June 19, 2016
It was morning in Le Mans, 130 miles southwest of Paris.
The preceding night had been pierced by the screams and howls of powerful race cars as they covered, endlessly it seemed, an eight-and-a-half-mile circuit first laid out in the early 1920s, when a race car was lucky to threaten 100 miles per hour. As French family dinners proceeded in tents and impromptu fireworks displays lit up the skies over the countryside, the engines’ wails had continued. They’d raged on as bedraggled fans from all over the world grabbed a few hours of sleep in cars, campers, and tents strewn around grassy parking lots and fields.
In the cockpit of his Ford GT, the supercar Ford had built to commemorate its legendary win at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans—with, the plan was, a fresh win—Joey Hand had been pushing 200 miles per hour since sunrise. So far his average speed in the twin-turbocharged, 600-horsepower, low-slung race car was 150 miles per hour. He was sweating under his helmet, and inside his fireproof racing suit. He had shifted gears hundreds of times. He was thirsty, and he was getting tired.
The nighttime run hadn’t worked out entirely in Ford’s favor. There was a Ferrari in the mix. It was the number 82 car, a so-called privateer ride supported by Risi Competizione of Houston, Texas. Hand, a compulsively cheerful Californian in his mid-thirties, who had a taste for American flag–motif cowboy hats and McDonald’s breakfasts—“I’ve won a lot of races with sausage Egg McMuffin in my stomach,” he liked to say—was in the number 68 Ford GT, possibly the most anticipated high-performance machine in recent history. It had been designed from the ground up to win endurance races, Le Mans in particular.
The new GT had first “rolled a wheel,” in racing parlance, fewer than 400 days earlier. There were now four GTs on the Circuit de la Sarthe at Le Mans, all red-white-and-blue and numbered 66, 67, 68, and 69—the years of Ford’s Le Mans victories with the car’s ancestor, the immortal GT40. And as the mid-morning snack lines formed outside the crêpe truck parked 100 yards from the pits, where the race cars pulled in for fuel and tire changes, Hand’s GT was in second place.
One or another of the GTs had run in first place plenty during the event, which extended from the afternoon of June 18 to the afternoon of June 19—an entire solar day of racing, designed to break cars, to break drivers, and to break whole companies. When Ford had won this thing in epic fashion on the same weekend fifty years earlier, it had crushed Ferrari, the team that had dominated Le Mans from 1960 to 1965 with its seductive red track rockets fueled by the ego of Enzo Ferrari.
Now Hand was running down the latter-day version of those same red Ferraris Ford had beaten in ’66. At the wheel of the Ferrari 488 GTE, a gorgeous twin-turbo, V-8–powered wedge of the finest Italian engineering and design, was Matteo Malucelli, a swashbuckling thirty-one-year-old from Forlì, near Bologna, who had survived a devastating crash two years earlier.
This was the GTE Pro class of the World Endurance Championship. This was the 24 Hours of Le Mans, perhaps the most famous race in the world and easily the toughest, a brutal test of driver and machine.
Hand and Malucelli were racing and racing hard.
The pouring rains that had beset the previous afternoon’s start were long gone. With the sun rising in the sky, Hand sensed his moment. The setup was perfect. He was right on Malucelli’s bumper—or, more accurately, his carbon-fiber diffuser, an aerodynamic component that extended low from the Ferrari’s rear. Because Hand’s car had been the fastest in qualifying, and fast enough to win the pole position, he knew he had the speed for a pass. He just had to pick his spot, find his moment—and not do something stupid, like overplay his chance and wreck the car.
He had Ferrari red in front of him, but a growling Ford EcoBoost V-6 engine was behind him, pumping velocity to his rear wheels as violently as a fire hose pumping water. Hand had to hold his GT back just enough to have the extra punch when he needed it.
Malucelli wasn’t on Hand’s mind anymore. Hand had chased him for enough laps to gather the information he needed to do what he’d come to do, all the way from Sacramento, California, to this normally quiet but now raucous corner of France. Every year they hold this mad race and invite the best drivers and the finest cars in the world to destroy themselves—and the maddest part was coming up.
It’s called the Mulsanne Straight—Les Hunaudières in French—a 3.7-mile stretch of tree-lined public road, where the fastest Le Mans racers, in the so-called prototype cars, can hit 250 miles per hour.
The Mulsanne Straight was the longest legal drag strip in the world, at least for this weekend. This was where Joey Hand was going to make his move. At 10:30 a.m., he peered through the eye port of his racing helmet and shifted in his racing suit. He remembered what Dave Pericak, the Ford executive heading up the Le Mans campaign, had said to him right before he got in the car: “Joey, go get ’em.”
“That’s the plan, boss,” Hand had replied.
Hand checked the Ferrari in front of him. He gave the instruments one last scan. And then he went for it. Hand blasted the GT around the 488 and slipped in front of it, holding his position but preparing to defend it as he slowed from nearly 200 to 100 miles per hour to brake for the hard right turn at the end of the Mulsanne. From wherever they were watching, the thousands of Ford fans who’d descended on Le Mans rose to their feet. It was fifty years to the day since Ford had first won Le Mans, 113 years since Henry Ford started the company that still bears his name, and eight years since it had become apparent to everyone back at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, that everything was going horribly wrong with the American auto industry.
Now, on a beautiful, clear morning in France, at one of motorsport’s grandest venues, the spiritual home of Ford’s greatest-ever racing victory, the carmaker’s newest and most advanced piece of rolling technology was winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans. All anyone wanted to know at this moment was: Will Ford be able to hold on? Could history be repeated?
As the race continued, Joey Hand and his GT kept running at the front of the GTE Pro class. But the fact was, Hand had a Ferrari on his ass—a very fast Ferrari. And Ferrari drivers don’t hold back, no matter where they race. They bleed rosso corsa, “racing red,” the Italian national motorsports color. The red-white-and-blue of Hand’s GT was putting a not exactly fine point on what this return to Le Mans was all about for Ford.
What’s more, for Ferrari the race was personal. Ford had ended Ferrari’s long Le Mans reign in the 1960s and after another three wins following the 1966 victory had backed away from Le Mans. Ferrari never really came back, not with a full-on effort supported by the factory in Maranello. Instead, the car company that Enzo Ferrari had started at about the same time that Le Mans was born shifted its focus to Formula One.
In 2016, the Ferrari drivers and their teams didn’t want to be accomplices to Ford’s attempt to revisit that humiliating weekend, so long ago, yet so fresh. This was going to be a battle. This was going to be the most astonishing 24 Hours of Le Mans in decades. This was going to be Ford versus Ferrari, just like the good old days. It was a perfect story for racing fans, and it was now in its final chapter, just four hours before the checkered flag would drop.
At 10:31 a.m., Joey Hand was right where he wanted to be: winning the race from the lead. He wasn’t hanging around behind the leaders, waiting to make a late pass. He was an American racing in a car bearing the name of the American who created the modern auto industry. He had twenty hours in the bank and four hours to go. This was going to be good.
It isn’t often that one car completely dominates the conversation at a major international auto show. And it isn’t often that one car so completely symbolizes a company’s return from the brink of ruin. But that exact confluence happened in January 2015 in Detroit, at the North American International Auto Show, the biggest car show of them all.
The unveiling of Ford’s new GT supercar was the culmination of a year of tantalizing rumors, which had begun to take shape in the fall of 2014 and then built momentum. The speculation went something like this: with 2016 right around the corner, the Ford Motor Company was seriously contemplating a return to what practically everyone in racing considers the automaker’s moment of purest glory on the track, Le Mans in ’66.
Everyone did the math: 2016 minus 1966 was fifty years. Ford had been through a lot in that half century. The company had always experienced ups and downs, of course. Although Henry Ford had pioneered the automobile, created the industrial production line, and even paid his workers a wage that enabled them to buy the cars that they were building, the company had been edged aside by General Motors before World War II. GM, the colossal model of the modern corporation, simply offered more choice.
But Ford had hardly been irrelevant in the years after that. It created beautiful sedans and produced what would become the best-selling vehicle in America for decades—the F-Series pickup truck. In the mid-1950s, the marvelous Thunderbird hit the road, defining in the process the sporty American coupe. In 1960, Ford introduced the Falcon, an innovative smaller car that stood in counterpoint to the massive cruisers of the Eisenhower era. The Escort, introduced in 1980, proved that the automaker could build a decent small car. The mid-1980s brought the Taurus, whose rounded shape would stand in contrast to the boxy sedans of the period; more than 7 million units would be sold.
Through the heyday of sport-utility vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s, Ford’s models sold well, starting with the Explorer, which has been in production since 1991. In the late 1990s, Ford’s Lincoln division invented the luxury SUV market with the Navigator. The Mustang—the quintessential “faster horse” Henry Ford, quite possibly apocryphally, said was what his customers would have said they wanted, had he asked them—was and still is an American icon. Embedded in the national imagination, the Ford Mustang is celebrated in A Faster Horse, a well-received feature-length documentary that premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.
And then there was racing. In this realm, Ford was less like an American car company than a European one. It proved its technology on the track and then put it in the cars it sold to the public.
The story of how Ford brought the GT40 to Le Mans in 1966 and went on to command the legendary endurance race is one of the most remarkable in the history of high-speed competition, not least for the business rivalry between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari, which wound up being played out on the French racecourse. Since then the GT40 has been bound into Ford’s DNA, for better or worse. To a certain extent Ford had been haunted by the GT40’s success. You might even say cursed. Why, people wondered, has the storied American company never again been able to live up to that moment? With 2016 looming, the talk intensified: How could Ford not return to Le Mans for the fiftieth anniversary of the greatest victory of its greatest race car?
Destiny beckoned, it seemed, and by the late autumn of 2014 it was obvious Ford had something in the works. In the following January, at the Detroit auto show, the world saw what it was: a breathtaking conceptual expression of what a new GT would look like, in a street-legal version. It was a fearsome, futuristic carbon-fiber predator, painted a luminous blue, with an innovative six-cylinder engine mounted behind the driver. The overall design immediately put Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, and a host of other exotic supercar manufacturers on notice.
That six-cylinder engine had something else going for it: a pair of turbochargers enabling—and this was what ultimately caused the collective dropping of jaws in Motown—600 horsepower.
Beauty was combined with power and set against a glorious racing backstory. As a stage setting, the GT introduction was masterly. But the vehicle also completely changed the conversation in the auto industry. Prior to the show, all anyone had been talking about was the arrival of self-driving cars—the latest chapter in the melding of the automobile and technology. With the debut of the GT, speed was suddenly back in the picture, as was the prospect of actual human drivers—driving fast.
The city of Detroit and the Ford Motor Company were also back—although not without plenty of scars from the carnage of the financial crisis. Motown was smaller. The population had fled in droves, and the auto industry, once a symbol of American might, had dwindled in importance. The U.S. economy was now postindustrial, and Detroit, the definitive American industrial city, was learning to accept its downsized role. Once a proud Midwestern counterpoint to New York and Los Angeles, Detroit was a bankrupt shadow of its former self, with whole swaths of the metropolis given over to decay; some sections, remarkably, were even seeing the reclamation of the urban landscape by nature. In the winter of 2005, with the financial crisis looming, I’d been in the city for a meeting and staying at the hotel at GM’s headquarters in the Renaissance Center downtown. At a late-evening dinner in the top-floor restaurant, looking out over the black Detroit River flowing with ice, I overhead a quartet of executives who’d also made the trip to Motown to talk to the biggest automaker in the United States.
“It used to be fun to come here,” one of them said. The rest of the group nodded and mumbled in bleak agreement. Then they went back to their drinks.
Detroit had been to hell and back, as the now-classic 2011 Chrysler commercial starring the hometown rapper Eminem memorably drove home when it premiered at that year’s Super Bowl. As had Ford. Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the new Ford CEO, Alan Mulally, fresh off a successful stint at Boeing, stared into a bleak crystal ball and decided that Ford would run out of money in a few years—and in any case would struggle to weather even a normal downturn in the highly cyclical auto industry, let alone a massive international economic crisis.
So Mulally mortgaged literally everything Ford owned to the credit markets. It was a bold bet, but it paid off. When the crisis hit and the U.S. auto market collapsed, General Motors and Chrysler required bailouts and bankruptcy protection to survive. But Ford had Mulally’s war chest.
Ford was a proud survivor. Within five years of that harrowing stretch, the company was healthy enough to start dreaming again. Against a backdrop of once-again booming U.S. auto sales and a balance sheet flush with cash, the Le Mans talk grew. Ford knew it had an opportunity to seize the kind of moment that might never come around again. And yet the new GT almost didn’t happen.
The initial plan, intermittently discussed in the post-financial-crisis period, had been to return to Le Mans with a track-worthy Mustang. It took a major executive push, coming from the top of the company beginning in 2014, to green-light the thrilling new machine while simultaneously organizing and funding a racing operation on two continents.
Ford continued to bask in the afterglow of having survived the financial crisis and the meltdown of the U.S. auto industry without taking government bailout money or declaring bankruptcy, like General Motors and Chrysler. There is no more iconic American car company than Ford (and yes, part of that iconography includes Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism, a bigotry embedded in the culture that he helped promote). For all practical purposes, Ford invented the automobile for the majority of Americans. And when the dark period of the financial crisis was over it pushed its brand forward in ways that had somehow become unimaginable for a demoralized U.S. auto industry.
The force doing the pushing was Mark Fields, Ford’s CEO, who got the job after Mulally retired in 2014. When he accepted the big seat, Fields outlined a new vision for Ford as an advanced mobility company far more than a carmaker. His plan was to prevent Ford from ever slipping back to the bleakness of the 2009 period, while simultaneously preparing the company to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century—challenges coming not from GM or Chrysler or Honda or Toyota or Ferrari, but from Tesla, Google, and Apple.
At the same time, Fields didn’t neglect Ford’s racing legacy. He came to Le Mans for the first time in 2015 to preside over the introduction of the new GT race car and to inaugurate Ford’s Le Mans campaign. He was back in 2016, watching the race as Joey Hand made his move on Ferrari on Sunday morning.
Fields often said he wasn’t a crusty “car guy,” but he knew what winning on the track meant to the company. And he had working for him Ford family members who also knew.
“I think racing is something that has always been a part of our DNA,” Henry Ford III told me in early 2016. Ford III is the great-great-grandson of Henry Ford and the grandnephew of Henry Ford II, the executive behind the GT40’s Le Mans wins in the 1960s. Le Mans regulations require that the GT race car have a road-going equivalent, and Henry III had taken on the job of overseeing the marketing of that version to buyers in the general public after the race. His Ford Performance team would live and breathe Le Mans, on a breakneck schedule, for a year.
“One of the things we’re trying to do with Ford Performance is really use racing as kind of a laboratory and a test bed for innovation,” Ford said.
In 2016, Ford’s comeback from the financial crisis and its aftermath was complete. Wall Street still hadn’t come around, and Ford executives sometimes grumbled about the stock price. But they didn’t complain about their customers. In 2015, a record 17.5 million new cars and trucks were sold in the United States, and a huge number of them were Fords—in particular Ford pickup trucks, including the F-150, which had been completely revamped to be lighter and get better fuel economy.
Ford was once again solidly the number-two automaker in the United States, behind GM. But Ford had a story brewing for 2016 that its Motown competitor was going to find tough to match. If Ford won again at Le Mans, it would be a win for everyone who had faith in the idea that Americans could build cars—great cars. Cars to remember, like the cars we remembered from the 1950s and 1960s.
For me, the story began in 2015 over a meal in New York City. It would end at a racetrack in France, where I stood with the sound of screaming engines in my ears like mechanical thunder. There was the flash of fast machines, and history thick in the air.
This is that story.