Fifty Years to the Day
Attrition always becomes a factor on the Circuit de la Sarthe. In 2016, in the prototype classes, cars were on and off the track, in and out of the garage, all night long. I devoted only one eye to the class that would ultimately claim the Le Mans title outright, but Toyota seemed impressive. I noted that no Japanese manufacturer had won Le Mans since Mazda in 1991.
The Michelin lounge had a convenient view straight down into the Ford pits, so I meandered over for a snack and to see whether the Ganassi crews could get their drivers in and out quickly and cleanly in the darkness.
The food had been delightful for the whole of my time at Le Mans. At races in the United States, I was used to urns of stale coffee, soda machines, maybe some bland sandwiches rolled out for lunch. The only deviation since I had dived into both the car-show circuit and the sports-car racing season in January had been a cocktail party thrown by an organization of journalists I belong to, the International Motor Press Association, at the conclusion of the New York auto show in April.
In France there were sandwiches, but they were made of mouthwatering French ham and tasty cheese and they were delicately sliced into narrow rectangles. There were other cheeses and fruits. Young men and women in black suits, white shirts, and black neckties would happily pour you a Coke or a beer or a glass of wine or some Champagne. There was espresso or cappuccino on demand. At one point, two chefs arrived to prepare elaborate little haute cuisine concoctions that could be nibbled from small cups. If you wanted to, you could grab a copy of the red Michelin Guide to take home; there were about 100 neatly arranged on a bank of shelves.
Overall, though, Le Mans was frankly looking a bit shabby. The press facilities appeared as if they hadn’t been significantly updated since the 1970s. The worn concrete stands did not mimic those in the shiny speed palaces of America. But this was still France—food mattered.
As it turned out, the timing of my snack was serendipitous, because the number 66 GT was sitting in the pits. It sat motionless for much longer than would have been normal for a refueling or a tire change, especially for a car that was fighting to hold onto third place in the GTE Pro class. At Le Mans, tire changes and refills can’t happen simultaneously, and the engines have to be turned off when fuel is taken on. Teams warm new tires up in special ovens beforehand, so they hit the cars hot and are ready to rock without a warm-up lap, a boon at night when the temperatures fall. But something unrelated to tires and fuel was keeping the number 66 at bay.
The problem was a malfunction with the electronics that should have kept the green “66” on its flank illuminated. Unable to identify the car, the marshals had ordered it into the pits, where crew members in racing suits, helmets, and gloves had frantically disassembled and were reassembling the components.
It was a serious infraction to have any aspect of the lighting system fail at night. This was an endurance race, and a healthy chunk of it, some eight hours, was run in darkness. A car that didn’t have reliable lights was obviously failing a critical test.
I’d later find out that the 66 wasn’t the only GT experiencing electronics issues. But it was the only one of the three on the lead lap that would get knocked off because of them.
The fix on the 66 car was fiddly and time-consuming. The crewman who was completing the repair was dealing with tiny screws smaller than pushpins and a precise, narrow screwdriver in the middle of the night, with a helmet on. The pits are well lit at Le Mans, but it was still a comically delicate crisis to be suffering through. From where I watched, the crewman was doing a brilliant job. He didn’t drop a single screw.
I later learned that this episode was classic Le Mans. A glitch that no one had planned for showed up in the middle of the night. The fix had to be figured out fast, and a solution had to be improvised. And then a mechanic or crew member had to execute it, under the most glaring pressure imaginable.
After about ten minutes, the problem was finally corrected, and the GT roared off into the night. But now it was two Fords versus one Ferrari on the lead lap.
Ferrari seized its chance to lead the GTE Pro class before twelve hours of racing had been completed. The number 68 Ford came into the pits for a brake change—something that had to be done at some point during the twenty-four hours of racing—dropping well behind the number 82 Risi 488, which went on to open a sizable time gap. The number 69 GT moved into second place, but it had its own brake change to deal with at some point.
Overnight, the Fords chased the Ferrari, while elsewhere in GTE Pro, the AF Corse Ferrari 488 crashed and later retired from the race, and one of the two Porsche 911s running in the class blew an engine. These mishaps and incidents—along with those in the other classes—might have brought out the safety car in previous years, but Le Mans now employs slow zones, requiring cars to reduce speed in affected parts of the circuit, dipping to fifty miles per hour when there’s an accident or a problem on the circuit. The race marshals monitor progress through these areas, and the circuit itself is equipped with a signal system to alert the drivers to slow down or suffer a penalty. (One of the secret skills in winning Le Mans is remaining constantly aware of the rules, so that a minor infraction doesn’t undo hours of work.) The implementation of the slow zone keeps the race moving, but it makes catching up with a fast car from a deficit of even a single lap difficult, because you can’t run flat out.
The Risi Ferrari fought hard, but the Fords were able to stay in touch, and by sunrise, the number 68 GT had closed the gap and was in the Ferrari’s mirrors. Then disaster struck: the charging Ford was assessed a drive-through penalty for failing to shut off its engine during refueling in the pits; it would have to make a slow detour through pit lane, entering, then exiting, without stopping, losing a bit of time. The number 69 GT might be Ford’s only hope, but it would have to make up ground on the Risi Ferrari.
Sunrise also brought carnage, as the return of daylight sent a signal through the prototype class to get on it and go for the black-and-white flag. For the GTE Pro drivers, this was a risky patch, where they had the potential to get involved in crashes as the faster prototypes start to fight it out. For the lead Ferrari and the Fords, however, nothing bad happened. And the Fords started to use their speed.
The pass came, naturally, on the Mulsanne Straight, with Joey Hand in the number 68 car, which had stormed back from its penalty. The American slipped around the Italian driver Matteo Malucelli and stepped on it hard to get in front of the 488. Hand wasn’t in the simulator in North Carolina. This was reality, on the most famous racing stretch on planet Earth.
We’re going to win from the lead.
Four hours to go, and Ford was once again running first in its class. An hour later, and it was still Ford-Ferrari, one-two. The 69 and 66 GTs were third and fourth.
But it was snug at the top. Hand had to keep the Ferrari back. And it was rough in that Ferrari. Toni Vilander, a thirty-five-year-old from Finland with two Le Mans wins with AF Corse to his credit, had to hold the number 68 Ford in his sights while making sure that the number 69 GT didn’t start pressuring him from behind.
The phrase “Go like hell” is ingrained in Le Mans lore. It’s what Bruce McLaren shouted to Chris Amon during a driver change in 1966. It’s a rallying cry. But I’ve always thought that the phrase, for all its urgent simplicity, cuts both ways. Going like hell is all about balls-to-the-wall driving and doing the most basic thing it takes to win, go faster than the other guy. But hell is, of course, what it has always been: a place of eternal suffering, a lake of fire, the realm of satanic ordeal, a region where you abandon all hope. Hell isn’t a place you want to get too familiar with. And going like hell in a race car is a mind-set that you want to visit only at the right time and in the right place.
Hell was more than a state of mind in the Risi Competizione Ferrari 488, blasting down the Mulsanne Straight at 200 miles per hour, its whistling twin turbos and screaming 606-horsepower V-8 filling Vilander’s ears with mechanical anguish, while on the radio he received updates about the Ford in front of him and the Fords behind. Now was the time to press, in the competitive conflagration that his body and mind had become, locked in a bright red missile that had been racking up eight-mile laps at an average speed of 150 miles per hour for almost twenty hours.
Predictably, it was in the so-called Porsche Curves on the opposite side of the circuit from the Mulsanne that the Ferrari lost it. Right. Left. More left. Right again. It’s a critical section. You have to be quick here. You want to push for the fastest line, but that might cause you to deviate from the racing line, the black track of sticky rubber laid down over the course of hundreds of laps by dozens of cars. It helps you stay glued to the surface and it gives you a guide though the curves, like a worn footpath when you’re in an unfamiliar forest.
But just off the racing line, the surface can be treacherous. The car can slip if the power is being laid down and the bond between rubber and road isn’t quite right. And when you’re trying to win Le Mans, you can’t back off on the power unless you’re sitting on a big fat lead. You can’t lose speed. It’s the can’t that creates the danger.
You can relax on the Mulsanne Straight, sort of. It’s your right foot and the car. Keep it pointed straight. You’re a passenger. You can get on the radio and talk to the team. But you’re a driver in the Porsche Curves.
Vilander was getting the 68 GT lined up. Another lap maybe. Another run down the Mulsanne. But he couldn’t lose anything in the Porsche Curves. He knew the number 68 Ford was fast—it had already run the Ferrari drivers down when it looked as if they had stretched out a lead. Now he was doing the running down. But he and Risi didn’t have eight hours of racing to work with. They had three. And the Porsche Curves were his undoing.
“I tried to catch Joey,” he said later. “But I overestimated my skills.”
Vilander’s car went into a spin. It wasn’t wrecked—his talent kept the car in the race—but Risi’s shot at spoiling Ford’s win had ended. The number 68 GT’s lead of less than ten seconds would grow to forty with two and a half hours to go. The commentators on the TV broadcast say they don’t think the number 82 Ferrari can get it back. But the race was far from a done deal.
The number 68 GT, now with Dirk Müller at the wheel, was running fast in the front. But the car was beset with electronics problems and had been all night. Nothing cost it a disastrous amount of time (the same couldn’t be said of the number 66 Ford), but at various points when Sébastien Bourdais was driving, he hadn’t had a working radio, and he didn’t have good control over the car.
Bourdais had been trying to win Le Mans flying blind and driving by feel, with no updates from mission control back in the pits on a track that is eight miles long and takes almost four minutes to get around. He didn’t know how much gas he actually had. He didn’t know how fast he was going coming into the pits. So he couldn’t comply with the Le Mans rules, which strictly and precisely govern how cars enter and leave the pits, and the sequence by which fuel goes in, tires come on and off, and other legal pit maintenance can go down.
It had been a steering-wheel problem that was responsible for the pit-lane drive-through penalty. When the fuel was going in while the driver change was under way, Bourdais simply couldn’t shut the car off using the switch on the steering wheel, and as a result, Ford got busted. The glitches hadn’t returned after the team put a new steering wheel on the number 68 car, so the nervous task at hand for Müller was to stay cool but stay fast. Müller had Fisichella thirty-six seconds behind him. John Hindhaugh, the English broadcaster who had jumped onto the TV feed for the conclusion of the race, boomed out the obvious.
“Giancarlo Fisichella is surrounded by the remaining Ford GTs!”
He was surrounded. It was a lonely struggle. But in the Risi number 82 Ferrari, Fisichella wasn’t giving up. He was giving all.
Fisichella was an Italian race-car driver with two Le Mans wins in his trophy case, not to mention an impressive Formula One career. He had been behind the wheel for as long he could remember. If one of his three children asks him what Papà does for a living, he might answer that he takes a machine built for speed and uses his talent to make that speed into something that wins races. Now he was at the wheel of the fastest Ferrari sports car he’d ever driven. It wasn’t F1-car fast. But it was fast. And he was doing what anyone who races Ferraris was made to do, what he was made to do. He was bonded with his 488. He felt the Circuit de la Sarthe fly by just inches below his seat. He felt his tires and the horsepower of his engine, and he heard the high-pitched whistle of its twin turbos at full song. There was no fighting the car, only flow. And he wasn’t going to go down without fighting the Fords.
But honestly, objectively, was Fisichella going to catch Müller in the number 68 GT? Probably not. It was the pole car. It was fast—faster than the number 82 Ferrari 488. But speed isn’t everything. Maybe the moment would get to Müller. The guy is forty. He had never won Le Mans before. He took a third in 2011, but that was five years ago. You can lose a lot in five years. He had to handle the Porsche Curves, too. He had to win from the lead.
Fisichella also had to think about the number 69 GT on his tail. Running second sucks. It’s almost like running two races at the same time. Fisichella had to try to win, with everything he had left, and avoid finishing third—or worse, fourth. You can see the contradiction. By pressing for first, Vilander had stumbled and spun the car. Was Fisichella good enough to avoid a stumble—and to win?
The answer was no. “We just didn’t have enough speed,” he would say later. In the end, that’s what it came down to.
As a crowd of the Ford faithful—many of them students of the 1966 win, some of them owners of the mid-2000s GT—waved blue Ford flags and hooted and hollered from the balcony of the Ford hospitality tent overlooking the appropriately named Ford Chicanes, which the cars negotiate as they power back past the stands and the pits, Dirk Müller got the job done, without cracking.
“The last few laps were very emotional,” he would say after the race.
Fisichella got his second. “We deserved it,” he said, unsmiling, when he got out of the car.
The number 69 GT driven by Ryan Briscoe, Richard Westbrook, and Scott Dixon completed the Ford-Ferrari-Ford, one-two-three finish for 2016. It was almost 1966 all over again. And it had been Ford versus Ferrari. There was certainly some poetry in that, to me, anyway—and to Dave Pericak. “You couldn’t have scripted it any better,” he later said to me.
The Risi Ferrari drivers, however, were grim and miserable, even later. But that was appropriate. They had fought a gallant fight, and their consolation was justified unhappiness. No one would begrudge them being crestfallen after losing such a bold campaign. It hurts when you could win and you don’t, regardless of the history. It hurts for a long time.
“They deserved second place,” Dave Pericak told me. “I never thought for one moment that Ferrari wasn’t going to give us a fight. But I would have loved to see a Ford in second.”
Ford had initially considered a post-race complaint against the number 82 Ferrari. Its leader lights had malfunctioned after the sun came up, the same problem that the number 66 GT had dealt with at night. But, showing commendable sportsmanship, Ford never made the complaint official.
The number 66 Ford GT of Olivier Pla, Stefan Mücke, and Billy Johnson took fourth. For Mücke in particular it was wonderful vindication after his harrowing crash just a month earlier at Spa. The number 67 car, driven by Marino Franchitti, Andy Priaulx, and Harry Tincknell, was never a factor and finished ninth in the GTE Pro class and fortieth overall. It had never overcome the lap deficit it racked up owing to the broken gearbox at the start of the race, but it did finish.
The GTs were grimy and battle scarred, with bits of cracked carbon fiber and duct tape spoiling their smooth shells. They were splattered with black, like sinewy supermodels that had spent twenty-four hours drilling for oil. But no one had ever been more interested in studying their curves and angles. They glowed from within.
It was a new victory for Ford, a stunning achievement, fresh history, and a majestic comeback from the debacle at Daytona. The horrible start in January had been vindicated by an ultimately magical return to France in June.
But it wasn’t the only big story to come out of Le Mans in 2016. In fact, it was overshadowed by what befell the Toyota LMP1-H prototype car.
The number 5 Toyota had a lead of almost seventy seconds over the number 2 Porsche, running away with the race. But with twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes of racing completed, the Toyota lost power. It stalled completely, in front of the stands, and the Porsche went past. One more lap, and Porsche repeated 2015, the overall winner of Le Mans.
The Toyota team was devastated; it would have been the first win by a Japanese team in twenty-five years. Instead, it was the most unbelievable finish in the history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a meltdown on the cusp of victory that will likely never be forgotten, even if Toyota wins this thing ten times in a row.
Because you’re involved in the same race, just running it in less outlandish cars, you feel for Toyota if you’re a Ford driver, or if you’re Chip Ganassi, or if you’re Raj Nair or Dave Pericak or Henry Ford III or Bill Ford or anyone else in the Ford family who touched the incredible story of the new GT and its return to glory at the toughest race in the world. You don’t want to see another strong, factory-supported effort done in at the last possible moment by a bizarre mechanical fault. But you’re also entitled to your victory lap and your podium celebration. A win is a win, no matter what else happens on the track.
Bill Ford joined the drivers on the podium for the trophy presentation and the ritual spraying of Champagne from gigantic bottles—bottles that the drivers wouldn’t surrender, continuing to chug the bubbly as they were led to the cramped Le Mans pressrooms for post-race questions. The “Star-Spangled Banner” was playing, echoing across the French countryside, a quiet place once again, as the cacophony of racing engines had vanished.
The race was in the record books. The drivers gathered in the pressroom and talked informally about how tired they were. I asked Joey Hand where Dirk Müller was, and Hand said that he had gone to get his phone. They were all on their phones. There was exciting news to convey to friends and family.
“Let me ask you a serious question,” I said to Hand.
“I didn’t get my sausage Egg McMuffin,” he said, preempting me with what had become an inside joke.
He was dead-dog beat, you could tell. Hand is a compulsively cheerful person, but he was digging deep. The buzz hadn’t worn off. He was looking forward to getting back to see his kids. They had been learning to play golf. There was a vacation planned. But there were also more races to run.
“That’s not a serious question!” I countered.
There was a McDonald’s just off the Mulsanne Straight, but Hand hadn’t been able to make it over there before race time, he told me with a mischievous smile. But he had managed to cobble together a facsimile from what he could find in the morning, an improvised McDonald’s good-luck charm far, far from home, an impromptu McMuffin avec saucisson.
Then I asked the serious question, taking him back to his lead in the Daytona race before all the problems showed up with his car. What was it like to run in front there in the GT’s debut, only to see it all go wrong, and then today take the lead over Ferrari when Malucelli was at the wheel?
He thanked me for remembering his briefly impressive driving debut with the GT, then rose wearily to his feet and got ready to do for Ford what he was paid to do—after doing what he had just done in such an effective way that he could now claim kinship with McLaren and Amon and the racing brotherhood of 1966.
“My father always told me,” Hand said to me, clearly fighting his exhaustion, “if you can pass ’em, do it.”
Ford wasn’t always winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2016. But its cars were winning the race for longer than any others in their class. And the number 68 car had won the pole, and although it hadn’t led the entire race, it finished where it started.
“Very few races have the passion and substance that this one does,” Scott Dixon, the first New Zealander to win the Indy 500 (in 2008), said during the post-race press conference.
Dixon was a lot like Fisichella, the Formula One guy now racing sports cars—but Dixon had won the Indy 500. Fisichella had been a Formula One winner, but he’d never captured an F1 championship. You got the sense that Le Mans was something special for Dixon.
“I love it,” he said. He had finished third, but it didn’t seem that way. “It’s fantastic,” he added.
One difficult thing about a car race is that it ends, even the longest and most challenging one. I was familiar with the feeling, the ebbing of the rush. Le Mans was a mess. In one spot, I noticed at least two dozen empty beer cans. The carnival was being disassembled, the Ferris wheel was coming down, the booze had run dry, the colorful tents were disappearing, the crêpes were running out. The revelers were packing up to go home, and the parking lots were emptying.
But I took a minute to soak it all in anyway. Racing, when you get right down to it, is about the sound as much as anything. It’s music. Those engines, they grab you in the gut. It’s a sacred sound, a siren cry, a raw and cruel symphony. Men have died for it. Fifty years ago to the day, the GT40s had crossed the finish line one-two-three. On June 19, 2016, the GT had almost matched that performance: one-three-four.
A racetrack is never completely silent. The motors echo across the generations. I closed my eyes and opened my ears. I listened for the old sounds to combine with the new.