I was standing on pit lane at Lime Rock Park in Lakeville, Connecticut, talking to Joey Hand for the first time since Le Mans. It was about an hour before the start of the IMSA WeatherTech Northeast Grand Prix, at a tight little track that was built in 1957 and became famous when a local racing enthusiast named Paul Newman decided it was going to be his stomping ground. There was, it turned out, a McDonald’s in nearby Canaan. Mission accomplished.
Hand had followed up the Le Mans victory with a second-place finish at Sahlen’s Six Hours of the Glen, at Watkins Glen International in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Westbrook and Briscoe took home the win, making it a one-two sweep for Ford-Ganassi. The program was back to running two cars per race for the rest of the season in the United States and Europe. Hand was on an impressive run, as was Ford.
It was a beautiful day in Connecticut for the grand prix, the pale blue northeastern summer sky filled with enormous clouds, the surrounding hills a deep and lush green. But it was hot—and the temperature was going to climb to well over 100 degrees inside the number 66 that Hand would be piloting around the bucolic, unpretentious, but treacherously snug Lime Rock course. That didn’t stop him from doing a little dance, a back-and-forth shuffle, when I asked him what it felt like to be a Le Mans winner.
“That makes everything OK,” he said, with his signature grin.
Ford didn’t win at Lime Rock, but Westbrook and Briscoe took third in a wild race that saw Fisichella run off the track twice during the two-hour-and-forty-minute dash. For me, the story had come almost full circle. As at Daytona, Corvette Racing finished one-two, the team that had been completely out of it at Le Mans capturing its hundredth win.
There was something soothing about the relatively quiet environs of Lime Rock and its small-town vibe after the speed palace in Florida and the Colosseum of endurance racing in France, and Hand seemed almost serene.
“It’s been a busy season,” he said. Right after the Lime Rock race, he would head off for a short vacation before getting back to it at the ten-hour Petit Le Mans race at Road Atlanta in September.
On the other side of the concrete pit barrier, on pit lane itself, two GTs were parked at forty-five-degree angles, the cockpits covered with silvery insulating blankets to keep the interiors cool for race time. They looked fresh and clean and ready to rock, just as they had on the grid at Daytona seven months earlier. Now, of course, they were Le Mans winners. The new GT had supplanted the old GT40. Ford had crafted a new legend.
Dave Pericak was a changed man when I finally caught up with him. He missed Lime Rock because he had to head to Germany for the 6 Hours of Nürburgring the same weekend, but he was still enjoying the post–Le Mans buzz. You had to hand it to the guy: In January, he had declared that Ford was ready to race, only to run smack into the catastrophe at Daytona. But now that bad memory had been erased by the most spectacular achievement of his already pretty stellar career with Ford.
“We took the trophy back to Dearborn and had a celebration,” he recalled, after saying that he began to calm down and appreciate the Le Mans win only on the plane back to the United States. “Something like four thousand people turned out, when it was over ninety degrees.”
Everyone at Ford had been following Pericak’s every move, listening to his every utterance, sharing in the ups and downs, the wins and losses. And although his emotions had been a challenge to manage throughout the year, Pericak’s confidence in the GT and the racing team, and in Multimatic and Ford itself, never waned.
“I knew we could do it,” he said. “To see Joey make that pass, to do it on command, that proved there was no looking back. I really felt that if the car stayed together, we had it won. Winning Le Mans had a way of washing away a lot of the pain and fears that had emerged early in the season.”
After the balance-of-performance controversy in France, he was also glad Ford had followed up Le Mans immediately with the Watkins Glen one-two victory. “That made a statement and closed the book on the skepticism.”
Pericak was optimistic about his future—and happy about his job, looking forward to finishing up the IMSA/WEC season and going for a championship. He’d be back for the 2017 Le Mans campaign as well. “If they don’t fire me, I’m planning to stick around.”
On July 28, Mark Fields presented Ford’s second-quarter 2016 earnings, the company’s first report after Le Mans, to Wall Street. Fields was only the second Ford top boss, and the first whose name wasn’t on the Glass House, to win the race.
Ford was continuing to make money, piling up profitable quarter after profitable quarter. Unless the economy was to get cratered by something totally out of Ford’s control, the company coffers were adequately stocked to keep it going back to Le Mans for the rest of the decade. Would four consecutive wins in the late 1960s be matched or exceeded in the late 2010s? Everyone at Ford hoped so, and the company was ready to put its money behind its magnificent new Le Mans–conquering GT. But Ferrari, Porsche, and, most important, Corvette weren’t going to sit out the next few years. History can’t ever be perfectly replayed, of course. Ferrari wanted revenge. Corvette wanted redemption. The plot points were already in place for other carmakers to stage their own returns to glory.
When Lime Rock was over, I walked back to the parking lot and thought about why auto racing exerts such a powerful emotional pull on the human psyche. There’s always something melancholy about the hours right after the end of a race, especially if the sun is slowly setting as the venue is cleaned up, the race cars are stowed in their semitruck transporters, and everyone who’s part of motorsport’s gypsy spectacle heads for the next contest. But this time does give you the opportunity to take a close look at the racetrack. I always check out the racing line, that black, grippy streak made from the bits of tires that burn off as the drivers sling through the corners and down the straights.
In a way the racing line is high-performance automotive artwork, the only tangible thing the machine leaves behind, like a signature that will rapidly fade. But just after the race, it tells a story. Something remarkable happened here. We made something incredible. We brought it here and pushed ourselves. We ached and burned. We went fast. We looked down the track and lived a few seconds in the future. We risked injury or even death. For two hours—or six or twelve or twenty-four—we could touch all the danger and excitement and promise that anyone in human history could ever ask for.