real time. And Ford was winning.
Everything was green now. Even the balky number 67 car had a chance to get back into it.
I like Mark Fields and I always have liked him. He’s living proof that by reinventing your expectations, you can put yourself in a position to be great. Ford Performance and Ganassi needed Fields’s effortless yet hard-won self-confidence and affirmation back in January, because at that point, the only people who really grasped that racing is hard and unpredictable were the drivers.
Even Chip Ganassi seemed to think that the Le Mans campaign wasn’t starting out the way he thought it should—but for him it was more of a chain-of-command thing, and Chip Ganassi wasn’t clearly at the very top.
“What I was most nervous about going into Daytona—and my nightmares came true—is that it was an adjustment for me and my team to be involved with a program with so many people touching the car that don’t come under my direct command,” Ganassi told me at Le Mans. “That was a challenge, a learning curve there. That was the tallest order of the spring, but it’s behind us.”
Ganassi also wasn’t looking beyond Le Mans. “We’re fully focused,” he said. “We’re here to win the race. I’m not planning next year. We’re here to win this race this weekend.”
He admitted that post–Le Mans, win or lose, the season would then revert to the mundane process of running races, weekend after weekend. “As big as those other races are, this is the one you want to win.”
For me, that crystallized what the impending twenty-four-hour ordeal meant not just for Ganassi but for everyone at Ford. It was easy to argue that the GTs existed as new cars in a racing season, and that somehow it would be acceptable for them to in fact repeat the history of the GT40s and spend two years failing to win Le Mans while all the kinks were worked out.
“Everybody,” Ganassi said, “wants to win the big ones.”
He added, “The most competitive games attract the most competitive teams. It’s an honor to be here. But you’ve still got to do the obvious things right. Take the tires off, put the tires on. Put the fuel in. Don’t hit anybody. You’ve still got to the run the race. Even with all the fanfare and hoopla. You still have to just race. We’re all in the middle of a chess game, and at three o’clock on Sunday at Le Mans, somebody is going to say ‘checkmate.’”
Fields was in a similar state of mind. Before Saturday, June 18, 2016, I’d never seen an American CEO so fully and contentedly ensconced in the process of winning. But we talked for half an hour, about two hours into the race, and he never once looked up at the standings, which were displayed around the paddock unit on flat-screen monitors, constantly updated. He was along for the ride and glad to be a passenger. It was Pericak who was out in the trenches, in his racing suit and with the headset on, obsessing. And Fields knew Dave could handle the stress.
“I hope we win,” Fields said, as we were shaking hands before I headed back to catch up on the race. “But if we don’t, we’ll learn some things.”
Then he brought it right home: “And we’ll be back next year.”
I had been steadfast in my objectivity about Ford’s chances since I had started following this story, back in mid-2015, when the company confirmed that it would return to Le Mans. What I really wanted was competition, drama, six months of adventures and misadventures on and off the track. You know, a good story.
But I had to admit it, as I walked back to the stands: I wanted Ford to win. The symbolism was just too rich, too heady. In 2009, the American auto industry had been down, out, and looking as though it might not get back up again. Ford had been in better shape than GM and Chrysler but not in great shape. It had been, as Fields had put it, “harrowing.” And yet we were all, seven years later, coming off the best sales year in the history of the U.S. auto market—17.5 million new cars and trucks had rolled off dealer lots—and Ford was back at Le Mans with a true factory effort for the first time since 2010 (privateers had run the second-generation GT back then). Heck, General Motors was here, as well, with the Corvette Racing team.
I was having my own “America! Fuck, yeah!” moment. I was thinking about getting a tattoo of the Circuit de la Sarthe on my forearm before I left France.
But I didn’t want Ferrari to throw in the towel, and as night arrived and the race moved into a period when the nerves start to fray, the adrenaline begins to ebb, the drivers try but fail to sleep, and the cars begin to feel and show the deleterious effects of lap after lap after lap, Ferrari lived up to its legendary status as the greatest racing marque to ever turn a wheel in competition.
With midnight closing in and sunrise six hours away, with a nearly full moon casting white light across the blissfully dry Circuit de la Sarthe, it was Ford-Ford-Ferrari-Ford on the lead lap. Only the number 82 Risi 488 stood between Ford and a full repeat of the 1966 result. But that Ferrari 488 was one hell of a car. And as night passed, dawn arrived, and pursuit of glory in France continued into Sunday afternoon, we’d learn that Giancarlo Fisichella is one hell of a driver.