by A. J. Baime
Though his name was not mentioned during this meeting, there was one man everyone present knew would have to be brought into the fold. No one at Ford had ever built a sports car that could beat the Chevrolet Corvette at the track, let alone a Ferrari. There was only one man in America who had the knowledge and experience to build and develop a winner. He wasn’t exactly the corporate type.
By the summer of 1963, Carroll Shelby’s company was on sound footing, its tiny assembly line churning out hand-built “Powered by Ford” Cobras. Shelby’s list of customers included Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Cosby, Vic Damone, James Garner, and the “King of Cool” Steve McQueen. The Cobra had captured the imagination of a new breed of speed enthusiast. There was even a Top 40 hit blasting over the radio waves about Shelby’s car, “Hey Little Cobra,” recorded by the Rip Chords.
Like Ferrari, Shelby had created a business model that depended on winning races. If the cars didn’t win, the cars wouldn’t sell. His company lived and died on the track. That summer, in Sports Car Club of America competition, the Cobras were winning everything. Shelby had all the reporters in his pocket. Los Angeles alone had four dailies, the Times and the Daily News in the morning, and the Mirror and the Herald-Examiner in the afternoon. The words “Carroll Shelby” were thumping out of those journos’ typewriters one after the other.
Around the corner from his facility at 1042 Princeton Drive, Shelby had added another shop on Carter Street. His men were no-names in the world of international racing, and yet, they were a font of unearthed talent. Chief engineer was Phil Remington, a forty-two-year-old who was working at the Princeton Drive shop for the previous owner and kind of came with the place when Shelby rented it. Remington was a mastermind with no college degree or any formal training, who’d been building speed machines since the early days of hot-rodding on dry lake beds northeast of Los Angeles. Competition manager was Ken Miles, a World War II tank commander from England. At forty-five, Miles was four years older than Shelby, a sharp-tongued engineer who’d earned a reputation as the best 1.5-liter-class racer in California and perhaps anywhere.
Recently, Shelby had hired his own photographer so he could supply shots to the papers and magazines. Dave Friedman’s darkroom at the Carter Street shop was actually an old toilet and smelled like one. Shelby loved to look over Friedman’s shoulder watching blank sheets of paper sit in the pools of chemicals. Slowly an image came into focus: cars being fabricated, cars at speed.
Shelby knew he had to take the Cobra overseas, where the Ferrari was king of the road. There was opportunity in Europe for a renegade American car manufacturer. Shelby knew as well as anyone the significance of victory at Le Mans. For men who built cars, it was the biggest stage in the world. The last time anyone beat Ferrari, the year was 1959 and Shelby was at the wheel of an Aston Martin. He became the second American after Phil Hill to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. During the entire race he wore a pair of chicken-farmer overalls.
Throughout Shelby’s years with Aston Martin in the late 1950s, he had developed a distaste for Enzo Ferrari. More than once Ferrari had offered Shelby a contract. And each time the Texan had turned it down. Perhaps he had a sense that signing that paper would be like making a pact with the devil. Yes, Ferrari’s cars were the greatest. But Shelby saw the men on Ferrari’s team die one after another in 1957–1958. He believed Il Commendatore was responsible.
“That son of a bitch killed my friend Musso,” Shelby said about the Roman pilot Luigi Musso, who died in a Dino at the French Grand Prix. “And he killed others too.”
In the spring of 1963, Shelby organized a press conference. When he called a meeting, everyone showed up. He stood before reporters and photographers, stared right into the eye of a television camera, and announced that he was forming a new team to take on Europe. The Texan was gunning for the Monster of Maranello. There was something between Shelby and Enzo Ferrari, Shelby’s girlfriend Joan later said. “It went way back into Shelby’s early racing career, and it was very personal.” And so the first major factory-backed American campaign to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans would be two-pronged. Shelby had filed paperwork to homologate his Cobra to race in the GT class against the Ferrari GTOs, while Ford would build a prototype to try to win Le Mans outright.
“Next year,” Shelby announced, “Ferrari’s ass is mine.”
8
Il Grande John: Italy, Spring 1963–1964
The highlight of my career was the moment that sparked it all, at 17, winning a relatively unimportant road race in Wales riding a Vincent which I largely built myself. It was the first time I felt man and machine came together. I’ll never forget the vibe I felt knowing I was part of the bike. It flowed . . . I was flying . . . That was the day the future was born.
—John Surtees
ON A WINTER MORNING early in 1964, Enzo Ferrari emerged from his new home at 11 Largo Garibaldi in Modena. A purring Fiat 1100 was waiting, with a loyal chauffeur named Pepino at the wheel. At sixty-six, after so many years of success and tribulation, Ferrari was finally enjoying a little personal wealth. His new home—around the corner from the Orsis’ manse, owners of Maserati—was immense. There was more than enough room for Ferrari and his wife, and his mother, Mama Adalgisa.
Ferrari stepped into the car. He preferred to be driven now, though the Fiat remained his transportation of choice. “What’s so surprising about that?” Ferrari said. “You’re just as likely to see [Fiat scion] Giovanni Agnelli driving a Ferrari.” He had been given an honorary doctorate in mechanical engineering by the University of Bologna and now preferred to be addressed as Ingegnere rather than Commendatore. Or simply, Ferrari. Otherwise, his routine hadn’t changed. Pepino delivered his boss to Antonio D’Elia’s barbershop, where gossip was exchanged. Quei Canarini non possono segnare uno scopo! Then it was off to Dino’s tomb. After that he headed to the factory.
In 1964, the world of speed and sports cars had gone mainstream and global, and competition for customers was extraordinary. Porsche had just debuted the inimitable 911, and Jaguar’s E-type, the most phallic car ever to roll down a road, was a hit. That spring Ferruccio Lamborghini unveiled his first customer car: the $13,900 Lamborghini 350 GT. It was an exceptional debut with a high-revving 12-cylinder engine. Still, no car inspired the kind of awe that Ferrari’s two new 1964 models did.
The 275 GTB was deemed “the Sophia Loren of supercars,” impossibly elegant and yet built for speed. The new 500 Superfast was the top-of-the-line Ferrari—a $29,300 customer car that could top 170 mph. Only thirty-six Superfasts were made. The New York Times: “Just to sit in one feels a bit dangerous.” Peter Sellers purchased a 500 Superfast. The Shah of Iran bought two. As Roberto Rossellini put it: “There is no finer thrill in the world than driving a Ferrari flat out.”
Ferrari had become arguably the most famous man in Italy after the Pope. Indeed, he was sometimes referred to as The Pope of the North, and his Vatican City was Modena, “a noisy nirvana of automobiles,” as one writer called the place. That he was a visionary and a genius was indisputable, and he knew it. Some 40 percent of his cars were purchased in North America, where clients now included the Dupont and Dulles families, New Yorks Governor Nelson Rockefeller, James Stewart, William Holden, Steve McQueen,* and Hollywood film director John Frankenheimer.
Phil Hill had faded from the Italian scene. Following the death of his teammate Von Trips, Hill faced disappointment at every turn. During the 1962 season, the team’s new manager Eugenio Dragoni complained over and over to the boss. Ferrari received phone calls from Dragoni in postrace reports from racetracks all over the continent.
“Sè, sè . . . sè, sè. Ma il tuo grande campione non ha fatto niente.” Your great champion didn’t do a thing.
Hill had little choice. He left the team. Even as a champion, he had never enjoyed Enzo Ferrari’s favor. “I wasn’t sorry to leave,” Hill later said in an interview with a reporter. “Enzo Ferrari never understood me . . . He always favored the man who would take that extr
a risk in a live-or-die situation. I wasn’t willing to die for Enzo Ferrari. I wasn’t willing to become one of his sacrifices.”
Italy had embraced the new pilot at Ferrari. From the beginning, his presence shook things up in a way no other Ferrari contract driver ever had. A thirty-year-old Englishman, his name was John Surtees. The fans called him Il Grande John. He had thinning dark blond hair, pale English skin, and a body so thin his clothes draped over him as if on a hanger. Tucked behind a striking nose, he had movie-star blue eyes. Surtees would never forget the day he met Enzo Ferrari. “It was a curious feeling as I walked through the door of Ferrari’s office that morning, as if I was stepping into another world,” he later recalled. “It seemed as though everybody was going about their jobs with a reverential earnestness which was almost unnatural. I was experiencing for the first time the unique magnetism of Ferrari.”
The first meeting took place at the cramped old scuderia office. Ferrari eyed the young driver from his chair behind his desk. He knew he was staring at a question mark. Surtees was a motorcycling World Champion. Only recently had he added two more wheels to his repertoire. He had but one full season of races under his belt in cars. But Ferrari saw something in him, a bottled-up fury that reminded many of “The Flying Mantuan” Tazio Nuvolari. Surtees was pure aggression. Ferrari bypassed the pleasantries.
“I would like you to drive for us next year,” he told Surtees. “Formula 1, sports cars, and anything else we might decide to race. Here’s the contract.”
Surtees faced one of the most difficult decisions of his life. He turned down the contract so he could gain more experience. The offer came again a year later. Ferrari was at the time rebuilding his team, with new engineering talent in the form of a local Modenese named Mauro Forghieri and a new team manager from Milan named Dragoni. With Hill gone, Ferrari needed a driver to anchor the team and Surtees signed on.
Surtees was born in 1934, the son of a talented motorcycle racer. He spent much of his youth in his father’s motorcycle shop in a rural village south of London. During World War II, Surtees’s father trained dispatch riders for the British army. These men would carry messages by motorcycle from the officers to the soldiers on the front lines. It was deadly work, and the faster and more skilled these riders were, the better chance they had at staying alive. The war robbed Surtees Sr. of his racing prime, something his son would never forget.
At fifteen, Surtees left school and took on an apprenticeship at the Vincent motorcycle factory in Stevenage. The entire family—mother, father, and three kids—led a nomadic existence on weekends, caravanning from one race to the next all over Great Britain. Money was always tight. John and his father raced Nortons and Vincents. Mother’s official job titles were “chief mechanic” and “caterer.”
When he was twenty-two, Surtees was hired by Count Domenico Agusta to race MV Agusta motorcycles, which was based outside Milan. By age twenty-six, Surtees had won seven Grand Prix World Championships for Count Agusta (four in the 500-cc class and three in the 350-cc class). Though an Englishman, he’d become a national hero in Italy. The Italians grew accustomed to seeing the young champion of speed in their sporting pages, his body coated neck to toe in skintight black leather, straddling his machine. During the season, he lived for much of the time out of hotels in Italy, and he began to pick up the language by watching spaghetti westerns at the cinema. He learned to eat Italian, to think Italian. He was blazing a path. For centuries, the British had come to Italy to be enchanted. Surtees came to become the fastest man on two wheels in the world.
He had never seen a racing car up close the day he stepped in one and motored onto the track at Goodwood in England. Six months later, he appeared at his first Formula One race, driving a Lotus. In his third Grand Prix he won the pole in Portugal. The press made no bones: Surtees’s ability to compete on four wheels instantly was unprecedented, miraculous. “He doesn’t seem to know the meaning of fear,” said manager of the Vanwall team David Yorke, who gave Surtees a tryout. “And yet at the same time he isn’t reckless either.”
In spirit, Surtees belonged in Italy. When he joined the Ferrari team before the 1963 season, some didn’t take to him. He was inexperienced on four wheels, and yet, he was so fast he bruised many an ego. Unlike the prototypical Ferrari driver, he didn’t come from money. He was a gritty working-class bloke with icy blue eyes and a blazing temper, the first of a new breed of racing’s angry young men.
Surtees debuted with the Ferrari factory team at the 1963 12 Hours of Sebring, winning the race. “Boy, if Horatio Alger could only have seen John Surtees hurling a Ferrari down the road,” commented Car and Driver. His contract didn’t pay him much. He had a retainer and earned a percentage of prize money. It added up to a decent wage. But in Italy, with its anemic lire, the living was good.
Ferrari sold Surtees a gray 330 GT at a discount, which had enough room in it for his racing kit and luggage. He roomed at the Hotel Reale, where the bar was still haunted by Mike Hawthorn, who before his death held court nightly there, drinking cherry brandy and smoking Senior Service cigarettes. A night at the hotel cost two thousand lire, barely more than one English pound. At the Tucano, Surtees could fill a table with all the classic Modenese dishes for the equivalent of fifty pence. He traveled the world with his wife Pat, who kept his lap charts, from Monte Carlo to Florida to South Africa.
From the beginning, and unlike Phil Hill, Surtees had an excellent rapport with Ferrari. The two were seen lunching frequently in town. Racing gossip could chew up the afternoon hours. The Englishman’s spot on the team was an experiment that Ferrari set in motion. Surtees was trying to become the first man ever to win World Championships on two wheels and four. He was game, and the fans were riveted.
On the tail of his first season with Ferrari, Surtees went west on an expedition to America, in the fall of 1963. He competed in a new Ferrari Le Mans-type sports car called the “P car” (for prototype) at Mosport in Canada and Riverside in California. He returned to Italy with insight into the American scene. There was a blossoming world of sports cars in the United States. Some sharp young engineers were building experimental lightweight cars, European in style, but with the American way of thinking: the big engine. Guys like Carroll Shelby and his Cobra, and a Texan named Jim Hall and his Chaparral.
“We cannot compete with the big engines being used in America,” Surtees warned Ferrari. Surtees also feared that the team was not evolving fast enough. There was a time, in the very recent past, when Italy was the center of innovation. Ferrari, Maserati, and Lancia: the legendary marques competed against each other, but also copied each other’s best ideas. Now, with Ferrari’s exception, those factory-backed racing teams had ceased to exist, due to the wobbly lire and the bloodshed. The best ideas were now coming from the fiercely competitive young teams of England. And who knew what kind of threat those big American engines might pose someday?
In Italy, there was only Ferrari, and the old man had his old way of doing things. Surtees could see a time in the future when the competition would overwhelm Ferrari like a gigantic wave of fast-moving metal.
“Look,” Surtees told Ferrari upon his return from America, “we are in a desert here.” He paused. “We are all alone.”
They had to innovate, think young and fast. They had to become something new, or else.
One day early in the spring of 1964, Ferrari’s chauffeur drove him to the Modena Autodrome to observe a shakedown of the new prototype Le Mans car. As the Fiat pulled into the parking lot, Ferrari saw the small crowd gathered in the pit area. He stepped out of the Fiat and heard the wail of the racing car’s V12 engine. From the pit Ferrari watched Surtees navigate the circuit.
The 1964 Ferrari 330 P was an update of the prototype sports car that’d conquered Le Mans the year before. The engine was mounted behind the cockpit. The four-liter V12 with six twin-choke Weber carburetors delivered roughly 370 horsepower in dyno tests, extreme power for a car that weighed 1,665 pounds with a full
tank. At the wheel, Surtees’s spine soaked up the engine’s throb. To create this machine, Ferrari had wrung every drop of imagination from some of the greatest mechanical minds in Italy. He once described the process of building such a car:
In the first act of his labor, the maker conceives what his creature is to be: he dreams of it and sees it in detail, and he lays down the plan of work which he entrusts to a band of helpers who share his passion. A racing car, in fact, does not necessarily come into being as the creation of a superior mind, but is always the compendium of the common unflagging and enthralling work of a team of men fired by a common enthusiasm. There follows its construction, which must nearly always be done in record time, although it never takes less than six to eight months of feverish work. The next stage is the assembly of the car and its testing, which is the most delicate, the most engrossing and the most dramatic phase. . .
This dramatic phase had begun. It was a typical session at the Autodrome that day, with the exception of Ferrari’s appearance, a rare occasion. The day’s work involved long and—ideally—uneventful hours at the track. It was all trial and error and it required patience. Cars were far less durable and way more idiosyncratic than they are today.
The 330 P was still in its infancy, and the work was dangerous. But the car was performing beautifully. Precise steering. A massive reservoir of power. Every part had been subjected to crack tests under ultraviolet light. Machinists had studied the gear teeth under a microscope for defects. Even the bolts were heat-treated. Surtees lapped for a while then brought the car into the pit to discuss his impressions with the technicians. The computer equipment that would soon revolutionize racing-car development had not yet arrived. Surtees was the computer. Gripping the wheel he flew around the circuit, using all five senses to examine the car’s behavior.
