The Legend of the Ford GT40 (Preston Lerner)

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Break Fix's History of Motorsportsseries is brought to you in part
by the International Motor RacingResearch Center, as well as the
Society of Automotive Historians,the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
Commerce, and the Argo Singer family.
Few cars have captured the essenceof American performance and racing

(00:20):
heritage, quite like the four gt.
In his book for GT, how Ford Silencedthe Critics Humbled Ferrari and conquered
LeMans author Preston Lerner takes readerson a thrilling deep dive into history,
engineering, and racing legacy of thisiconic machine from the groundbreaking
GT 40 that stunned the motorsportsworld in the 1960s to the modern GT's

(00:42):
triumphant return to LAMA in 2016.
Preston masterfully weaves togetherthe stories of the visionaries, drivers
and engineers who made it all possible.
In this episode, we return to theInternational Motor Racing Research
Center for a center conversationwhere Preston explores the book's most
fascinating insights discusses Ford'srelentless pursuit of victory and

(01:02):
uncovers what makes the GT one of themost legendary race cars of all time.
For those of you who have not had achance to meet, my name is Tom Leman.
This is one of the most delightfulopportunities I get to welcome people
to our center conversation, andparticularly today with our wonderful
speaker Preston, learn Pressure.
Pressure present.
I am delighted to have such awonderful crowd here today to hear this

(01:25):
presentation, and let's get right to it.
Ladies, let introduce PrestonLerner and his talk on.
Let's see, where is that?
Oh, it's the GT 40.
Are you ready Preston?
I think Don's going first.
Sorry about that.
Don.
Don Caps is a member of our historianscouncil, a great friend of the center.
And so now let me bring up Don Caps,we'll get you more information.

(01:48):
Done
sheet, the center time stations,which have been going on since
what, 2000 late 1999, 2000.
Uh, I've been here as with thistime, they have someone like Preston
and some of people will come.

(02:08):
This is great.
Plus this is a wonderful crowd.
Today, Preston and I have gone backa little ways back and forth on some.
Preston is a contributing writer for aautomobile magazine and is, uh, written
several really interesting books.
Scab, which is still kind of amilestone for that particular mark,
still into Paul Newman, uh, Mexico.

(02:29):
Also really wonderful book on automotivemythology, which, uh, I, I've enjoyed
that one a great deal because it, itmade a very dear lady, very happy to see
something that she had a research on.
You have to read a book, but oneis very dear and dear to all of
us who are here today is his workon the 4G two and race of 1966.

(02:53):
I know how many of you remember backin the, uh, the dark ages where about
two or three times a year you get asatellite TV beamed in from France on
the Obama race, and there it was, theAmerican cars coming across the line in.
And that was an incredible experienceto see it live all in any color

(03:17):
you want, along to black and white.
So things have changed a great deal andone of the things that's nice to have
someone like Preston here is he bringsa tremendous of amount of information
and knowledge on the automobile world.
All so basic.
Somebody really doesn'tneed an introduction, but
someone who really, uh, I.

(03:48):
Thank you, Don.
Thanks also to Tom and Glenda andJosh and Bill and Kip and everybody
else here at the InternationalMotor Racing Research Center.
This is my first visit.
It's a fantastic facility and it'san honor and a thrill to stand at the
spiritual home of American Road Racing.
I am the author of four gt and if youcan see from this unconscionably long
subtitle, my book is specifically aboutthe Forge Factory program to win La Ma.

(04:11):
Ford advanced vehicles built 133 or ahundred thirty four four GT forties.
Only about two dozen of themwere raced by the factory.
The rest were sold to private tier.
Some of them had some amazing successes.
The most famous, and a lot of you hereprobably know it was chassis 10 75,
which went on to win Lama two yearsrunning in 68 and 69, and they were four
GT forties that continued to race andclub races well until the seventies.

(04:33):
So there's a lot of historythere, but I'm really focused very
specifically on the year 63 to 67when Ford ran a factory program.
You know, a lot of storieshave been told about the GT 40.
Several excellent books have beenwritten over the years and there
are still some points of dispute.
You know, I reached my own conclusions.
Your mileage may vary, butthis is the story as I see it.
At any rate, and I'm happy to, to answeras many questions as you guys have.

(04:55):
I. The Ford GT Sagabegins in the early 1960s.
Ford's products have become very stodgyand the company was losing youth sales
and market share to General Motors.
So at the tail end of 61, Lee Iaccocawas brought in to run Ford Division,
and one of his primary objectives wasto appeal to the first cohort of what

(05:16):
we now call the baby boom generation.
One of the ways he wanted to dothat was to implement the win on
Sunday, sell on Monday concept.
Ia. Coco was instrumental in inauguratingthe Total Performance Program, and the
idea was to use racing as a marketing toolto appeal especially to younger buyers.
So total performance ended up, there wasa whole bunch of stuff that they did,

(05:36):
but the four major components, at leastfor our purposes, they did drag racing,
which was based on the muscle cars thatwere already coming off the assembly line.
They did stock cars withHolman and Moody, and they.
They sent a whole bunch of money downto Charlotte and Motors, especially
the 4 27 big block they did in cars.
Winning Indy was their big goal.
Created a special motor, 255 cubicinch twin cam, forward 4K motor,

(05:58):
which became one of the greatengines in, in, uh, indie history.
And there was road racing, uh,with the cobras, which were really
successful here in the states.
And would go on to bevery successful overseas.
But you know, the Cobra was a GTcar and it wasn't really eligible.
It was never gonna win LAMA overall.
And frankly, no one in the United Statesor very few people in the United States
knew anything except for Lama and Ford hadnothing in its inventory to go win Lama.

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So at the same time that these thingsare going on, uh, here in the states,
Enzo Ferrari in Marine, he waslooking to the future and was, and was
worried about what was gonna happen.
Ferrari was, in certain respect,the polar opposite of Ford because
Ford used racing to sell streetcar.
Enzo sold street cars to fund racing.
And he could only sell so manycars because there was, you know,
a relatively small market for it.

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And he was wondering how longhe was gonna be able to fund the
racing program to continue to winat endurance racing at Lamont.
And he was also inFormula One in a big way.
So Ferrari let it be known throughhis emissaries that he might
be willing to sell the company.
Ford got wind of this.
They sent over a bunch ofaccountants and technicians.
They inventoried the factory.
They looked at the books theysent over Don Fry, which who was

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uh, Lee Coco's, right hand man tonegotiate directly with Enzo Ferrari.
And torturous negotiations ensued.
They hammered out a purchase price,actually put together a contract, and
at the 11th hour, Enzo got cold feet andhe left Don Fry standing at the altar.
Conspiracy theorists are convinced thatFerrari never intended to sell to Ford,
and that this whole ploy was a charadeto convince Fiat to buy the company.

(07:22):
And in fact, Fiat did buy thecompany a couple years later
as devious as Enzo Ferrari was.
I think that's a little moreMachiavellian than he truly was.
You know, my reading of the subjectis that the more the negotiations went
on to be clearer, he came to Ferrari.
But if he became part of the FordCorporate Empire, he was no longer
gonna be able to act like an absolutemonarch, which is what he's been
since he started the company.
So he told Don Fra, he wasn't interested.

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Ferri goes back to Dearborn.
He meets with Henry Ford the second.
Henry known as the Deuce, wasthe grandson of Henry Ford.
He, he was the CEO andpresident of Ford Motor Company.
He'd been running it since WorldWar ii, and he was every bit
as autocratic as Enzo Ferrari.
And so when Fry tells Henry whathappened, Ford was convinced that Enzo had

(08:03):
essentially given him the middle finger.
So he told Fry, well,that's the way he wants it.
You go over there and whip his ass.
Or he may have said, you goto Lamont and beat his ass.
It's actually not clear exactly whathe said because Fry told the story
different ways to different people.
The salient point is that HenryFord wanted Ford Motor Company
to win Lamont and he wanted tohumiliate Ferrari in the process.
So that's what they set out to do.

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But the problem was Ford didn'tactually have anybody in its entire
company, which was something like350,000 employees who knew anything
about international road racing.
And the only guy who sort of knowledgeableon the subject at all was a British
transplant by the name of Roy L.
And L had run the Aston Martinprogram that went to Lamont in 49.
That actually sounds a little moreimpressive than it is because back

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then the Astons were essentiallymodified street cars, and after that
L had nothing to do with racing.
He worked on the productionside of the business for Owt
and then for Ford of England.
Then he came over to the Statesand he worked in RD at Ford.
But in the land of the blind, the oneeye band is King Roy Lund was tasked
with putting together a proposal thatwould be presented to the Ford management
to sort of green light this program.

(09:07):
Lum was a, was a clever guy, a cleverengineer, and he realized that what Ford
needed, uh, was gonna be a, uh, a midengine MoCo with a swoopy aerodynamic
body powered by a Ford V eight.
He also roughed out the dimensions of thecar, which he called the GT 40 because
it was supposed to be 40 inches high.
He.
So L and Don Fry go to Ford Management.
They present this plan.
Ford Management says, great, go in Lama.

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They didn't think it was reallygonna be that big a deal.
You know, L was the one who reallyunderstood the enormity of the, the
project that Ford had ahead of it.
So the problem was there wasnobody at Ford who knew how
to build a car like this.
And in fact, there was no one inthe United States who really had any
experience with mid-engine Monaco chassis.
So Roy Lund decided to go to Englandto find somebody to design and build
the car that would go to Lamont.

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And they considered a coupleof possibilities before
deciding on Eric, broadly.
Broadly, had been working in theconstruction trades in the mid
fifties when he built a special to goroad racing the club level himself.
And his car was so successfulagainst the Lotus's that other
guys commissioned cars from him.
And eventually he was successfulenough that he created a
company called Lola Cars.
And in 63 he had wowed the motorsportsworld with a car called the Lola

(10:13):
Mark vi, or sometimes Lola gt.
And this was a mid-engine Monaco withswoopy aerodynamic body work powered by
a Ford V eight engine, which is to say itwas exactly what Roy one was looking for.
Broadly is hired the company leasea shop space near Heathrow Airport.
Forms a company calledFord Advanced Vehicles.
To build the cars broadly brings hissmall Lola crew over John Wire, who,

(10:35):
uh, had become famous for Ram rotting.
The Aston Martin team that won Lamont59 was brought in to run the operations.
So to keep the trains runningon time, John Wire was nicknamed
Death Ray, you can sort of get thesense Y from the way he looks here.
He wasn't a good guy to have mad at you.
And then Roy L came overto England with three Ford
engineers and they went to work.

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Now one of the pervasive myths thatreally kind of annoy me is that people
say that the four GT was nothingmore than a warmed over Lola, and
that's demonstrably false deniedexplicitly by broadly and wire and L.
The engine was entirely anAmerican product, obviously.
It was the, it was essentiallythe 2 55 cubic inch Indy car motor
with a push rod valve train insteadof a twin camera arrangement.

(11:18):
The body, which you saw beforeactually had been a full-size clay
had been done before Braley was hired.
Lauren had already sketched out thedimensions before Braley was hired.
The Monaco had a lot of Lolastuff in it, no question about it.
But it was bigger and more robust.
And frankly, the Brits wereaghast at how heavy it was.
The suspension was pretty muchstandard race car practice of the day.
But the suspension geometry was puttogether by a Ford engineer back

(11:40):
in Dearborn who was using softwarewritten in Fortran on an IBM mainframe.
Not sure how that, well that worked.
So it was really an an Anglo-Americancollaboration in the truest sense
of the word, and I think that'sthe best way to think of it.
The collaboration didn't goall that smoothly to be honest.
There was a serious culture clash, and itwasn't so much between Americans and the
English, but it was the Ford guys wereformerly trained engineers who were used

(12:03):
to working in a corporate environment.
You know, they were accustomed toprotocols and design reviews and all
sorts of formalized procedures tofollow, and the Brits were racers.
It wasn't that they, you know, wereshade tree mechanics, but they were
used to doing things on the fly andmaking corrections as necessary.
The two groups did not get along at all.
The Americans thought the Brits werekind of bumpkins, and the Brits thought
the Americans were sticking the mud.
So before too long, Roy Lun andEric Broley, who were the two people

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in charge of the program, weren'teven talking to each other and
everything had to go through RoyLu and that didn't work too well.
Originally, they had hoped to race thebeginning of the 64 season, and in fact
the first car wasn't finished untilApril 64 and it was shown briefly here
at Heathrow Airport, and that's actuallywire on the left, broadly in the middle,
and a rare picture of Roy L on the right.
And then it was flown over to theStates where it was shown very

(12:47):
briefly to the American media.
Uh, right before the New York Auto Showand then this car, which is the first
car, was sent over to La Ma for the Lamonttest, and there was a second car finished
so late that it was shipped over to Francewithout even being graphic up properly.
So needless to say, the carshadn't been tested really at all.
They'd just been shaken downto make sure they would run.
They get to La Ma and it's a disaster.

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These are cars that are supposedto go 200 miles an hour.
And at 150 miles an hour,they were all over the road.
Joe Lescher, French driver, who wasbrought in because Bruce McLaren
wasn't available, goes out in thefirst car and immediately totals it.
Uh, the bulls on kink.
The second car is driven by Roy Salvadori,who had won Lamar with Carol Shell
being 59, and he's cajoled by a wireto get back into the car on the second

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day, and he does so against his betterjudgment and proceeds to crash the car at
bulls on hairpin, cranks the front end.
And so that car's done for the day.
Salvadori was so unimpressed bythe car that he immediately quit
the program in the interest of hisself-preservation as he put it.
In fact though, that was, that wasthe wrong call on Salvador's part.
The problem with the car was that theaerodynamics of the body work produced a

(13:50):
bunch of rear end lift, which is exactlywhat you don't want in a race car.
I. Simply by slapping a spoiler onthe rear deck that settled down the
rear end and thereafter, pretty mucheverybody who drove the Ford GT said
it was among their favorite cars ever.
It was a big car.
It was a heavy car.
It was not good and then slow stuff.
It wasn't agile, but it wasextremely stable and benign and
medium speed and high speed corners.
It was faster than any indie car oruh, formula one car in a straight line.

(14:13):
Ford had spent a lot of time on thecockpit making it comfortable, which
was very unusual in those days.
You know, Ferrari didn'tcare about his drivers.
So it was, it was really good forlong distance races and, and it had
the, the one quality that driverswant most in a race car, and that is
that it was fast, it could win races.
And so drivers generally lovethe GT 40, the guys who drove it
except for Roy Salvador, of course.
So month after the two cars are wreckedat lama, there's a car, I believe this

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is, the second car was repaired and itgoes to the Burg Green for its race debut.
Berg Green really was the wrongspot for debut, but it was the only
chance to race the car before Lama.
So that's where Ford decided to go.
Phil Hill and and McLaren are in the car.
They qualify second to JohnCiz and the lead Ferrari.
They run second in the race,but then they break predictably
pretty early on for Lama.
Then it's a month later.
So they had three cars of Lamont,which is pretty impressive

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for a brand new operation.
End of the first lap, Ferrari are leading.
1, 2, 3. They go down to ChurchRouge, which is, you know, is
the right hand or leads onto themoles on Strait to start lap two.
Ferrari is 1, 2, 3.
The fourth car in line is RichieGinther and he's behind them and at
the end of the moles on straight, heis passed all three Ferrari and he
is disappearing into the distance.
Ginther leads easily for the first hour.

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He pits Maton.
Gregory gets in the car.
Maton Gregory leadseasily during his stint.
The car is the fastest car on thetrack, but unfortunately it breaks.
Second car catches onfire, so its race is over.
Third car is Bill Hill and Bruce McLaren,and they're delayed at the start.
They have a misfire that takes 'em a whileto figure out, but once the car's going,
it's also the fastest car on the track.
Sets the track record, but then itfails slightly before a half distance.

(15:40):
All three cars failed, whichis not what you want when you
go racing, but reliability issomething that you can deal with.
At least the cars were fast.
That's what you want with a new car.
You want it to be fast.
You can always work on fragility later on.
Generally speaking, the Ford Campwas upbeat after that first Lama.
The rest of the yeardidn't go quite as well.
They raced at, ran in France shortly afterLamar, and the cars performed very badly.
So thereafter Wire decided not todo any more racing and he wanted to

(16:03):
focus on testing and development.
But towards the end of theyear, he was told he was ordered
actually to prep two cars for.
The Nassau speed weeks andhe didn't want to go there.
There was racists in The Bahamas.
They were kind of a, they werea run what you brung deal.
They were, it was on a tight circuit.
He thought it was a waste of time togo, but he was, as I say, uh, coerced
into, into sending two cars there.
And the problem is, is they,uh, they do terribly here.

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They're being outrun bya cobra of all things He.
Both of the four GTS break and they'rebeaten by GM products, which sort of
adds insult to injury after Nassau.
There's a big powwow back in Dearbornand the Ford discusses what went wrong
with the season and they decided thatthe problem with the four GT program
was not the cars, it was John Wire.
So they fired John Wire, although theylet him continue to run the customer

(16:46):
racing program, and they decided tohave the racing program run by their
in-house snake charmer, Carol Shelton.
Don't think Shelby needsmuch of an introduction here.
One of the most charismatic figures ever.
Great driver, he created the cobras.
What's important is he'd also puttogether a race team called Shelby
American based in Southern California.
And I know today it sounds weird to thinkof a racing team in, you know, in Los
Angeles because you know, everybody's inCharlotte or they're in, uh, Indianapolis

(17:09):
or somewhere near a racetrack.
But Southern California had beenthe home, the really center of, uh,
American racing industry pretty muchsince Harry Miller, uh, opened his
shop in downtown Los Angeles in theteens and well into the fifties.
Most of the, the really competitive IndyRoadsters and sprint cars and midgets were
still coming outta shops in Los Angeles.
I. In addition to all the, the sort ofracing history, Southern California was
the birthplace of hot rod civilization,so there was a tremendous talent pool of

(17:33):
really good craftsmen, experienced racemechanics there for Shelby to choose from.
And Southern California was alsowhere all the aerospace stuff was
happening in addition to the people.
Shelby had access to a bunch ofmaterials and components and technologies
that were just then finding theirway in into the motorsports world.
I mean, stuff like titanium andfittings and stuff, we really
all take for granted now.

(17:54):
I mean, that was just thenmoving over into that world.
So Shelby put together areally impressive organization.
I don't have time unfortunately to,to talk about all the people who went
on to bigger and better things, buttwo of them deserve special mention.
First, Phil Remington,master of all trades.
Remington could do pretty much anything.
He was a machinist, he was weld,he could fabricate, he could tune,
suspensions, breathe on motors.

(18:14):
I mean, he could do it all.
The thing about him that made himdifficult to work with was not that he was
difficult personally, he was actually avery pleasant guy and and extremely humble
considering how accomplished he was.
But as I said about him, he could doeverything that, that you could do,
and he could do it faster, and he coulddo it for longer than you could do it.
But Carol Smith, who was therace engineer, you guys have
probably seen his tune to Win andFasteners to win all his books.

(18:36):
He said that Remington's greatestskill was that he was a problem
solver and he would come up withfixes before other people even
realized that there was a problem.
So Remington's number one, and Ithink he was probably the single most
important person in the four GT program.
Second was Ken Miles.
I was a Brit.
He'd driven a tank after D-Day in WorldWar ii, come over the California in the
fifties to work at an MG dealership.

(18:56):
Was a champion, small boarracer in West Coast racing.
Was hired by Shelby for the COBRA program.
Won a whole bunch of races in Cobras.
Besides being a really talented racecar driver, he was a test driver at
Parx launch and he could drive for hourson end at nine-tenths without damaging
the car, and then come back and tellpeople exactly what the car was doing
in the middle of turn six, you know,at 4,200 RRP M or whatever it was.

(19:18):
So he was an invaluable resource.
The cars come over fromEngland in December of 1964.
And they're immediately Shelby eyes.
First thing they do is they paint 'em.
Blue is a Shelby Blue.
Next thing they did, these are the bariwheels, uh, wire wheels were replaced by,
uh, good old American Hali brand mags.
The 2 55 IndyCar motor is replacedby a 2 89 small block, which had

(19:39):
been proven in the cobras already.
They started testing thethings mostly at Riverside.
This happens to be at WillowSprings, which is north of la.
Miles and Bonderant would bombaround the track for hours on end.
They'd report all theirissues to Remington.
Remington would make thefixes implement them.
They'd go back out to Riverside inrural springs and repeat as necessary.
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 intheir first doubting for Shelby American.
So as you can imagine, the uh,four guys thought that Shelby
walked on water after that.
It was not only the first win for thefour GT, it was the first time the card
ever come close to finishing a race.
Unfortunately, I think the Britishexpression is that it flattered to
deceive because this turned out tobe the high point of the 65 season.
The rest of the yearwent pretty disastrously.

(20:21):
They were beaten everywhere and theywere humiliated a couple places.
Ford realized it needed to sort of dosomething to raise its game, so to speak.
So one of the steps they took wasto create an in-house subsidiary
called CarCraft, and this wasa quasi works skunk works.
Where Ford engineers were senteither on the payroll or to moonlight
and come up with the r and d, uh,improvements to advance the program.

(20:45):
And one of the things they decidedto do was to use the 4 27 cubic
inch motor, the big block, whichwas being raced really successfully
in NASCAR by Holman and Moody.
And so the guys at Car Craft thoughtit might be a good idea to see if
they could stick a 4 27 into four gt.
And it really wasn't aparticularly difficult conversion.
They had to cut a rear bulkhead,they had to move the seats,

(21:05):
a bunch of plumbing changes.
Later on, they developed anew transmission, but by and
large, it was a pretty simpleconversion by industry standards.
And when they finished the car, Ken Mileswas dispatched to Michigan to the Romeo
test track to see what the car would do.
And after shaking it down, he goesout and he pretty immediately gets
the car up to 200, 1.5 miles an hour.
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 thecar I wanna race at Lamont.
Which is good, except that there wasonly about six weeks to go before Lamar.
There's now, now a rush programto get the car prepared.
The new car, the big block car, isdubbed the Mark two and the small
block cars are retroactively namedMark ones just for future reference.
So for Lamar Ford shows up with six cars.

(21:48):
They got two mark twos,brand new four mark ones.
The Mark twos had barely beenshaken down before the race, and
when they got to the track theyfound out they were wicked loose.
And that's really a problemin La Ma, which was one of the
fastest tracks in the world.
So during the course of practiceand qualifying, the Shelby American
guys spent most of their timebehind the pits, cutting aluminum,
shaping it, and then, uh, fixing it.

(22:10):
These appendages to the race corner.
The car is completely clean.
Aerodynamically when it showed up.
Lamont here, it's got a front air dam.
It's got a canards onthe, uh, front fender.
It's got these weird looking tail fanson the rear deck, and it's also got a
big rear spoiler, which you can't see.
So the car looked kinda likea frankensteinish, ran like
a monster out on the track.
And as soon as the race starts, putsBruce McLaren in the lead, Chris Amen.

(22:30):
Behind him.
When they get to the end of the MOS onstraight at Lap one, they can barely see
the Ferraris and near view view mirrors.
These guys dominate the race andthe mark twos until they break.
This is kind of a commontheme with the Ford story.
It turns out the problems were reallykind of fluky deals that didn't
have anything to do with the newmotor, but nevertheless, the car
is broke and to make matters worth.
So did all four of the mark one.
Ford was oh for six,which is a pretty bad er.

(22:53):
Back in Dearborn there was seriousconsternation and wonderment about
why things had gone so badly wrong.
So Ford created a thing called theLAMA Committee, and I know that sounds
like bureaucratic, sort of ask coveringsort of like a blue ribbon committee,
but in fact, the department headsfrom each of the major departments
at Ford were put onto this committee.
So they had a representative fromengine and Foundry and transmissions.

(23:14):
And design and even public relations,and they would meet periodically to
check on what was going on and tochart course corrections if necessary.
One thing they really need tounderstand is what sort of resources
that Ford put into this program.
And it wasn't just money, even thoughwhat Ford spent was unprecedented,
that no one had ever come closeto spending this kind of money.
But this was the first time that amajor mainstream manufacturer had
ever gone racing in a big time way.

(23:36):
Ford was creating a paradigm for whatwould be used in decades to come.
It's still being used to this day.
And in addition to the money thatthey spent, they had all these r and
d resources that teams like Ferrarior Jaguar, you know, had no access to,
you know, they created car craft, Imean, a whole subsidiary for racing.
There was an engine cell, a dinocell, where they would run four
20 sevens for 24 to 48 hours.

(23:57):
Not, not just the motors, but they hada attached to a gear box, which was
run by servos so that it could mimicall the gear changes made at Lamont.
You know, that was something thatno one else had ever thought of
doing before, and I, I don't evenknow who does that to this day.
So it was a, it was areally impressive effort.
I, I just think that's worth rememberingas an overarching theme in this project.
Anyway, Lamont committee, they, they camewith a couple of important decisions.

(24:18):
First, they decided to bagthe rest of the 65 season.
Their thinking was that nobody caredabout places like Spa and Monza.
They even heard of themhere in the States.
All really Ford cared about was winninglama, maybe to a lesser degree, the
American races at Sebring in Daytona.
So they decided to forget about racinganymore in 65 and focus on testing
and development here in the States.
And the testing was relentless.

(24:39):
Again, no test program likethis had ever been seen before.
And not only would Shelby Americanshow up with all their guys, but Ford
would send a bunch of engineers andthey also had the vendors show up with
engineers, so Lockheed or ING or Goodyear.
And everybody would then write upreports, his memos and all these memos
will be sent around to everybody.
And there's just stacks and stacksof paper, which are really, uh.

(25:00):
You know, kind of fascinatingto see what they found, all the
different things they experimentedwith and just tried to make work.
The third thing they decided todo was not leave all their eggs
in the Carroll Shelby basket.
And so it was decided to bring inHolman and Moody, which had been the
dominant force down in stock car racingto also be involved in the program.
They also brought in Alan Mann over inEngland and Mann had just won the GT
championship, uh, with the Cobra DaytonaCove, so he was brought in as well.

(25:23):
Although, to be honest, hewas always a minor player.
And the other thing that LAMAcommittee decided to do was to
double down on the big block motor.
And this was a controversialdecision at the time, and there's
still debate about it to this day.
The Brits were convinced that Ford couldwin LAMA with a small block engine.
And I guess you could argue that theydid win Lama with a small block in 68
and 69, but that of course was afterthe unlimited engines had been outlawed.

(25:45):
Still, you can make the casethat maybe the 2 89 would've
beaten Ferrari at Lamont in 66.
But there's a axiom in boxing that a goodbig man will always beat a good small man.
And I think that's the casewith the, uh, the engines.
No way the, the small block wasgonna beat the big block car.
The big block was too powerful, toomuch torque, which the drivers love.
'cause that's what you wantcoming out of a corner.

(26:06):
And since it was so strong, they couldbasically lo along it's 6,000 or six
200 RPM and still go 200 miles an hour.
Yes, it was heavier, so itwas harder on brakes and tires
and all sorts of components.
But on balance, I thinkthe 4 27 was the way to go.
So they test for therest of the 65 season.
Start the 66 season.
Go to Daytona.
It's a 1, 2, 3 finish.
Ruby and Miles repeatingtheir victory of 65.

(26:28):
Next race at Sebring.
One, two, finish.
This is Miles and ruby again.
Now in the open top X one shouldhave been a 1, 2, 3 finish.
This is the famous race where theinfamous race where Darren Gurney
was leading his car broke onthe last corner of the last lap.
And he was disqualified for pushingthe car across the start line.
So the teams go to Lama Loaded for Bear.
They're the prohibitive favorites.

(26:48):
They have no fewer than eight cars.
It's like an armada.
No one's ever seen before.
Three Shelby American cars, three Hoand Moody cars, two Allen Mann cars.
They're the prohibitivefavorites going into the race.
But you know, being favorites also thispressure by being kind of the odds on
favorite, and the person who was feelingit more than anybody was Leo Bebe.
Leo Bebe was the guy in charge of all ofFord Racing's programs, and he had been

(27:09):
a confidant of Henry Ford II since theymet in the Navy during World War ii.
But before Lama Henry Ford had metwith Bebe and he'd handed him a note
card on which he'd handwritten threewords, you better win Bebe understood.
This wasn't like a friendly exportation.
This was an order from hiscommander in chief, and he was
going to be expected to fall on hissword if he failed to win Lamar.

(27:30):
This little card meant so muchto Bebe that he carried it in his
wallet for the rest of his life.
So, yeah, he kind of knew youbetter win before the race starts.
Ford meets with all its drivers andthey, they give everybody strict orders
to run to very conservative lap times.
So we'll finish the race.
And so far as I can tell, nobody paidany attention to these lap times.
No, the first lap, this was still whenthe had the Lamas start when he ran

(27:52):
across the track and jumped in his car.
Miles' door didn't close properly, sohe has to pit at the end of the first
lap and he goes out and immediately setsa lap record to make up for lost time.
Meanwhile, Dan Gurney never likesto be slower than anybody in the
Ford team, so he sets anotherlap record while taking the lead.
The third Shelby American car was drivenby Chris a Amen, and Bruce McLaren.
Team McLaren was sort of McLaren'sfledgling manufacturing operation,

(28:14):
was sponsored by Firestone.
Everybody else was running good years.
During this race, as you can sort ofsee here, it was, it rained on and off.
The track was greasy, calledfor intermediate tires.
It just so happened theFirestone Intermediate was junk.
Kept throwing treads, so theylost several laps replacing tires.
And finally, McLaren makes the politicallyin expedient decision to get rid of his
Firestones, even though Firestones hissponsor and slap on a set of good years.

(28:37):
And this is when he leans downinto the car and tells a amen.
Well, what Aon told me, he said wasdrive the door handles off the door.
I believe what Amon told AJ Bain was ago like hell, whatever the point was,
they wanted to run flat out to make upfor lost time, and that's what they did.
By about halfway through the race,it's Shelby American Cars 1, 2, 3.
Ferraris are nowhere.
It's Ford's race to Win.

(28:58):
But then shortly after Dawn JerryGrant pits from the lead in the car.
He's sharing with Dan Gurney.
The water temp gauge is pegged.
Head gasket's gone.
Leo Bebe feels a stinkingsensation in his stomach.
Remember, Bebe's been through 64where all three cars have failed.
He's been through 65 whenall six cars have failed.
At this point there arefour, four gts left.
So four of 'em are already gone and allhe can think of is that he's got this,

(29:20):
you better win no card in his pocket.
And he is got Henry Ford II with thisvast entourage looking over his shoulder
and he doesn't wanna screw things up.
So he immediately sends downorders to slow the cars down to
lap times of four minutes a lap.
They had qualified around three 30 a lap.
So this is 30 seconds off the pace.
Granted it was greasy on the trackand you know it's an endurance race.

(29:40):
Those are lap times that anamateur could be driving at.
And Chris a Amen told me thatit took him about 15, 20 minutes
just to slow down to that pace.
Thereafter, the race ceases to be a racein any sort of what we think of a race.
I mean, there was no realcompetition out there.
I. If you look at the, uh, results, andyou'll see that the lead changed hands
numerous times over the course of thelast eight hours between the name of

(30:01):
McLaren Car and they're in the blackcar and the Miles Denny Hume car, which
is the second car over there in line.
But it wasn't because they were dicingfor the lead, it was because, you know,
their pit stop schedules, they justpitted at different times and they
had to pit about every hour for gas.
They needed tires periodically.
These cars went through brake pads,so they had to make pad changes.
Both of them changed rotorsbefore the race was over.
They weren't really competing.

(30:22):
All they were doing was clicking off lapsand, and making their way to the finish.
Somewhere along the line, someonecomes up with a bright idea
of staging a dead heat finish.
Now, this is to me, one of the greatmysteries of Lemos 66, and there's a
bunch of mysteries about this race.
I have no idea who reallycame up with the idea.
Bruce McLaren said he did, butthat seems really unlikely to me.
And the thing is, I cannot thinkof a single automobile race

(30:42):
that's ever ended in a dead heat.
Uh, not a major one.
I can't think of a single race ofany kind that ended in a dead heat.
You know, whether it be a horse raceor a boat race, or a political race.
The whole point of racething is to anoint a winner.
So I don't know why anyone thought theywere gonna be able to do this, but to
Leo Bebe, this sounded like a great idea.
First of all, it would be apublic relations coup for Ford.
Second of all, it would preventthe first two cars from fighting

(31:04):
with each other for the win.
And that was his great fear, wasthat they would start dicing and
they would crash into each otherand things would go down the tubes.
So Ford Official is, is.
Sent over to, uh, talk to the A CO,which is the Automobile Club of the West,
which is the I syncratic organizationthat runs Lama and the French officials
essentially say, we're cool with that.
If you want a dead heat finish, go for it.

(31:25):
So Ford of official comes back,he reports to BB and Shelby
and all the, uh, the Ford guys.
We can do a dead heatfinish if you wanna do it.
Somewhere along the line, theKen Miles car had pulled well
ahead of the McLaren A Amen Car.
And why it did so is is also a subjectof dispute Miles fans and Charlie
Agape, who's his, was his crew chiefand is still around to this day, are
convinced it was 'cause Miles wasthe faster driver in a faster car.

(31:47):
Bruce McLaren always contended thatMiles had flouted team orders and
instead of running at four minutes alap, he cut a couple of quick laps to
make sure that he was in the lead whenthey came down to the end of the race.
At this point, it's impossibleto say what really happened.
But the point was before they were to getinto their cars for their final stint,
both McLaren and Miles were broughtover to talk to the board Brain Trust.

(32:09):
And they were told, miles, you slow down.
Let McLaren catch up to you.
By this time, there's only one other Fordleft, and that was a Holman and Moody
car being driven by Dick Hutcherson, whowas a stock car Ace, who admitted later
he had no business driving at Lamont.
He was completely out of his element.
I mean, you can imagine alsoin the rain and at night.
He never even turned right before.
He's in third place,but he's 10 laps down.

(32:29):
So miles and McLaren get intheir cars for their final stint,
and they start circling around.
Miles, slows down, McLarenstarts to catch up.
Meanwhile, the Ford official comes runningbreathlessly until the Ford pits and
he says the A CO has changed its mind.
They're no longer going toallow a dead heat finish if
the cars finish side by side.
The car that has covered the greatestdistance will be declared the winner.

(32:50):
Now it just so happened thatMiles and Hume qualified Second
Aon and McLaren qualified fourth.
So therefore, Aon and uh, McLarenwill have covered about 20 more feet
than the other car, and it would bedeclared the winner on that basis.
The problem is there are no in-car radiosback in 1966, the only way to communicate
with the drivers is via pit boards,which are shown at the Moozon hairpin.

(33:13):
And it's pretty hard to getthis whole thing in writing.
I think while the drivers are going by,theoretically, they could have pitted the
cars to tell the drivers what was goingon, but no one wants to take the chance.
I think of a, of an unscheduled pitstop for no particularly good reason.
And also from Leo, Leo Be's perspective,all that could happen was bad things
if the guys understood the situation,because Miles might be encouraged to
start racing with McLaren for the win.

(33:35):
And that's exactly whathe didn't want to happen.
Again, there are a lot of people whothink that Bebe purposely screwed
miles out of the win, and I findthis a little difficult to believe.
I mean, miles was a little difficultpersonally, and I guess you could
argue that he had floated team ordersearlier in the race if he did fly
team orders earlier in the race.
But you know, he'd been astall water of the program.
He had done most of thetesting and development.
He knew the Ford guys really well.
He was coming off windsat Daytona and Sebring.

(33:57):
I mean, I don't see any reason why theywould've wanted to hang him out to dry.
I think Bebe's issue was he didn'twant anything to go wrong and he
didn't particularly care who won therace as long as a Ford won the race.
And from his perspective,it was safer to do nothing.
So he did nothing and the carscontinued on to the finish.
And this is the famous finish.
You know, in this photo, as youcan see, this is, uh, McLaren
leading with miles lagging back.

(34:19):
And so there are schools of thoughtthat say that McLaren goose the
throttle to steal the victory.
And some people claim that Miles purposelyheld back to show his disgruntlement
at Ford for denying him the victory.
In fact, miles says that thereal finish line is actually
back about 10 yards from there.
And he said when they crossed thetiming line, there was actually
a, a wire that they were as closeto being dead even as they could.

(34:40):
And nobody knew what wasgoing on in the pits.
I mean, even in the FordCamp, they weren't exactly
sure what was gonna happen.
There's a fellow here, bill Benet,who's actually there in 66, who was
actually there while this was going on.
Nobody in the standsknew what was going on.
Chris a Amen in the pitsdidn't know what was going on.
He didn't realize that he was thewinner until they started pushing
him toward the victory roster.
On the other hand, Ken Miles thought hehad 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
until they wouldn't let him go there.
So, and Ford couldn't havecared less either way.
I mean, to the United States, noone had heard of any of these guys.
I mean, you had, uh, a transplantedBritain, three guys from New Zealand,
all the people in the United States knewthat a Ford had won, finished 1, 2, 3,
vanquished Ferrari mission accomplished,which is why Henry Ford is the only
guy who looks really, really happyhere on the victory, ROS, that's Amen.

(35:23):
And McLaren, and to me, theirsmiles look a little bit sheepish.
A couple of minutes after that, milesand Hume are more or less pushed onto
the rostrum, and there's a pretty tellingphoto of Miles who looks like he's
grinning his teeth while he's grinning.
Clearly not happy to be there.
The only person who looks reallyelated is Henry Ford, and that's
important to note because I.
A week before the race, Henry Ford hadtold reporters he figured this would

(35:46):
be the end of the program after Lamont.
And when you think about it, this wasthe perfect place to end the program.
They just finished 1, 2, 3beaten Ferrari, you know, done
everything they'd set out to do.
All that could happen from nowwas things could go downhill.
The thing is though, racingis a brutal, cruel sport.
So many things go wrong so many timesthat when you win any race, I mean
even at the Lowliest club level.
You're just so happy.
At least I'm so happy.

(36:06):
So you're just elated.
And you can see Ford here.
He's just jazzed by the whole thing.
And he's so amped that when they ask him,well, what are you guys gonna do now?
He says, we're gonna comeback and do it again.
And I think this came as asurprise to all the people at Ford.
I don't think anyone reallyintended to really figure there
was gonna be a 1967 program.
So a lot of people that sort ofthe Ford saga ends here, but I
actually like the rest of thestory, which is just one more year.

(36:27):
'cause to me, it's the best partof the story, even though it's sort
of a postscript in some respects.
After Lama, a man is let go.
Holman and Moody plays a, a largerrole in testing and development,
and they incorporate a lot ofNASCAR technology into the race car.
Most notably, there was a heavyduty roll cage, and this turns out
to be a big deal, at least in PeterRevson because it's thought to have
saved his life when he barrel rolledhis car during testing at Daytona.

(36:49):
And there's again, they test andtest and test and test, and they
do so much testing that they renamethe cars as, uh, mark two Bs.
The six, six cars were calledMark two a's, but at any rate.
Ford goes to Daytona to begin the 67season and they figure they're gonna
have more of the same, gonna be Ferrariagain, gonna be a nice easy year.
Instead, they run into a buzz sawand it's called the, uh, the Ferrari
three 30 P four, A gorgeous car.

(37:11):
It's a car that sounds spectacular.
It's agile, it's fast, it'sas iconic in its own way.
The P four is as the mark two was.
At Daytona Ford has acatastrophic race output.
Shafts for the transmissionswere improperly.
He treated and every one of 'em fails.
Only one car finished therace and it was way back.
The Ferraris finished 1, 2, 3 andthey managed the picture perfect.

(37:33):
Uh, line of breast formation,you know, at the finish.
That Ford kind of botched there at Lamar.
To add sort of insult to injuryafter the race, Chris, a Amen who
had moved over to the Ferrari teamsaid the, uh, Ford handled like
a truck compared to the Ferrari.
So the four guys weren't too happy.
But besides being humiliated, there werealso a sense of, well, what do we do now?
They just spent.
Six months developing.

(37:55):
You know this Mark two B, and it had justbeen trounced by Ferrari at Daytona, and
it's conceivable the Mark two might'vebeen able to beat Ferrari Lama, which
was attractive, favored the Fords,but it definitely wasn't a done deal.
So Phil Remington came up witha plan B or sort of a Plan J,
as you might wanna call it.
And I gotta backtrack reallybriefly to why that is.
So from the very beginning of the program,everyone understood excessive weight

(38:16):
was the biggest issue with the four gts.
And there have been all sortsof efforts to lighten the cars.
They used aluminum body work and actuallyaluminum chassis, they cut the tops off.
But eventually a uh, Ford engineerby the name of Chuck Mountain, who
had been one of the guys who hadgone over to England in 63 to work on
the original car, found a company inwestern Massachusetts called Brunswick.
And it made a bunch of consumer products.
One of them was actuallybowling pins, believe it or not.

(38:37):
I think it was those A MF bowling pins.
But they also were a major departmentof defense contractor and they were
building instrument panels for fighterjets out of a aluminum honeycomb material
that was very light, yet very rigid.
So mountain thought it might bepossible to build a Monaco, added this.
Material.
Ed Hull, who was one of the unsungheroes of the program, built a chassis
where he used honeycomb aluminum.

(38:57):
It was bonded with, uh, an industrialgrade glue that was cured in a high
temperature ovens, very similar to theauto Clay is used now to, uh, make carbon
fiber and around this Monaco Ford stylingput together a radical looking body work.
It had these protrusions at the frontthat looked to me like lobster claws.
And it had this high long rear deck, whichhas actually been modified here a little

(39:18):
bit already, but it resembled a bread van.
They dubbed this to the J car.
And the JCAR actually was slightly fasterthan the Mark two, but only slightly.
And most of the drivers, wellactually all the drivers except
Forman preferred the Mark two.
So it was decided to raise the mark two in66 at lama, and that was the right call.
Obviously they finished 1, 2, 3, but theycontinued to test the jcar after Lama.
And so Ken Miles was in thecar at Riverside in August.

(39:40):
They're testing two experimental,semi-automatic transmissions and on the
back stray while he was doing somethinglike a buck 80 or something like that.
Car goes outta control.
No one to this day knows exactly why.
All sorts of theories.
Some people say they thought the bodywork was aerodynamically unstable.
I find it hard to believe.
Some people thought the honeycomb aluminumactually came apart in in the Monaco.
Some people think the brakes locked.

(40:00):
I think the most likely thing was thatthe transmission froze in gear rate.
The car goes off the track, highspeed barrel rolls, miles is
ejected, and he's killed on the spot.
And that's probably the lowest day inthe history of the Ford GT program.
And that also ends, as you mightimagine, a development of the JCAR until
Daytona 1967, when Ford has nothingelse in its cupboard to beat Ferrari.

(40:21):
So Phil Remington comes up withthe idea of using the jcar.
He thought it was a good chassisand he thought the problem was the
body work, which he suspected wasvery draggy, is the way he put it.
So Remington flies to Dearborn withtwo of his top fabricators and they
take the car into the wind tunnel.
And Remington literally starts hackingaway at the body work and reshaping
it totally by intuition into theshape that he thinks will work well.

(40:43):
He gets finished, they runthe car through the tunnel.
The numbers look good.
They immediately shipped thecar out to Kingman, Arizona high
speed test track that Ford hasout there straight outta the box.
The uh, mark four is five milesan hour faster than the mark two.
So Ford decides, Hey, we thinkwe've got something here.
They named the car of the mark four andthe reason why they didn't name it the
mark three was because the mark threewas the name reserve for, there was

(41:05):
a street car version of the GT 40 ofwhich they built, I think seven total.
Ford decided to have a kind ofgong show bake off between the
mark four and the mark two.
Uh, at Sebring whole newMark four is built up.
Shelby American was running withMario Andretti and Bruce McLaren
Holman and Moody was runninga, uh, one of the Mark two Bs.
McLaren puts this car on the poleand then races with the Chaparral.

(41:27):
There's a, they dice for a couplehours until the Chaparral breaks,
and the mark four wins easily.
The mark two is literallymiles and miles behind.
This is one of the rare occasionswhere a car straight out of the box
wins its first major race anyway,and the Mark IV actually only raced
two races, and it won both of 'em.
So I had a pretty good winning record.
After Sebring Ford decides tobuild four brand new Mark fours.

(41:48):
I mean the resources they had at theirdisposal were were pretty incredible.
This is the Gurney Ford car, though thereally famous one, which is still owned
by Ford, the only one that they still own.
And Ford goes to Lamar with four markfours with two mark twos as backup.
McLaren puts one of the mark fours onthe pole, but the Ferrari and Chaparral
are right there, and clearly thisisn't gonna be a cakewalk this year.
First of all, remember Ferrarihad crushed the Fords at Daytona

(42:10):
and they've been faster than theMark four in the Lamont test.
Chaparral was the most sophisticatedrace car in the world in 1967.
This was the two f, the high wingcar with the adjustable wing and,
and the Semiotic matter transmission.
So, you know, Ford had areal race on its hands.
It wasn't like 66 where they werejust waiting for the Ferraris to fail.
McLaren's on the pole.
The, the Chaparral Ferrari's right there.
The slowest Mark four,strangely enough, is Dan Gurney.

(42:32):
Since then, there's sort of thismythology that has grown up that
Gurney was sandbagging 'cause hedidn't wanna embarrass his co-driver.
AJ Foyt Gurney deniesthat this was the case.
Foy was not a very experiencedroad racer, but he was AJ Foyt.
I mean, he was gonna gofast and he did go fast.
What happened was that Gurneywas consciously following the
example of his friend Briggs.
Cunningham and Briggs was not a very fastdriver, but he always finished at Lamar.

(42:53):
Whereas Gurney had D nfd in sevenout of his nine races there.
So Gurney may decided that he wasgonna go slow and he was gonna
especially go slow in the breakzone for the moles on Hairpin.
Well, what happened was the cars weregoing 215 miles an hour down the street.
Then they had to break down to about35 miles an hour for the hairpin.
And you can imagine howhard that was on brake pads.
Also, the brakes would get extremelycool on the mul on strait and when they

(43:14):
would get, when you hammered the brakes,the rotors had a tendency to crack.
So what Gurney decided to do was,instead of breaking at the 300 yard
mark or whatever it was, he decidedhe could lay brake at, he was backing
outta the throttle around 600 yards out,letting the aerodynamic drag slow the
car down to about 160 miles an hour.
Then he was lightly getting intothe brake pedal, slowly build up
temp so that the would preservepaths and, and save the rotors.

(43:37):
The other reason why he wasn'tparticularly fast during practice was
he was adamant about making the carhandle well through the Olson kink.
The cars were dead flat through thekink, even at 250 miles an hour.
But when the car wasn't handlingwell, it was a bit of a handful.
You really had to concentrate, you had touse all the road, and that was a problem.
If it was, you know, when it's dark, it.
It might start raining.
There was always traffic at Lama Gurney.
Wanted to make sure he could getthrough the kink, literally with

(43:59):
one hand on the steering wheel.
So he worked for a long time in practice,fiddling with the suspension and adjusting
the rear spoiler until he transformedthe car into what he described.
The handling as being like a bigAmerican luxury car, you know, it
was perfectly stable and a reallycomfortable, and just gobbled up miles.
That's how he was readyto go and the race begins.
Ronnie Bucknam takes the leadin a, strangely enough, in
one of the marked two vs.

(44:20):
And he holds the lead for thefirst hour, but Gurney was behind
him and he thought that Ronnie wasdriving pretty hard to stay there.
Gurney takes the lead afterthe first hour and he and Foyt
lead for the next 23 hours.
At one point there were eightlaps ahead of the lead and all
the other fors run into trouble.
Mario Andretti famously crashesin the Ss. Both of the mark
twos get caught up in his crash.
So there are three for wreckedin like literally one minute.

(44:42):
Lloyd Ruby beaches, hismark four in the sand.
McLaren loses the body work on his markfour while he is on the mos on straight.
Then he has to go back around.
He has to go back out to findit loses a whole bunch of
time and he finished way back.
So while these guys were in the lead, theFerrari are the best of the rest, and the
Ferrari were really good, but they weren'tfast enough to catch Boyton Gurney.
So Ferrari realized their only hope ofwinning the race was to break the Ford.

(45:06):
Mike Parks in the P four was sent outto Harry Gurney into driving faster
than he wanted or ought to drive.
Parks got behind him and he startedduking back and forth and flashing
his brights, and then he wouldoutbreak him in the brake zone at
the moozon hairpin and a down yourarage, generally behaving like what?
Uh, gurney called a pain in the ass.
Gurney got tired of this and after acouple of laps when he got to Arage,

(45:27):
which is the slow right hander on thebackside of the circuit, he pulled off
the circuit and he parked the car andhe just sat there in a neutral with the
engine running and parks pulls off behindhim and the two cars are sitting there.
And to me that I think this isthe most surreal moment in the
history of automobile racing.
It's the middle of the 24 hours Oma.
And the cars running one, two are sittingon the side of the road, like Uber drivers

(45:49):
waiting for their fares to show up.
So I love that.
But Gurney was content to sit thereas long as parks wanted to sit there.
So after about 10 or 15 seconds,parks finally takes off.
Gurney takes off after them, andthe race proceeds to the finish.
They didn't run very hard thereafter they didn't have to.
They won by, I think, fourlaps, set a new record.
Foy took the last stint.
That picture at the beginning was, if yourecall, there was gurney sitting on the

(46:11):
hood as they went to the victory rostrum.
And here they are at the rostrum.
Where Gurney famously shakes uphis magnum of champagne, pops
the cork and sprays the crowd.
Supposedly, this is the first timeanyone had ever done this before,
and this started a tradition that forbetter or worse exists to this day.
This was the capstone of theof the Ford Factory effort.
About a week after this, Don Fry announcedthat Ford was getting out of Lamar racing.

(46:34):
Ford had actually prepared, they had plansfor the 68 season, but they shelved them.
They didn't wanna spend any more money.
What more could they do?
Shortly thereafter, the CSI, whichas I recall, was the predecessor
of the FIA or somehow, I don'tknow the exact relationship.
I'm sure Don knows they changedthe regulations and they
outlawed unlimited sized engine.
They did make a littlebit of a mistake there.
They created group four where they setthe engine limit at five liters and they

(46:56):
said the course had to be homologated.
Well, as it turns out, the GT forties,of which there were, you know, more than
a hundred out there, easy to homologatedand ran a small block, five liter motor,
two 80 nines, and also three oh twos.
So John Wire took GT forties and hegot himself some Gulf sponsorship
and he went to LAMA and won in 68and 69 with small block GT forties.

(47:16):
So Ford wins LAMA four years running.
This is the greatest American AchievementIvy League in international road racing.
Most of the Ford people, and Isuspect most people generally
think the 66 is the best victory.
Personally, I like the 67 win.
Genuinely all American car, allAmerican drivers, really competitive
race and tremendous performance.
So that was the end of the Ford program.
And again, first time really amainstream manufacturer had gone racing

(47:39):
and Ford set the bar pretty high.
To this day, I think everyone whogoes big time auto racing is tries
to match the achievements of Ford.
We're gonna open the floor to questionsif anybody has any questions, but I did
wanna mention a couple of names here.
First, Jim Vogel, who's the ownerof the GT 40, the Mark two, which is
the um, 66 winner, and he's here, andthat's his car over there in the lobby.
Bill Vanay, who pointed out before,who was here in 66, and also Calvin

(48:00):
Lane who was here somewhere, Ididn't see him, but he was there
at Lamont 64, saw the cars run.
So if you guys get a chance, you shouldchat with them a little later today.
Anybody has any questions, justlay 'em on me and I'll do my best.
Where is the Mark iv?
The Mark iv.
It's very interesting 'cause Ford didn'tunderstand, I think what they were doing
and they had no interest in their history.
The actual 66 winner ended up beingsold, but the Mark IV they knew

(48:23):
was a big deal and they kept that.
It's in the Henry Ford Museumin Dearborn to this day.
It's never run since 67.
And actually there was some damage intransport a couple years ago and it
was sent to all American racers andDan Gurney's team actually did the
restoration of the car, the minor point.
But
yes.
Uh, I worked in the, a division of3M in 1961, and at that time I was

(48:44):
led to understand that that was awell established aerial technology.
At that time, we were making the diesel.
Oh, really?
But we were making the,that's how I came across.
But that was a well establishedtechnology, lot of planes
in the air using technology.
Yeah.
I find it hard to believe that the.
Failed.
I mean, but I think this is interesting'cause this is the era when, again, where

(49:06):
aerospace technology is making its wayover to motorsports for the first time.
I mean, now we take all that stufffor granted, you know, this is when
it was really starting to happen.
Did FO defer to gurney?
I mean the car set up.
Yeah, absolutely.
Fo explicitly said, you know,whatever you wanna do is fine with me.
And I have to confess thatFloyd's one of the only people
that I was never able to talk to.

(49:28):
I've actually tried to talkto, I did a book on the SC.
Don mentioned a couple yearsago, and he wouldn't talk to
me about that book either.
I don't know, and I don't knowwhy I've talked to him about
other subjects, the road racingstuff he never would talk about.
I don't, I have no idea why, but yeah,I mean, he clearly understood he was the
junior partner in that team, but I, I justwanted to disabuse people with the idea
that fight was some neophyte out there.
I. I mean, you know, he was probably thegreatest driver in America at the time.

(49:49):
He had just won Indy liketwo weeks previously.
He had actually raced thescabs pretty successfully.
He rear engine scabs in 64.
So his problem was he'd never beento Lamar before, never raced at
night before, and he didn't get anypractice time because the windshields
which were made nearby in Corningkept breaking during practice.
So, uh, that was one of theproblems they had that year.
Question regarding the rivalrybetween Ford and Ferrari.

(50:10):
I really kicked around that there wasa point in time that Ferrari either
attempted to or canceled or raced.
It was supposed to occur inItaly in, uh, in an effort to
avoid being embarrassed by Ford.
Is there any any truth to that?
I believe I have to.
How they prevented the Cobra Daytona coupfrom winning the GT Championship in 64.
And I don't remember the details,but yeah, it was like some chicanery

(50:31):
that Enzo, uh, cooked up to makesure that they kept the championship.
The two 50 GTOI think won thechampionship and it was long in the
tooth by that point, but nothinglike that happened in Lamas stuff.
But there's only 'cause Ferraricouldn't come up with any solutions.
I guess he would've done itif he could've, he would've
been quarter about all.
Second question, how longwere these run on the circuit?

(50:55):
I remember one came in the, in my mind.
Was it?
Oh really?
I don't think so.
First, uh.
Uh, yeah, Henry's, uh, Italian wife,a very glamorous, supposedly she

(51:16):
placed a bed on Ferrari in 67, Ithink, or 66, but, uh, I don't know
how well that, that didn't go over toowell, apparently with the Ford guys.
I'm not sure how long theGT fours were raced for.
I mean, it was a, it was a long time,you know, again, you might wanna look,
the Ronnie Spain book is really well doneand, and there's several other books that
sort of deal with the private tier years.
I don't recall having anyhabitual, you know, systemic
problems with fires in those cars.

(51:37):
So maybe that was just a baddeal there in Mexico City.
Part of that is thesafety regulation change.
70, you've got to have certaintypes of, uh, protections in the
fuel tank, that type of thing.
Uh, there other, uh, issues that reallyby 70 71, they were, uh, technically
safety wise becoming obole upgrade.

(52:01):
You go out, buy anothercar because by then they.
I'm happy to answer more questions though.
You know, we go over there if you wannaask me anything informally, but if not,
I really appreciate you taking this time.
It was a pleasure for me to do this.
Thanks.

(52:26):
This episode is brought to youin part by the International
Motor Racing Research Center.
Its charter is to collect,share, and preserve the history
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The Center's collection embodiesthe speed, drama and camaraderie
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(52:51):
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(53:14):
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The SAH actively supports the compilationand preservation of papers, organizational
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(53:58):
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