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The Legend of the Ford GT40: Engineering Triumph & Racing Legacy · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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Break Fix's History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part
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by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
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Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
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Commerce, and the Argo Singer family.
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Few cars have captured the essence of American performance and racing
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heritage, quite like the four gt.
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In his book for GT, how Ford Silenced the Critics Humbled Ferrari and conquered
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LeMans author Preston Lerner takes readers on a thrilling deep dive into history,
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engineering, and racing legacy of this iconic machine from the groundbreaking
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GT 40 that stunned the motorsports world in the 1960s to the modern GT's
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triumphant return to LAMA in 2016.
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Preston masterfully weaves together the stories of the visionaries, drivers
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and engineers who made it all possible.
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In this episode, we return to the International Motor Racing Research
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Center for a center conversation where Preston explores the book's most
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fascinating insights discusses Ford's relentless pursuit of victory and
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uncovers what makes the GT one of the most legendary race cars of all time.
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For those of you who have not had a chance to meet, my name is Tom Leman.
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This is one of the most delightful opportunities I get to welcome people
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to our center conversation, and particularly today with our wonderful
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speaker Preston, learn Pressure.
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Pressure present.
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I am delighted to have such a wonderful crowd here today to hear this
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presentation, and let's get right to it.
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Ladies, let introduce Preston Lerner and his talk on.
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Let's see, where is that?
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Oh, it's the GT 40.
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Are you ready Preston?
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I think Don's going first.
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Sorry about that.
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Don.
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Don Caps is a member of our historians council, a great friend of the center.
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And so now let me bring up Don Caps, we'll get you more information.
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Done
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sheet, the center time stations, which have been going on since
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what, 2000 late 1999, 2000.
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Uh, I've been here as with this time, they have someone like Preston
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and some of people will come.
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This is great.
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Plus this is a wonderful crowd.
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Today, Preston and I have gone back a little ways back and forth on some.
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Preston is a contributing writer for a automobile magazine and is, uh, written
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several really interesting books.
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Scab, which is still kind of a milestone for that particular mark,
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still into Paul Newman, uh, Mexico.
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Also really wonderful book on automotive mythology, which, uh, I, I've enjoyed
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that one a great deal because it, it made a very dear lady, very happy to see
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something that she had a research on.
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You have to read a book, but one is very dear and dear to all of
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us who are here today is his work on the 4G two and race of 1966.
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I know how many of you remember back in the, uh, the dark ages where about
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two or three times a year you get a satellite TV beamed in from France on
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the Obama race, and there it was, the American cars coming across the line in.
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And that was an incredible experience to see it live all in any color
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you want, along to black and white.
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So things have changed a great deal and one of the things that's nice to have
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someone like Preston here is he brings a tremendous of amount of information
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and knowledge on the automobile world.
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All so basic.
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Somebody really doesn't need an introduction, but
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someone who really, uh, I.
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Thank you, Don.
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Thanks also to Tom and Glenda and Josh and Bill and Kip and everybody
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else here at the International Motor Racing Research Center.
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This is my first visit.
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It's a fantastic facility and it's an honor and a thrill to stand at the
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spiritual home of American Road Racing.
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I am the author of four gt and if you can see from this unconscionably long
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subtitle, my book is specifically about the Forge Factory program to win La Ma.
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Ford advanced vehicles built 133 or a hundred thirty four four GT forties.
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Only about two dozen of them were raced by the factory.
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The rest were sold to private tier.
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Some of them had some amazing successes.
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The most famous, and a lot of you here probably know it was chassis 10 75,
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which went on to win Lama two years running in 68 and 69, and they were four
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GT forties that continued to race and club races well until the seventies.
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So there's a lot of history there, but I'm really focused very
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specifically on the year 63 to 67 when Ford ran a factory program.
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You know, a lot of stories have been told about the GT 40.
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Several excellent books have been written over the years and there
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are still some points of dispute.
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You know, I reached my own conclusions.
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Your mileage may vary, but this is the story as I see it.
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At any rate, and I'm happy to, to answer as many questions as you guys have.
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I. The Ford GT Saga begins in the early 1960s.
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Ford's products have become very stodgy and the company was losing youth sales
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and market share to General Motors.
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So at the tail end of 61, Lee Iaccoca was brought in to run Ford Division,
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and one of his primary objectives was to appeal to the first cohort of what
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we now call the baby boom generation.
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One of the ways he wanted to do that was to implement the win on
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Sunday, sell on Monday concept.
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Ia. Coco was instrumental in inaugurating the Total Performance Program, and the
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idea was to use racing as a marketing tool to appeal especially to younger buyers.
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So total performance ended up, there was a whole bunch of stuff that they did,
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but the four major components, at least for our purposes, they did drag racing,
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which was based on the muscle cars that were already coming off the assembly line.
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They did stock cars with Holman and Moody, and they.
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They sent a whole bunch of money down to Charlotte and Motors, especially
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the 4 27 big block they did in cars.
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Winning Indy was their big goal.
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Created a special motor, 255 cubic inch twin cam, forward 4K motor,
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which became one of the great engines in, in, uh, indie history.
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And there was road racing, uh, with the cobras, which were really
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successful here in the states.
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And would go on to be very successful overseas.
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But you know, the Cobra was a GT car and it wasn't really eligible.
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It was never gonna win LAMA overall.
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And frankly, no one in the United States or very few people in the United States
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knew anything except for Lama and Ford had nothing in its inventory to go win Lama.
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So at the same time that these things are going on, uh, here in the states,
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Enzo Ferrari in Marine, he was looking to the future and was, and was
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worried about what was gonna happen.
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Ferrari was, in certain respect, the polar opposite of Ford because
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Ford used racing to sell streetcar.
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Enzo sold street cars to fund racing.
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And he could only sell so many cars because there was, you know,
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a relatively small market for it.
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And he was wondering how long he was gonna be able to fund the
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racing program to continue to win at endurance racing at Lamont.
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And he was also in Formula One in a big way.
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So Ferrari let it be known through his emissaries that he might
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be willing to sell the company.
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Ford got wind of this.
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They sent over a bunch of accountants and technicians.
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They inventoried the factory.
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They looked at the books they sent over Don Fry, which who was
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uh, Lee Coco's, right hand man to negotiate directly with Enzo Ferrari.
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And torturous negotiations ensued.
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They hammered out a purchase price, actually put together a contract, and
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at the 11th hour, Enzo got cold feet and he left Don Fry standing at the altar.
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Conspiracy theorists are convinced that Ferrari never intended to sell to Ford,
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and that this whole ploy was a charade to convince Fiat to buy the company.
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And in fact, Fiat did buy the company a couple years later
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as devious as Enzo Ferrari was.
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I think that's a little more Machiavellian than he truly was.
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You know, my reading of the subject is that the more the negotiations went
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on to be clearer, he came to Ferrari.
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But if he became part of the Ford Corporate Empire, he was no longer
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gonna be able to act like an absolute monarch, which is what he's been
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since he started the company.
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So he told Don Fra, he wasn't interested.
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Ferri goes back to Dearborn.
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He meets with Henry Ford the second.
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Henry known as the Deuce, was the grandson of Henry Ford.
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He, he was the CEO and president of Ford Motor Company.
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He'd been running it since World War ii, and he was every bit
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as autocratic as Enzo Ferrari.
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And so when Fry tells Henry what happened, Ford was convinced that Enzo had
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essentially given him the middle finger.
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So he told Fry, well, that's the way he wants it.
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You go over there and whip his ass.
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Or he may have said, you go to Lamont and beat his ass.
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It's actually not clear exactly what he said because Fry told the story
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different ways to different people.
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The salient point is that Henry Ford wanted Ford Motor Company
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to win Lamont and he wanted to humiliate Ferrari in the process.
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So that's what they set out to do.
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But the problem was Ford didn't actually have anybody in its entire
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company, which was something like 350,000 employees who knew anything
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about international road racing.
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And the only guy who sort of knowledgeable on the subject at all was a British
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transplant by the name of Roy L.
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And L had run the Aston Martin program that went to Lamont in 49.
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That actually sounds a little more impressive than it is because back
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then the Astons were essentially modified street cars, and after that
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L had nothing to do with racing.
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He worked on the production side of the business for Owt
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and then for Ford of England.
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Then he came over to the States and he worked in RD at Ford.
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But in the land of the blind, the one eye band is King Roy Lund was tasked
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with putting together a proposal that would be presented to the Ford management
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to sort of green light this program.
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Lum was a, was a clever guy, a clever engineer, and he realized that what Ford
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needed, uh, was gonna be a, uh, a mid engine MoCo with a swoopy aerodynamic
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body powered by a Ford V eight.
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He also roughed out the dimensions of the car, which he called the GT 40 because
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it was supposed to be 40 inches high.
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He.
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So L and Don Fry go to Ford Management.
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They present this plan.
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Ford Management says, great, go in Lama.
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They didn't think it was really gonna be that big a deal.
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You know, L was the one who really understood the enormity of the, the
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project that Ford had ahead of it.
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So the problem was there was nobody at Ford who knew how
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to build a car like this.
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And in fact, there was no one in the United States who really had any
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experience with mid-engine Monaco chassis.
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So Roy Lund decided to go to England to find somebody to design and build
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the car that would go to Lamont.
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And they considered a couple of possibilities before
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deciding on Eric, broadly.
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Broadly, had been working in the construction trades in the mid
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fifties when he built a special to go road racing the club level himself.
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And his car was so successful against the Lotus's that other
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guys commissioned cars from him.
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And eventually he was successful enough that he created a
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company called Lola Cars.
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And in 63 he had wowed the motorsports world with a car called the Lola
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Mark vi, or sometimes Lola gt.
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And this was a mid-engine Monaco with swoopy aerodynamic body work powered by
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a Ford V eight engine, which is to say it was exactly what Roy one was looking for.
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Broadly is hired the company lease a shop space near Heathrow Airport.
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Forms a company called Ford Advanced Vehicles.
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To build the cars broadly brings his small Lola crew over John Wire, who,
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uh, had become famous for Ram rotting.
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The Aston Martin team that won Lamont 59 was brought in to run the operations.
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So to keep the trains running on time, John Wire was nicknamed
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Death Ray, you can sort of get the sense Y from the way he looks here.
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He wasn't a good guy to have mad at you.
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And then Roy L came over to England with three Ford
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engineers and they went to work.
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Now one of the pervasive myths that really kind of annoy me is that people
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say that the four GT was nothing more than a warmed over Lola, and
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that's demonstrably false denied explicitly by broadly and wire and L.
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The engine was entirely an American product, obviously.
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It was the, it was essentially the 2 55 cubic inch Indy car motor
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with a push rod valve train instead of a twin camera arrangement.
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The body, which you saw before actually had been a full-size clay
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had been done before Braley was hired.
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Lauren had already sketched out the dimensions before Braley was hired.
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The Monaco had a lot of Lola stuff in it, no question about it.
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But it was bigger and more robust.
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And frankly, the Brits were aghast at how heavy it was.
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The suspension was pretty much standard race car practice of the day.
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But the suspension geometry was put together by a Ford engineer back
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in Dearborn who was using software written in Fortran on an IBM mainframe.
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Not sure how that, well that worked.
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So it was really an an Anglo-American collaboration in the truest sense
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of the word, and I think that's the best way to think of it.
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The collaboration didn't go all that smoothly to be honest.
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There was a serious culture clash, and it wasn't so much between Americans and the
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English, but it was the Ford guys were formerly trained engineers who were used
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to working in a corporate environment.
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You know, they were accustomed to protocols and design reviews and all
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sorts of formalized procedures to follow, and the Brits were racers.
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It wasn't that they, you know, were shade tree mechanics, but they were
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used to doing things on the fly and making corrections as necessary.
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The two groups did not get along at all.
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The Americans thought the Brits were kind of bumpkins, and the Brits thought
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the Americans were sticking the mud.
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So before too long, Roy Lun and Eric Broley, who were the two people
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in charge of the program, weren't even talking to each other and
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everything had to go through Roy Lu and that didn't work too well.
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Originally, they had hoped to race the beginning of the 64 season, and in fact
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the first car wasn't finished until April 64 and it was shown briefly here
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at Heathrow Airport, and that's actually wire on the left, broadly in the middle,
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and a rare picture of Roy L on the right.
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And then it was flown over to the States where it was shown very
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briefly to the American media.
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Uh, right before the New York Auto Show and then this car, which is the first
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car, was sent over to La Ma for the Lamont test, and there was a second car finished
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so late that it was shipped over to France without even being graphic up properly.
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So needless to say, the cars hadn't been tested really at all.
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They'd just been shaken down to make sure they would run.
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They get to La Ma and it's a disaster.
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These are cars that are supposed to go 200 miles an hour.
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And at 150 miles an hour, they were all over the road.
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Joe Lescher, French driver, who was brought in because Bruce McLaren
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wasn't available, goes out in the first car and immediately totals it.
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Uh, the bulls on kink.
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The second car is driven by Roy Salvadori, who had won Lamar with Carol Shell
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being 59, and he's cajoled by a wire to get back into the car on the second
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day, and he does so against his better judgment and proceeds to crash the car at
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bulls on hairpin, cranks the front end.
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And so that car's done for the day.
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Salvadori was so unimpressed by the car that he immediately quit
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the program in the interest of his self-preservation as he put it.
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In fact though, that was, that was the wrong call on Salvador's part.
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The problem with the car was that the aerodynamics of the body work produced a
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bunch of rear end lift, which is exactly what you don't want in a race car.
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I. Simply by slapping a spoiler on the rear deck that settled down the
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rear end and thereafter, pretty much everybody who drove the Ford GT said
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it was among their favorite cars ever.
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It was a big car.
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It was a heavy car.
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It was not good and then slow stuff.
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It wasn't agile, but it was extremely stable and benign and
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medium speed and high speed corners.
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It was faster than any indie car or uh, formula one car in a straight line.
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Ford had spent a lot of time on the cockpit making it comfortable, which
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was very unusual in those days.
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You know, Ferrari didn't care about his drivers.
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So it was, it was really good for long distance races and, and it had
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the, the one quality that drivers want most in a race car, and that is
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that it was fast, it could win races.
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And so drivers generally love the GT 40, the guys who drove it
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except for Roy Salvador, of course.
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So month after the two cars are wrecked at lama, there's a car, I believe this
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is, the second car was repaired and it goes to the Burg Green for its race debut.
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Berg Green really was the wrong spot for debut, but it was the only
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chance to race the car before Lama.
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So that's where Ford decided to go.
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Phil Hill and and McLaren are in the car.
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They qualify second to John Ciz and the lead Ferrari.
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They run second in the race, but then they break predictably
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pretty early on for Lama.
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Then it's a month later.
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So they had three cars of Lamont, which is pretty impressive
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for a brand new operation.
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End of the first lap, Ferrari are leading.
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1, 2, 3. They go down to Church Rouge, which is, you know, is
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the right hand or leads onto the moles on Strait to start lap two.
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Ferrari is 1, 2, 3.
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The fourth car in line is Richie Ginther and he's behind them and at
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the end of the moles on straight, he is passed all three Ferrari and he
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is disappearing into the distance.
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Ginther leads easily for the first hour.
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He pits Maton.
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Gregory gets in the car.
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Maton Gregory leads easily during his stint.
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The car is the fastest car on the track, but unfortunately it breaks.
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Second car catches on fire, so its race is over.
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Third car is Bill Hill and Bruce McLaren, and they're delayed at the start.
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They have a misfire that takes 'em a while to figure out, but once the car's going,
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it's also the fastest car on the track.
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Sets the track record, but then it fails slightly before a half distance.
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All three cars failed, which is not what you want when you
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go racing, but reliability is something that you can deal with.
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At least the cars were fast.
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That's what you want with a new car.
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You want it to be fast.
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You can always work on fragility later on.
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Generally speaking, the Ford Camp was upbeat after that first Lama.
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The rest of the year didn't go quite as well.
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They raced at, ran in France shortly after Lamar, and the cars performed very badly.
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So thereafter Wire decided not to do any more racing and he wanted to
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focus on testing and development.
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But towards the end of the year, he was told he was ordered
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actually to prep two cars for.
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The Nassau speed weeks and he didn't want to go there.
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There was racists in The Bahamas.
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They were kind of a, they were a run what you brung deal.
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They were, it was on a tight circuit.
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He thought it was a waste of time to go, but he was, as I say, uh, coerced
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into, into sending two cars there.
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And the problem is, is they, uh, they do terribly here.
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They're being outrun by a cobra of all things He.
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Both of the four GTS break and they're beaten by GM products, which sort of
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adds insult to injury after Nassau.
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There's a big powwow back in Dearborn and the Ford discusses what went wrong
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with the season and they decided that the problem with the four GT program
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was not the cars, it was John Wire.
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So they fired John Wire, although they let him continue to run the customer
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racing program, and they decided to have the racing program run by their
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in-house snake charmer, Carol Shelton.
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Don't think Shelby needs much of an introduction here.
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One of the most charismatic figures ever.
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Great driver, he created the cobras.
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What's important is he'd also put together a race team called Shelby
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American based in Southern California.
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And I know today it sounds weird to think of a racing team in, you know, in Los
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Angeles because you know, everybody's in Charlotte or they're in, uh, Indianapolis
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or somewhere near a racetrack.
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But Southern California had been the home, the really center of, uh,
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American racing industry pretty much since Harry Miller, uh, opened his
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shop in downtown Los Angeles in the teens and well into the fifties.
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Most of the, the really competitive Indy Roadsters and sprint cars and midgets were
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still coming outta shops in Los Angeles.
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I. In addition to all the, the sort of racing history, Southern California was
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the birthplace of hot rod civilization, so there was a tremendous talent pool of
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really good craftsmen, experienced race mechanics there for Shelby to choose from.
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And Southern California was also where all the aerospace stuff was
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happening in addition to the people.
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Shelby had access to a bunch of materials and components and technologies
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that were just then finding their way in into the motorsports world.
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I mean, stuff like titanium and fittings and stuff, we really
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all take for granted now.
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I mean, that was just then moving over into that world.
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So Shelby put together a really impressive organization.
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I don't have time unfortunately to, to talk about all the people who went
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on to bigger and better things, but two of them deserve special mention.
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First, Phil Remington, master of all trades.
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Remington could do pretty much anything.
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He was a machinist, he was weld, he could fabricate, he could tune,
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suspensions, breathe on motors.
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I mean, he could do it all.
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The thing about him that made him difficult to work with was not that he was
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difficult personally, he was actually a very pleasant guy and and extremely humble
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considering how accomplished he was.
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But as I said about him, he could do everything that, that you could do,
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and he could do it faster, and he could do it for longer than you could do it.
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But Carol Smith, who was the race engineer, you guys have
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probably seen his tune to Win and Fasteners to win all his books.
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He said that Remington's greatest skill was that he was a problem
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solver and he would come up with fixes before other people even
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realized that there was a problem.
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So Remington's number one, and I think he was probably the single most
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important person in the four GT program.
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Second was Ken Miles.
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I was a Brit.
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He'd driven a tank after D-Day in World War ii, come over the California in the
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fifties to work at an MG dealership.
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Was a champion, small boar racer in West Coast racing.
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Was hired by Shelby for the COBRA program.
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Won a whole bunch of races in Cobras.
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Besides being a really talented race car driver, he was a test driver at
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Parx launch and he could drive for hours on end at nine-tenths without damaging
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the car, and then come back and tell people exactly what the car was doing
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in the middle of turn six, you know, at 4,200 RRP M or whatever it was.
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So he was an invaluable resource.
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The cars come over from England in December of 1964.
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And they're immediately Shelby eyes.
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First thing they do is they paint 'em.
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Blue is a Shelby Blue.
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Next thing they did, these are the bari wheels, uh, wire wheels were replaced by,
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uh, good old American Hali brand mags.
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The 2 55 IndyCar motor is replaced by a 2 89 small block, which had
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been proven in the cobras already.
19:41
They started testing the things mostly at Riverside.
19:43
This happens to be at Willow Springs, which is north of la.
19:46
Miles and Bonderant would bomb around the track for hours on end.
19:49
They'd report all their issues to Remington.
19:51
Remington would make the fixes implement them.
19:54
They'd go back out to Riverside in rural springs and repeat as necessary.
19:57
They only had about six weeks for Daytona, but they sent two cars to Daytona and lo
20:01
and behold, miles and Lloyd Ruby win in their first doubting for Shelby American.
20:05
So as you can imagine, the uh, four guys thought that Shelby
20:07
walked on water after that.
20:08
It was not only the first win for the four GT, it was the first time the card
20:12
ever come close to finishing a race.
20:13
Unfortunately, I think the British expression is that it flattered to
20:16
deceive because this turned out to be the high point of the 65 season.
20:19
The rest of the year went pretty disastrously.
20:21
They were beaten everywhere and they were humiliated a couple places.
20:25
Ford realized it needed to sort of do something to raise its game, so to speak.
20:29
So one of the steps they took was to create an in-house subsidiary
20:32
called CarCraft, and this was a quasi works skunk works.
20:36
Where Ford engineers were sent either on the payroll or to moonlight
20:41
and come up with the r and d, uh, improvements to advance the program.
20:45
And one of the things they decided to do was to use the 4 27 cubic
20:48
inch motor, the big block, which was being raced really successfully
20:51
in NASCAR by Holman and Moody.
20:54
And so the guys at Car Craft thought it might be a good idea to see if
20:57
they could stick a 4 27 into four gt.
21:00
And it really wasn't a particularly difficult conversion.
21:02
They had to cut a rear bulkhead, they had to move the seats,
21:05
a bunch of plumbing changes.
21:06
Later on, they developed a new transmission, but by and
21:08
large, it was a pretty simple conversion by industry standards.
21:11
And when they finished the car, Ken Miles was dispatched to Michigan to the Romeo
21:15
test track to see what the car would do.
21:18
And after shaking it down, he goes out and he pretty immediately gets
21:21
the car up to 200, 1.5 miles an hour.
21:23
And he, when he gets out of the car, Roy Luon says to him, what do you think?
21:26
And Miles says, that's the car I wanna race at Lamont.
21:29
Which is good, except that there was only about six weeks to go before Lamar.
21:32
There's now, now a rush program to get the car prepared.
21:35
The new car, the big block car, is dubbed the Mark two and the small
21:40
block cars are retroactively named Mark ones just for future reference.
21:45
So for Lamar Ford shows up with six cars.
21:48
They got two mark twos, brand new four mark ones.
21:51
The Mark twos had barely been shaken down before the race, and
21:54
when they got to the track they found out they were wicked loose.
21:57
And that's really a problem in La Ma, which was one of the
21:58
fastest tracks in the world.
22:00
So during the course of practice and qualifying, the Shelby American
22:03
guys spent most of their time behind the pits, cutting aluminum,
22:08
shaping it, and then, uh, fixing it.
22:10
These appendages to the race corner.
22:11
The car is completely clean.
22:12
Aerodynamically when it showed up.
22:14
Lamont here, it's got a front air dam.
22:16
It's got a canards on the, uh, front fender.
22:18
It's got these weird looking tail fans on the rear deck, and it's also got a
22:21
big rear spoiler, which you can't see.
22:23
So the car looked kinda like a frankensteinish, ran like
22:25
a monster out on the track.
22:27
And as soon as the race starts, puts Bruce McLaren in the lead, Chris Amen.
22:30
Behind him.
22:31
When they get to the end of the MOS on straight at Lap one, they can barely see
22:34
the Ferraris and near view view mirrors.
22:36
These guys dominate the race and the mark twos until they break.
22:39
This is kind of a common theme with the Ford story.
22:41
It turns out the problems were really kind of fluky deals that didn't
22:44
have anything to do with the new motor, but nevertheless, the car
22:46
is broke and to make matters worth.
22:48
So did all four of the mark one.
22:50
Ford was oh for six, which is a pretty bad er.
22:53
Back in Dearborn there was serious consternation and wonderment about
22:57
why things had gone so badly wrong.
23:00
So Ford created a thing called the LAMA Committee, and I know that sounds
23:04
like bureaucratic, sort of ask covering sort of like a blue ribbon committee,
23:07
but in fact, the department heads from each of the major departments
23:10
at Ford were put onto this committee.
23:11
So they had a representative from engine and Foundry and transmissions.
23:14
And design and even public relations, and they would meet periodically to
23:18
check on what was going on and to chart course corrections if necessary.
23:21
One thing they really need to understand is what sort of resources
23:23
that Ford put into this program.
23:25
And it wasn't just money, even though what Ford spent was unprecedented,
23:28
that no one had ever come close to spending this kind of money.
23:30
But this was the first time that a major mainstream manufacturer had
23:34
ever gone racing in a big time way.
23:36
Ford was creating a paradigm for what would be used in decades to come.
23:40
It's still being used to this day.
23:42
And in addition to the money that they spent, they had all these r and
23:44
d resources that teams like Ferrari or Jaguar, you know, had no access to,
23:48
you know, they created car craft, I mean, a whole subsidiary for racing.
23:52
There was an engine cell, a dino cell, where they would run four
23:55
20 sevens for 24 to 48 hours.
23:57
Not, not just the motors, but they had a attached to a gear box, which was
24:01
run by servos so that it could mimic all the gear changes made at Lamont.
24:05
You know, that was something that no one else had ever thought of
24:07
doing before, and I, I don't even know who does that to this day.
24:09
So it was a, it was a really impressive effort.
24:11
I, I just think that's worth remembering as an overarching theme in this project.
24:15
Anyway, Lamont committee, they, they came with a couple of important decisions.
24:18
First, they decided to bag the rest of the 65 season.
24:21
Their thinking was that nobody cared about places like Spa and Monza.
24:24
They even heard of them here in the States.
24:26
All really Ford cared about was winning lama, maybe to a lesser degree, the
24:30
American races at Sebring in Daytona.
24:32
So they decided to forget about racing anymore in 65 and focus on testing
24:35
and development here in the States.
24:37
And the testing was relentless.
24:39
Again, no test program like this had ever been seen before.
24:42
And not only would Shelby American show up with all their guys, but Ford
24:45
would send a bunch of engineers and they also had the vendors show up with
24:48
engineers, so Lockheed or ING or Goodyear.
24:51
And everybody would then write up reports, his memos and all these memos
24:55
will be sent around to everybody.
24:56
And there's just stacks and stacks of paper, which are really, uh.
25:00
You know, kind of fascinating to see what they found, all the
25:02
different things they experimented with and just tried to make work.
25:05
The third thing they decided to do was not leave all their eggs
25:08
in the Carroll Shelby basket.
25:09
And so it was decided to bring in Holman and Moody, which had been the
25:13
dominant force down in stock car racing to also be involved in the program.
25:16
They also brought in Alan Mann over in England and Mann had just won the GT
25:20
championship, uh, with the Cobra Daytona Cove, so he was brought in as well.
25:23
Although, to be honest, he was always a minor player.
25:26
And the other thing that LAMA committee decided to do was to
25:28
double down on the big block motor.
25:31
And this was a controversial decision at the time, and there's
25:33
still debate about it to this day.
25:35
The Brits were convinced that Ford could win LAMA with a small block engine.
25:38
And I guess you could argue that they did win Lama with a small block in 68
25:41
and 69, but that of course was after the unlimited engines had been outlawed.
25:45
Still, you can make the case that maybe the 2 89 would've
25:48
beaten Ferrari at Lamont in 66.
25:51
But there's a axiom in boxing that a good big man will always beat a good small man.
25:56
And I think that's the case with the, uh, the engines.
25:58
No way the, the small block was gonna beat the big block car.
26:00
The big block was too powerful, too much torque, which the drivers love.
26:04
'cause that's what you want coming out of a corner.
26:06
And since it was so strong, they could basically lo along it's 6,000 or six
26:10
200 RPM and still go 200 miles an hour.
26:12
Yes, it was heavier, so it was harder on brakes and tires
26:15
and all sorts of components.
26:15
But on balance, I think the 4 27 was the way to go.
26:19
So they test for the rest of the 65 season.
26:21
Start the 66 season.
26:22
Go to Daytona.
26:23
It's a 1, 2, 3 finish.
26:24
Ruby and Miles repeating their victory of 65.
26:28
Next race at Sebring.
26:29
One, two, finish.
26:30
This is Miles and ruby again.
26:32
Now in the open top X one should have been a 1, 2, 3 finish.
26:35
This is the famous race where the infamous race where Darren Gurney
26:37
was leading his car broke on the last corner of the last lap.
26:40
And he was disqualified for pushing the car across the start line.
26:43
So the teams go to Lama Loaded for Bear.
26:47
They're the prohibitive favorites.
26:48
They have no fewer than eight cars.
26:49
It's like an armada.
26:51
No one's ever seen before.
26:52
Three Shelby American cars, three Ho and Moody cars, two Allen Mann cars.
26:56
They're the prohibitive favorites going into the race.
26:59
But you know, being favorites also this pressure by being kind of the odds on
27:02
favorite, and the person who was feeling it more than anybody was Leo Bebe.
27:06
Leo Bebe was the guy in charge of all of Ford Racing's programs, and he had been
27:09
a confidant of Henry Ford II since they met in the Navy during World War ii.
27:13
But before Lama Henry Ford had met with Bebe and he'd handed him a note
27:17
card on which he'd handwritten three words, you better win Bebe understood.
27:22
This wasn't like a friendly exportation.
27:23
This was an order from his commander in chief, and he was
27:26
going to be expected to fall on his sword if he failed to win Lamar.
27:30
This little card meant so much to Bebe that he carried it in his
27:32
wallet for the rest of his life.
27:33
So, yeah, he kind of knew you better win before the race starts.
27:37
Ford meets with all its drivers and they, they give everybody strict orders
27:41
to run to very conservative lap times.
27:43
So we'll finish the race.
27:44
And so far as I can tell, nobody paid any attention to these lap times.
27:48
No, the first lap, this was still when the had the Lamas start when he ran
27:52
across the track and jumped in his car.
27:53
Miles' door didn't close properly, so he has to pit at the end of the first
27:57
lap and he goes out and immediately sets a lap record to make up for lost time.
28:00
Meanwhile, Dan Gurney never likes to be slower than anybody in the
28:03
Ford team, so he sets another lap record while taking the lead.
28:07
The third Shelby American car was driven by Chris a Amen, and Bruce McLaren.
28:10
Team McLaren was sort of McLaren's fledgling manufacturing operation,
28:14
was sponsored by Firestone.
28:16
Everybody else was running good years.
28:17
During this race, as you can sort of see here, it was, it rained on and off.
28:20
The track was greasy, called for intermediate tires.
28:22
It just so happened the Firestone Intermediate was junk.
28:25
Kept throwing treads, so they lost several laps replacing tires.
28:28
And finally, McLaren makes the politically in expedient decision to get rid of his
28:33
Firestones, even though Firestones his sponsor and slap on a set of good years.
28:37
And this is when he leans down into the car and tells a amen.
28:40
Well, what Aon told me, he said was drive the door handles off the door.
28:43
I believe what Amon told AJ Bain was a go like hell, whatever the point was,
28:47
they wanted to run flat out to make up for lost time, and that's what they did.
28:51
By about halfway through the race, it's Shelby American Cars 1, 2, 3.
28:55
Ferraris are nowhere.
28:57
It's Ford's race to Win.
28:58
But then shortly after Dawn Jerry Grant pits from the lead in the car.
29:02
He's sharing with Dan Gurney.
29:03
The water temp gauge is pegged.
29:05
Head gasket's gone.
29:06
Leo Bebe feels a stinking sensation in his stomach.
29:09
Remember, Bebe's been through 64 where all three cars have failed.
29:12
He's been through 65 when all six cars have failed.
29:15
At this point there are four, four gts left.
29:17
So four of 'em are already gone and all he can think of is that he's got this,
29:20
you better win no card in his pocket.
29:22
And he is got Henry Ford II with this vast entourage looking over his shoulder
29:25
and he doesn't wanna screw things up.
29:27
So he immediately sends down orders to slow the cars down to
29:31
lap times of four minutes a lap.
29:33
They had qualified around three 30 a lap.
29:35
So this is 30 seconds off the pace.
29:37
Granted it was greasy on the track and you know it's an endurance race.
29:40
Those are lap times that an amateur could be driving at.
29:43
And Chris a Amen told me that it took him about 15, 20 minutes
29:46
just to slow down to that pace.
29:48
Thereafter, the race ceases to be a race in any sort of what we think of a race.
29:53
I mean, there was no real competition out there.
29:54
I. If you look at the, uh, results, and you'll see that the lead changed hands
29:58
numerous times over the course of the last eight hours between the name of
30:01
McLaren Car and they're in the black car and the Miles Denny Hume car, which
30:05
is the second car over there in line.
30:06
But it wasn't because they were dicing for the lead, it was because, you know,
30:09
their pit stop schedules, they just pitted at different times and they
30:12
had to pit about every hour for gas.
30:13
They needed tires periodically.
30:15
These cars went through brake pads, so they had to make pad changes.
30:18
Both of them changed rotors before the race was over.
30:21
They weren't really competing.
30:22
All they were doing was clicking off laps and, and making their way to the finish.
30:25
Somewhere along the line, someone comes up with a bright idea
30:28
of staging a dead heat finish.
30:30
Now, this is to me, one of the great mysteries of Lemos 66, and there's a
30:33
bunch of mysteries about this race.
30:34
I have no idea who really came up with the idea.
30:37
Bruce McLaren said he did, but that seems really unlikely to me.
30:40
And the thing is, I cannot think of a single automobile race
30:42
that's ever ended in a dead heat.
30:44
Uh, not a major one.
30:45
I can't think of a single race of any kind that ended in a dead heat.
30:48
You know, whether it be a horse race or a boat race, or a political race.
30:51
The whole point of race thing is to anoint a winner.
30:53
So I don't know why anyone thought they were gonna be able to do this, but to
30:56
Leo Bebe, this sounded like a great idea.
30:58
First of all, it would be a public relations coup for Ford.
31:01
Second of all, it would prevent the first two cars from fighting
31:04
with each other for the win.
31:05
And that was his great fear, was that they would start dicing and
31:08
they would crash into each other and things would go down the tubes.
31:10
So Ford Official is, is.
31:13
Sent over to, uh, talk to the A CO, which is the Automobile Club of the West,
31:16
which is the I syncratic organization that runs Lama and the French officials
31:22
essentially say, we're cool with that.
31:23
If you want a dead heat finish, go for it.
31:25
So Ford of official comes back, he reports to BB and Shelby
31:28
and all the, uh, the Ford guys.
31:30
We can do a dead heat finish if you wanna do it.
31:32
Somewhere along the line, the Ken Miles car had pulled well
31:34
ahead of the McLaren A Amen Car.
31:36
And why it did so is is also a subject of dispute Miles fans and Charlie
31:41
Agape, who's his, was his crew chief and is still around to this day, are
31:44
convinced it was 'cause Miles was the faster driver in a faster car.
31:47
Bruce McLaren always contended that Miles had flouted team orders and
31:52
instead of running at four minutes a lap, he cut a couple of quick laps to
31:56
make sure that he was in the lead when they came down to the end of the race.
31:59
At this point, it's impossible to say what really happened.
32:01
But the point was before they were to get into their cars for their final stint,
32:05
both McLaren and Miles were brought over to talk to the board Brain Trust.
32:09
And they were told, miles, you slow down.
32:11
Let McLaren catch up to you.
32:12
By this time, there's only one other Ford left, and that was a Holman and Moody
32:15
car being driven by Dick Hutcherson, who was a stock car Ace, who admitted later
32:19
he had no business driving at Lamont.
32:21
He was completely out of his element.
32:22
I mean, you can imagine also in the rain and at night.
32:24
He never even turned right before.
32:27
He's in third place, but he's 10 laps down.
32:29
So miles and McLaren get in their cars for their final stint,
32:32
and they start circling around.
32:34
Miles, slows down, McLaren starts to catch up.
32:36
Meanwhile, the Ford official comes running breathlessly until the Ford pits and
32:40
he says the A CO has changed its mind.
32:43
They're no longer going to allow a dead heat finish if
32:45
the cars finish side by side.
32:47
The car that has covered the greatest distance will be declared the winner.
32:50
Now it just so happened that Miles and Hume qualified Second
32:54
Aon and McLaren qualified fourth.
32:57
So therefore, Aon and uh, McLaren will have covered about 20 more feet
33:02
than the other car, and it would be declared the winner on that basis.
33:05
The problem is there are no in-car radios back in 1966, the only way to communicate
33:09
with the drivers is via pit boards, which are shown at the Moozon hairpin.
33:13
And it's pretty hard to get this whole thing in writing.
33:15
I think while the drivers are going by, theoretically, they could have pitted the
33:18
cars to tell the drivers what was going on, but no one wants to take the chance.
33:21
I think of a, of an unscheduled pit stop for no particularly good reason.
33:25
And also from Leo, Leo Be's perspective, all that could happen was bad things
33:29
if the guys understood the situation, because Miles might be encouraged to
33:33
start racing with McLaren for the win.
33:35
And that's exactly what he didn't want to happen.
33:37
Again, there are a lot of people who think that Bebe purposely screwed
33:40
miles out of the win, and I find this a little difficult to believe.
33:43
I mean, miles was a little difficult personally, and I guess you could
33:45
argue that he had floated team orders earlier in the race if he did fly
33:49
team orders earlier in the race.
33:50
But you know, he'd been a stall water of the program.
33:52
He had done most of the testing and development.
33:54
He knew the Ford guys really well.
33:55
He was coming off winds at Daytona and Sebring.
33:57
I mean, I don't see any reason why they would've wanted to hang him out to dry.
34:00
I think Bebe's issue was he didn't want anything to go wrong and he
34:03
didn't particularly care who won the race as long as a Ford won the race.
34:06
And from his perspective, it was safer to do nothing.
34:09
So he did nothing and the cars continued on to the finish.
34:11
And this is the famous finish.
34:14
You know, in this photo, as you can see, this is, uh, McLaren
34:16
leading with miles lagging back.
34:19
And so there are schools of thought that say that McLaren goose the
34:21
throttle to steal the victory.
34:23
And some people claim that Miles purposely held back to show his disgruntlement
34:28
at Ford for denying him the victory.
34:30
In fact, miles says that the real finish line is actually
34:32
back about 10 yards from there.
34:34
And he said when they crossed the timing line, there was actually
34:36
a, a wire that they were as close to being dead even as they could.
34:40
And nobody knew what was going on in the pits.
34:42
I mean, even in the Ford Camp, they weren't exactly
34:44
sure what was gonna happen.
34:45
There's a fellow here, bill Benet, who's actually there in 66, who was
34:48
actually there while this was going on.
34:49
Nobody in the stands knew what was going on.
34:51
Chris a Amen in the pits didn't know what was going on.
34:53
He didn't realize that he was the winner until they started pushing
34:55
him toward the victory roster.
34:57
On the other hand, Ken Miles thought he had won the race and he actually tried
35:00
to drive his car to the victory rostrum, and he didn't realize that he was second
35:03
until they wouldn't let him go there.
35:05
So, and Ford couldn't have cared less either way.
35:07
I mean, to the United States, no one had heard of any of these guys.
35:09
I mean, you had, uh, a transplanted Britain, three guys from New Zealand,
35:12
all the people in the United States knew that a Ford had won, finished 1, 2, 3,
35:16
vanquished Ferrari mission accomplished, which is why Henry Ford is the only
35:19
guy who looks really, really happy here on the victory, ROS, that's Amen.
35:23
And McLaren, and to me, their smiles look a little bit sheepish.
35:26
A couple of minutes after that, miles and Hume are more or less pushed onto
35:30
the rostrum, and there's a pretty telling photo of Miles who looks like he's
35:35
grinning his teeth while he's grinning.
35:36
Clearly not happy to be there.
35:38
The only person who looks really elated is Henry Ford, and that's
35:41
important to note because I.
35:42
A week before the race, Henry Ford had told reporters he figured this would
35:46
be the end of the program after Lamont.
35:47
And when you think about it, this was the perfect place to end the program.
35:50
They just finished 1, 2, 3 beaten Ferrari, you know, done
35:52
everything they'd set out to do.
35:53
All that could happen from now was things could go downhill.
35:56
The thing is though, racing is a brutal, cruel sport.
35:59
So many things go wrong so many times that when you win any race, I mean
36:02
even at the Lowliest club level.
36:04
You're just so happy.
36:05
At least I'm so happy.
36:06
So you're just elated.
36:08
And you can see Ford here.
36:09
He's just jazzed by the whole thing.
36:11
And he's so amped that when they ask him, well, what are you guys gonna do now?
36:14
He says, we're gonna come back and do it again.
36:16
And I think this came as a surprise to all the people at Ford.
36:18
I don't think anyone really intended to really figure there
36:20
was gonna be a 1967 program.
36:22
So a lot of people that sort of the Ford saga ends here, but I
36:24
actually like the rest of the story, which is just one more year.
36:27
'cause to me, it's the best part of the story, even though it's sort
36:30
of a postscript in some respects.
36:32
After Lama, a man is let go.
36:34
Holman and Moody plays a, a larger role in testing and development,
36:37
and they incorporate a lot of NASCAR technology into the race car.
36:40
Most notably, there was a heavy duty roll cage, and this turns out
36:43
to be a big deal, at least in Peter Revson because it's thought to have
36:46
saved his life when he barrel rolled his car during testing at Daytona.
36:49
And there's again, they test and test and test and test, and they
36:52
do so much testing that they rename the cars as, uh, mark two Bs.
36:56
The six, six cars were called Mark two a's, but at any rate.
36:59
Ford goes to Daytona to begin the 67 season and they figure they're gonna
37:02
have more of the same, gonna be Ferrari again, gonna be a nice easy year.
37:06
Instead, they run into a buzz saw and it's called the, uh, the Ferrari
37:09
three 30 P four, A gorgeous car.
37:11
It's a car that sounds spectacular.
37:13
It's agile, it's fast, it's as iconic in its own way.
37:16
The P four is as the mark two was.
37:18
At Daytona Ford has a catastrophic race output.
37:22
Shafts for the transmissions were improperly.
37:24
He treated and every one of 'em fails.
37:25
Only one car finished the race and it was way back.
37:29
The Ferraris finished 1, 2, 3 and they managed the picture perfect.
37:33
Uh, line of breast formation, you know, at the finish.
37:36
That Ford kind of botched there at Lamar.
37:39
To add sort of insult to injury after the race, Chris, a Amen who
37:41
had moved over to the Ferrari team said the, uh, Ford handled like
37:45
a truck compared to the Ferrari.
37:46
So the four guys weren't too happy.
37:49
But besides being humiliated, there were also a sense of, well, what do we do now?
37:52
They just spent.
37:53
Six months developing.
37:55
You know this Mark two B, and it had just been trounced by Ferrari at Daytona, and
37:59
it's conceivable the Mark two might've been able to beat Ferrari Lama, which
38:02
was attractive, favored the Fords, but it definitely wasn't a done deal.
38:05
So Phil Remington came up with a plan B or sort of a Plan J,
38:09
as you might wanna call it.
38:10
And I gotta backtrack really briefly to why that is.
38:13
So from the very beginning of the program, everyone understood excessive weight
38:16
was the biggest issue with the four gts.
38:18
And there have been all sorts of efforts to lighten the cars.
38:20
They used aluminum body work and actually aluminum chassis, they cut the tops off.
38:24
But eventually a uh, Ford engineer by the name of Chuck Mountain, who
38:27
had been one of the guys who had gone over to England in 63 to work on
38:29
the original car, found a company in western Massachusetts called Brunswick.
38:33
And it made a bunch of consumer products.
38:35
One of them was actually bowling pins, believe it or not.
38:37
I think it was those A MF bowling pins.
38:39
But they also were a major department of defense contractor and they were
38:42
building instrument panels for fighter jets out of a aluminum honeycomb material
38:46
that was very light, yet very rigid.
38:48
So mountain thought it might be possible to build a Monaco, added this.
38:51
Material.
38:52
Ed Hull, who was one of the unsung heroes of the program, built a chassis
38:56
where he used honeycomb aluminum.
38:57
It was bonded with, uh, an industrial grade glue that was cured in a high
39:02
temperature ovens, very similar to the auto Clay is used now to, uh, make carbon
39:05
fiber and around this Monaco Ford styling put together a radical looking body work.
39:10
It had these protrusions at the front that looked to me like lobster claws.
39:15
And it had this high long rear deck, which has actually been modified here a little
39:18
bit already, but it resembled a bread van.
39:20
They dubbed this to the J car.
39:21
And the JCAR actually was slightly faster than the Mark two, but only slightly.
39:25
And most of the drivers, well actually all the drivers except
39:28
Forman preferred the Mark two.
39:29
So it was decided to raise the mark two in 66 at lama, and that was the right call.
39:32
Obviously they finished 1, 2, 3, but they continued to test the jcar after Lama.
39:36
And so Ken Miles was in the car at Riverside in August.
39:40
They're testing two experimental, semi-automatic transmissions and on the
39:44
back stray while he was doing something like a buck 80 or something like that.
39:47
Car goes outta control.
39:48
No one to this day knows exactly why.
39:50
All sorts of theories.
39:51
Some people say they thought the body work was aerodynamically unstable.
39:54
I find it hard to believe.
39:55
Some people thought the honeycomb aluminum actually came apart in in the Monaco.
39:59
Some people think the brakes locked.
40:00
I think the most likely thing was that the transmission froze in gear rate.
40:04
The car goes off the track, high speed barrel rolls, miles is
40:08
ejected, and he's killed on the spot.
40:10
And that's probably the lowest day in the history of the Ford GT program.
40:13
And that also ends, as you might imagine, a development of the JCAR until
40:17
Daytona 1967, when Ford has nothing else in its cupboard to beat Ferrari.
40:21
So Phil Remington comes up with the idea of using the jcar.
40:25
He thought it was a good chassis and he thought the problem was the
40:27
body work, which he suspected was very draggy, is the way he put it.
40:30
So Remington flies to Dearborn with two of his top fabricators and they
40:34
take the car into the wind tunnel.
40:35
And Remington literally starts hacking away at the body work and reshaping
40:39
it totally by intuition into the shape that he thinks will work well.
40:43
He gets finished, they run the car through the tunnel.
40:46
The numbers look good.
40:47
They immediately shipped the car out to Kingman, Arizona high
40:50
speed test track that Ford has out there straight outta the box.
40:53
The uh, mark four is five miles an hour faster than the mark two.
40:56
So Ford decides, Hey, we think we've got something here.
40:59
They named the car of the mark four and the reason why they didn't name it the
41:02
mark three was because the mark three was the name reserve for, there was
41:05
a street car version of the GT 40 of which they built, I think seven total.
41:10
Ford decided to have a kind of gong show bake off between the
41:13
mark four and the mark two.
41:15
Uh, at Sebring whole new Mark four is built up.
41:17
Shelby American was running with Mario Andretti and Bruce McLaren
41:21
Holman and Moody was running a, uh, one of the Mark two Bs.
41:24
McLaren puts this car on the pole and then races with the Chaparral.
41:27
There's a, they dice for a couple hours until the Chaparral breaks,
41:30
and the mark four wins easily.
41:31
The mark two is literally miles and miles behind.
41:34
This is one of the rare occasions where a car straight out of the box
41:38
wins its first major race anyway, and the Mark IV actually only raced
41:41
two races, and it won both of 'em.
41:42
So I had a pretty good winning record.
41:44
After Sebring Ford decides to build four brand new Mark fours.
41:48
I mean the resources they had at their disposal were were pretty incredible.
41:51
This is the Gurney Ford car, though the really famous one, which is still owned
41:54
by Ford, the only one that they still own.
41:56
And Ford goes to Lamar with four mark fours with two mark twos as backup.
42:00
McLaren puts one of the mark fours on the pole, but the Ferrari and Chaparral
42:04
are right there, and clearly this isn't gonna be a cakewalk this year.
42:06
First of all, remember Ferrari had crushed the Fords at Daytona
42:10
and they've been faster than the Mark four in the Lamont test.
42:12
Chaparral was the most sophisticated race car in the world in 1967.
42:16
This was the two f, the high wing car with the adjustable wing and,
42:19
and the Semiotic matter transmission.
42:21
So, you know, Ford had a real race on its hands.
42:22
It wasn't like 66 where they were just waiting for the Ferraris to fail.
42:26
McLaren's on the pole.
42:27
The, the Chaparral Ferrari's right there.
42:29
The slowest Mark four, strangely enough, is Dan Gurney.
42:32
Since then, there's sort of this mythology that has grown up that
42:34
Gurney was sandbagging 'cause he didn't wanna embarrass his co-driver.
42:37
AJ Foyt Gurney denies that this was the case.
42:40
Foy was not a very experienced road racer, but he was AJ Foyt.
42:42
I mean, he was gonna go fast and he did go fast.
42:45
What happened was that Gurney was consciously following the
42:47
example of his friend Briggs.
42:49
Cunningham and Briggs was not a very fast driver, but he always finished at Lamar.
42:53
Whereas Gurney had D nfd in seven out of his nine races there.
42:56
So Gurney may decided that he was gonna go slow and he was gonna
42:59
especially go slow in the break zone for the moles on Hairpin.
43:02
Well, what happened was the cars were going 215 miles an hour down the street.
43:05
Then they had to break down to about 35 miles an hour for the hairpin.
43:08
And you can imagine how hard that was on brake pads.
43:10
Also, the brakes would get extremely cool on the mul on strait and when they
43:14
would get, when you hammered the brakes, the rotors had a tendency to crack.
43:17
So what Gurney decided to do was, instead of breaking at the 300 yard
43:21
mark or whatever it was, he decided he could lay brake at, he was backing
43:24
outta the throttle around 600 yards out, letting the aerodynamic drag slow the
43:28
car down to about 160 miles an hour.
43:30
Then he was lightly getting into the brake pedal, slowly build up
43:33
temp so that the would preserve paths and, and save the rotors.
43:37
The other reason why he wasn't particularly fast during practice was
43:39
he was adamant about making the car handle well through the Olson kink.
43:43
The cars were dead flat through the kink, even at 250 miles an hour.
43:46
But when the car wasn't handling well, it was a bit of a handful.
43:49
You really had to concentrate, you had to use all the road, and that was a problem.
43:52
If it was, you know, when it's dark, it.
43:54
It might start raining.
43:55
There was always traffic at Lama Gurney.
43:56
Wanted to make sure he could get through the kink, literally with
43:59
one hand on the steering wheel.
44:00
So he worked for a long time in practice, fiddling with the suspension and adjusting
44:04
the rear spoiler until he transformed the car into what he described.
44:07
The handling as being like a big American luxury car, you know, it
44:10
was perfectly stable and a really comfortable, and just gobbled up miles.
44:14
That's how he was ready to go and the race begins.
44:16
Ronnie Bucknam takes the lead in a, strangely enough, in
44:19
one of the marked two vs.
44:20
And he holds the lead for the first hour, but Gurney was behind
44:23
him and he thought that Ronnie was driving pretty hard to stay there.
44:25
Gurney takes the lead after the first hour and he and Foyt
44:28
lead for the next 23 hours.
44:30
At one point there were eight laps ahead of the lead and all
44:32
the other fors run into trouble.
44:33
Mario Andretti famously crashes in the Ss. Both of the mark
44:37
twos get caught up in his crash.
44:39
So there are three for wrecked in like literally one minute.
44:42
Lloyd Ruby beaches, his mark four in the sand.
44:45
McLaren loses the body work on his mark four while he is on the mos on straight.
44:50
Then he has to go back around.
44:51
He has to go back out to find it loses a whole bunch of
44:53
time and he finished way back.
44:55
So while these guys were in the lead, the Ferrari are the best of the rest, and the
44:58
Ferrari were really good, but they weren't fast enough to catch Boyton Gurney.
45:02
So Ferrari realized their only hope of winning the race was to break the Ford.
45:06
Mike Parks in the P four was sent out to Harry Gurney into driving faster
45:11
than he wanted or ought to drive.
45:13
Parks got behind him and he started duking back and forth and flashing
45:17
his brights, and then he would outbreak him in the brake zone at
45:19
the moozon hairpin and a down your arage, generally behaving like what?
45:23
Uh, gurney called a pain in the ass.
45:24
Gurney got tired of this and after a couple of laps when he got to Arage,
45:27
which is the slow right hander on the backside of the circuit, he pulled off
45:31
the circuit and he parked the car and he just sat there in a neutral with the
45:35
engine running and parks pulls off behind him and the two cars are sitting there.
45:39
And to me that I think this is the most surreal moment in the
45:41
history of automobile racing.
45:42
It's the middle of the 24 hours Oma.
45:45
And the cars running one, two are sitting on the side of the road, like Uber drivers
45:49
waiting for their fares to show up.
45:51
So I love that.
45:52
But Gurney was content to sit there as long as parks wanted to sit there.
45:56
So after about 10 or 15 seconds, parks finally takes off.
45:59
Gurney takes off after them, and the race proceeds to the finish.
46:02
They didn't run very hard there after they didn't have to.
46:04
They won by, I think, four laps, set a new record.
46:06
Foy took the last stint.
46:08
That picture at the beginning was, if you recall, there was gurney sitting on the
46:11
hood as they went to the victory rostrum.
46:13
And here they are at the rostrum.
46:14
Where Gurney famously shakes up his magnum of champagne, pops
46:17
the cork and sprays the crowd.
46:19
Supposedly, this is the first time anyone had ever done this before,
46:22
and this started a tradition that for better or worse exists to this day.
46:26
This was the capstone of the of the Ford Factory effort.
46:29
About a week after this, Don Fry announced that Ford was getting out of Lamar racing.
46:34
Ford had actually prepared, they had plans for the 68 season, but they shelved them.
46:37
They didn't wanna spend any more money.
46:38
What more could they do?
46:39
Shortly thereafter, the CSI, which as I recall, was the predecessor
46:43
of the FIA or somehow, I don't know the exact relationship.
46:45
I'm sure Don knows they changed the regulations and they
46:48
outlawed unlimited sized engine.
46:50
They did make a little bit of a mistake there.
46:52
They created group four where they set the engine limit at five liters and they
46:56
said the course had to be homologated.
46:57
Well, as it turns out, the GT forties, of which there were, you know, more than
47:00
a hundred out there, easy to homologated and ran a small block, five liter motor,
47:04
two 80 nines, and also three oh twos.
47:06
So John Wire took GT forties and he got himself some Gulf sponsorship
47:11
and he went to LAMA and won in 68 and 69 with small block GT forties.
47:16
So Ford wins LAMA four years running.
47:19
This is the greatest American Achievement Ivy League in international road racing.
47:22
Most of the Ford people, and I suspect most people generally
47:25
think the 66 is the best victory.
47:27
Personally, I like the 67 win.
47:29
Genuinely all American car, all American drivers, really competitive
47:32
race and tremendous performance.
47:35
So that was the end of the Ford program.
47:36
And again, first time really a mainstream manufacturer had gone racing
47:39
and Ford set the bar pretty high.
47:40
To this day, I think everyone who goes big time auto racing is tries
47:43
to match the achievements of Ford.
47:45
We're gonna open the floor to questions if anybody has any questions, but I did
47:47
wanna mention a couple of names here.
47:49
First, Jim Vogel, who's the owner of the GT 40, the Mark two, which is
47:53
the um, 66 winner, and he's here, and that's his car over there in the lobby.
47:56
Bill Vanay, who pointed out before, who was here in 66, and also Calvin
48:00
Lane who was here somewhere, I didn't see him, but he was there
48:03
at Lamont 64, saw the cars run.
48:05
So if you guys get a chance, you should chat with them a little later today.
48:08
Anybody has any questions, just lay 'em on me and I'll do my best.
48:11
Where is the Mark iv?
48:13
The Mark iv.
48:14
It's very interesting 'cause Ford didn't understand, I think what they were doing
48:17
and they had no interest in their history.
48:19
The actual 66 winner ended up being sold, but the Mark IV they knew
48:23
was a big deal and they kept that.
48:24
It's in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn to this day.
48:26
It's never run since 67.
48:28
And actually there was some damage in transport a couple years ago and it
48:31
was sent to all American racers and Dan Gurney's team actually did the
48:34
restoration of the car, the minor point.
48:36
But
48:39
yes.
48:39
Uh, I worked in the, a division of 3M in 1961, and at that time I was
48:44
led to understand that that was a well established aerial technology.
48:48
At that time, we were making the diesel.
48:50
Oh, really?
48:51
But we were making the, that's how I came across.
48:54
But that was a well established technology, lot of planes
48:57
in the air using technology.
49:01
Yeah.
49:01
I find it hard to believe that the.
49:03
Failed.
49:03
I mean, but I think this is interesting 'cause this is the era when, again, where
49:06
aerospace technology is making its way over to motorsports for the first time.
49:10
I mean, now we take all that stuff for granted, you know, this is when
49:12
it was really starting to happen.
49:14
Did FO defer to gurney?
49:18
I mean the car set up.
49:19
Yeah, absolutely.
49:21
Fo explicitly said, you know, whatever you wanna do is fine with me.
49:24
And I have to confess that Floyd's one of the only people
49:26
that I was never able to talk to.
49:28
I've actually tried to talk to, I did a book on the SC.
49:30
Don mentioned a couple years ago, and he wouldn't talk to
49:32
me about that book either.
49:33
I don't know, and I don't know why I've talked to him about
49:35
other subjects, the road racing stuff he never would talk about.
49:37
I don't, I have no idea why, but yeah, I mean, he clearly understood he was the
49:41
junior partner in that team, but I, I just wanted to disabuse people with the idea
49:45
that fight was some neophyte out there.
49:46
I. I mean, you know, he was probably the greatest driver in America at the time.
49:49
He had just won Indy like two weeks previously.
49:51
He had actually raced the scabs pretty successfully.
49:54
He rear engine scabs in 64.
49:55
So his problem was he'd never been to Lamar before, never raced at
49:58
night before, and he didn't get any practice time because the windshields
50:01
which were made nearby in Corning kept breaking during practice.
50:04
So, uh, that was one of the problems they had that year.
50:06
Question regarding the rivalry between Ford and Ferrari.
50:10
I really kicked around that there was a point in time that Ferrari either
50:14
attempted to or canceled or raced.
50:16
It was supposed to occur in Italy in, uh, in an effort to
50:20
avoid being embarrassed by Ford.
50:21
Is there any any truth to that?
50:24
I believe I have to.
50:24
How they prevented the Cobra Daytona coup from winning the GT Championship in 64.
50:29
And I don't remember the details, but yeah, it was like some chicanery
50:31
that Enzo, uh, cooked up to make sure that they kept the championship.
50:34
The two 50 GTOI think won the championship and it was long in the
50:37
tooth by that point, but nothing like that happened in Lamas stuff.
50:40
But there's only 'cause Ferrari couldn't come up with any solutions.
50:42
I guess he would've done it if he could've, he would've
50:44
been quarter about all.
50:51
Second question, how long were these run on the circuit?
50:55
I remember one came in the, in my mind.
50:59
Was it?
51:04
Oh really?
51:10
I don't think so.
51:10
First, uh.
51:12
Uh, yeah, Henry's, uh, Italian wife, a very glamorous, supposedly she
51:16
placed a bed on Ferrari in 67, I think, or 66, but, uh, I don't know
51:19
how well that, that didn't go over too well, apparently with the Ford guys.
51:22
I'm not sure how long the GT fours were raced for.
51:24
I mean, it was a, it was a long time, you know, again, you might wanna look,
51:27
the Ronnie Spain book is really well done and, and there's several other books that
51:30
sort of deal with the private tier years.
51:32
I don't recall having any habitual, you know, systemic
51:35
problems with fires in those cars.
51:37
So maybe that was just a bad deal there in Mexico City.
51:39
Part of that is the safety regulation change.
51:44
70, you've got to have certain types of, uh, protections in the
51:48
fuel tank, that type of thing.
51:50
Uh, there other, uh, issues that really by 70 71, they were, uh, technically
51:56
safety wise becoming obole upgrade.
52:01
You go out, buy another car because by then they.
52:05
I'm happy to answer more questions though.
52:07
You know, we go over there if you wanna ask me anything informally, but if not,
52:09
I really appreciate you taking this time.
52:11
It was a pleasure for me to do this.
52:19
Thanks.
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