by A. J. Baime
Death
At the kink near the White House, out of sight of the grandstands, the high-pitched wail of a Ferrari V12 clashed with the throatier bellow of a Cobra V8. The drivers were battling for position when the Cobra* blew a tire and clipped the Ferrari. Both drivers looked out their windshields and saw the world spinning. The shrill screech of burning rubber filled their ears. They wrestled with their cars, using all their tools—brake, clutch, steering wheel, gas. Sentience reached its absolute peak and both men were suddenly suspended in time.
“A wonderful thing happens,” Masten Gregory once said about losing control of a car. “Time slows down to a crawl, or else your mind runs like a computer, you know everything that’s going on, and you can just sit there and consider the alternatives that will get you out of it.” And when every attempt to regain control fails, there is always God. Bruce McLaren: “There’s nothing like that blank flash of despair when it dawns on you that you might be going to hit something hard and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. Except to get down in the cockpit and pray.”
The Cobra flipped and tumbled off the road, landing upside down in thick bushes in an area forbidden to spectators. The Ferrari spun wildly in a cloud of smoke and ended up in the grass. Pieces of the cars littered the pavement and the nearest flagmen waved yellow in the night. Track stewards and medical staff were alerted. Miraculously, both drivers pulled themselves out of their cars with only minor injuries. A man looked at the Cobra and saw something under it in the thick brush. Was it. . .? He looked closer.
There was a small body under the car.
A closer look: there was more than one body.
Police arrived along with reporters and medics. They found three young boys under the wrecked Cobra. The kids had sneaked under a nearby fence to get close to the track and they were watching under the cover of the bushes. None of them had any identification and all were pronounced dead.
Dawn
At 5:20 A.M., Phil Hill set a lap record. In the mist of a morning fog, he conquered the circuit in 3:49.2.* Minutes later he pulled the Ford into the pit with gearbox problems. The team of mechanics was exasperated, as was the crew of Ford executives. The Italianmade transmission was once again the culprit. Hill stepped out of the car, and as the early-dawn light illuminated his face, he stood there for a moment with his helmet in his hand. The sleepy crowd gave him a round of applause and he couldn’t help but smile.
The race was barely more than half over, and the Ford team was finished.
Shortly after Hill’s Ford retired, Surtees pulled his first-place 330 P into the pit. His car was limping also. He complained to the mechanics of a slipping clutch and the needle on the water temperature gauge was steadily rising. When the mechanics popped open the radiator cap, steam piped out. Surtees was exhausted and pissed off. First place slipped away. The technicians knew Ferrari would be angry, too; they’d hear it from him for sure when they got back to the factory.
“Why didn’t we find this out in our tests? We run these engines on the dynos all day long!”
“Ah,” they would reply, “but there’s something about going down that long straight at Le Mans that is different.”
By the time Surtees was in the car again, he was lying third. Ferraris held seven of the top eight places.
In fourth place, snarling along through the fog, was a Shelby American Cobra. In his pit, Shelby watched the cars roll by. The deeper into the race, the slower the hours seemed to pass. The crew signaled for Dan Gurney to bring the #5 Cobra in for repairs, fuel, and driver change. They were holding their breath. Gurney had slaughtered the GT lap record and was in first place in the GT class, but about an hour earlier, the car had started bleeding oil. The oil cooler had sprung a leak. Chief engineer Remington rigged a quick fix. Rules stated that a team could add oil only every twenty-five laps, so if the oil leak continued, the engine would seize and Shelby would have to pack it in. Gurney stepped out of the car and huddled with Shelby and driver Bob Bondurant.
“Brakes okay?” asked Bondurant.
“Yeah,” Gurney said, “but I wouldn’t trust ‘em.”
Shelby told Bondurant not to ride the engine too hard. “Watch your oil pressure,” he said. He gave the driver a shove and Bondurant was off.
Finish
The final hours stretched out in a blur of speed, smoke, and noise. The crowds grew restless and the mercury in thermometers spiked. As the Dutray clock ticked past 3:45 P.M., the order of placement was all but set and the drivers slowed to assure their finish. The first-place car was five laps ahead of the second-place car, which was seven laps ahead of the third. Spectators not used to this tradition found it odd: at the end of the world’s most brutal automobile race, the cars cruised slowly, no faster than they might on these public roads on any other day of the year. In the final minutes no driver would take the chance of blowing his engine or shredding a tire. Finishing was all that mattered now. The crowds leaned in, awaiting the moment when the checkered flag would wave and the champions would be crowned.
Just after 4:00 P.M., the red prototype Ferrari of Sicilian Nino Vaccarella and Frenchman Jean Guichet rolled over the finish line, winners of the 1964 24 Hours of Le Mans. Enzo Ferrari’s cars finished in five of the top six places. Surtees placed third in a wounded 330 P. In fourth place, winning the GT class, was a Shelby Cobra. None of the Ford prototypes finished. Phil Hill, Bruce McLaren—they were no more than spectators at the finish.
Fans and media flooded the pavement, swarming the winning car. Ferrari flags waved high. The winners stepped toward the podium and soon the Italian national anthem was playing over the loudspeakers. The Shelby crew gathered around the Cobra, which had a California license plate on the lower right side of its rear end. Stirling Moss was there with a Wide World of Sports camera crew to interview the drivers, Gurney and Bondurant.
“Congratulations Bob,” Moss said. “History I reckon has been made here today. How are you feeling, how much sleep did you get?”
“About five hours,” Bondurant said.
“How about you?” Moss said to Gurney.
“About three, I think.”
Up walked a skinny man in a distinctly Germanic hat. It was Huschke von Hanstein, competition manager of the Porsche team. He hugged Bondurant. “Thank you for beating them,” he said.
The Americans weren’t the only ones out to dethrone Enzo Ferrari.
A few yards away, Shelby stood, his curled bouffant looking a tad less than perfect. His team members crowded around, fists pumping toward the sky. Just two years had passed since Shelby first stepped foot in Iacocca’s office with the idea of building his own car. Nobody believed he’d ever beat the Corvettes. Nobody believed his cars would finish the 24-hour grind at Le Mans. Now the “Powered by Ford” Shelby Cobra had placed fourth at Le Mans and first in the GT class. Shelby’s Cobra was the Cassius Clay of motor racing, easy on the eyes and capable of the impossible. The reporters awaited comment from the Texan. He was always good for a quote.
“Fourth isn’t bad,” Shelby said. “Maybe America didn’t hammer any nails in Ferrari’s coffin this time. But we threw a scare into him. Next year we’ll have his hide.”
12
Aftermath: June–December 1964
ON MONDAY MORNING, the day after, the Ford team was summoned to the Hotel de Paris in downtown Le Mans. Tired men filed into the hotel smelling of grease and hangover. They found a Ford executive by the name of Leo Beebe waiting for them. He had a thin, bony face and the tall, gangly frame of a one-time high school basketball star. There was an air of sober intensity about him. He looked, in John Wyer’s opinion, “like an evangelist missionary.”
Most of the team recognized Beebe. He had stood mysteriously in the Ford pit in a suit and tie during the course of the race, arms folded, eyes taking it in, lips locked around a big cigar. If he had said a single word the whole 24 hours, few had heard it. The forty-six-year-old Ford executive was Henry Ford II’s eyes and ears.
> Beebe and Henry II had met during World War II. They’d served together in the Navy and had formed the kind of bond men do when in uniform during wartime. Beebe was no auto man. He was a high school sports coach. But Henry took him in and made him his top troubleshooter. Beebe had been with the company ever since, nearly twenty years now. “If he told me to jump out of that window, I’d do it, and think about it on the way down,” Beebe said of his boss. He’d never seen an automobile race before the day he was made chief executive in charge of all Ford racing—stock cars, Indy cars, sports cars, the works. Henry II needed a man in charge he could trust.
At Le Mans, team manager Wyer believed the cars had performed well on their debut.
Leo Beebe didn’t agree.
“I don’t know anything about racing,” Beebe prefaced his remarks. But you didn’t need an engineering degree to know that Henry II’s cars had lost. And it wasn’t a matter of an easy fix. Sure, the transmissions had blown. “You could lay it to a gearbox,” Beebe reasoned, “but if the gearbox didn’t work how can we know anything else would work?”
Henry II had spent a lot of money on these cars, and Beebe wanted a checkered flag as soon as possible. The next major international sports car race was the 12 Hours of Reims in the heart of France’s Champagne country. It was two weeks away—July Fourth weekend, no better time to wave the Stars and Stripes.
The racers were dumbfounded. That left the Ford Advanced Vehicles team no time to develop the car. They’d be throwing the car back into the heat of competition against the Ferraris before it was ready, before it had been properly tested and prepared. Besides, Reims was a brutal and dangerous race, run over 12 hours starting at the stroke of midnight on a road course with fast, undulating straights. For the racers, it didn’t add up. This was a matter of a marketing executive making racing decisions and overruling the engineers. But the argument was for naught. The evangelist minister had spoken.
Two weeks later, at 11:59 P.M. on July 4, the pits at Reims were lit up under the stars, the grandstands filled with racing fans passing around chilled bottles of Moët. Wyer had entered three cars, with Phil Hill heading up the team. The blast of thirty-seven engines igniting at precisely midnight sent every creature in the surrounding countryside ducking for cover.
By sunrise, halfway through the race, the Ford team was heading back to their hotel in town. All three cars had suffered mechanical failure. The Ferraris raced on, taking first, second, third, and fourth places.
On a rainy September morning, Enzo Ferrari climbed into his Fiat and his chauffeur Pepino steered north up Highway E35, windshield wipers scraping at the glass. Through the Po Valley, the silhouettes of tractors could be seen trudging through the fog in the fields. They passed the old cities of Parma and Piacenza to Monza, a small city bordering Milan. The date was September 5, 1964, the day before the Italian Grand Prix. Each year the Grand Prix at Monza united Italians behind Ferrari from Turin to Palermo, and each year the Pope of the North made his appearance in the pit the day before.
The very word—Monza—was a synonym for speed. The 3.6-mile Autodrome was one of the oldest purpose-built closed racing circuits in the world, completed in 1922 and further expanded through the years. Cynics used another moniker to describe Monza—The Death Circuit. It had claimed so many over the years: Giaccone, Sivocci, Zborowski, Materassi, Arcangeli, Compari, Borzacchini, Czaykowski, Ascari, Von Trips. With few exceptions, Ferrari had known all of these men. His pilgrimage here each September was in part to honor them.
In 1964, controversy heightened the anticipation leading up to the Grand Prix. Surtees was number one at Ferrari, and number two was Lorenzo Bandini, a twenty-eight-year-old who was Monza’s hometown hero. Bandini had gotten his start working in a garage just a few miles from the Autodrome, in Milan. Team manager Eugenio Dragoni was also from Milan. It was no secret that Dragoni favored Bandini. He decried Surtees while praising Bandini to the boss. The Ferrari champion should be an Italian, Dragoni argued, and Bandini was fast. As much as Italians adored Surtees, he was not one of them by blood.
Politics played a major role in determining the outcome of races. Cars were like athletes—no two the same, each responding differently to the elements. The man given the fastest car had an obvious advantage, and Dragoni sought to put Bandini in the better ride. As Surtees continued his campaign to become the first Grand Prix champion on two wheels and four, he found himself pitted against his teammate late in the season and criticized in the papers by his own team manager.
“Any right-thinking Italian should be able to see,” Dragoni had told reporters, “that in Bandini, Italy has a true World Champion.” Surtees would later come to believe that Ferrari himself was planting negative stories in the papers, stirring up the controversy.
By the time Ferrari arrived back in Modena from Monza that evening, in his Fiat with Pepino at the wheel, Surtees had won the pole.
When the phone rang at the factory postrace the next day, Dragoni’s voice came through over the wire. Bandini had placed third and Surtees had won in record speed. At the Autodrome, mobs lifted their hometown hero onto their shoulders so Bandini floated atop the surging tide. Surtees marched toward the podium parting the crowds, his goggles up on his white helmet, his face stained with soot. He was so focused, he barely registered a smile, even as the crowd chanted Il Grande John.
Back in Dearborn.
“What does Ferrari have that we don’t?” asked Leo Beebe.
“I can tell you in a word,” John Wyer answered. “Ferrari. One man who knows his mind instead of a committee.”
“General Motors is run by the committee system,” Beebe said, “and they are fairly successful.”
“Yes,” Wyer snapped. “But how many races have they won?”
Wyer wasn’t making any friends. He was sitting with Ford’s Special Vehicles Committee in an office meeting room. The place smelled like antiseptic floor cleaner, what company employees called “that Ford smell.” The committee included Roy Lunn and Don Frey, among others. As far as Wyer was concerned, he was the committee. The fifty-four-year-old had spent his entire life in racing in Europe. He was Mr. Aston Martin, a Le Mans champion team manager. If the suits would lay off, he’d turn their car into a winner.
Thus far Ford had entered GT40s in three races. Not a single one had reached a finish line. Three cars had been destroyed; two that crashed in test sessions and the one that had caught fire at Le Mans. The only bright spot was Shelby’s success with the Cobras in the GT class. Beebe wanted decisions made and he wanted them made in Dearborn, not in England, where Wyer was based.
The committee had come up with a radical idea. In its arsenal, Ford Motor Company had a 427-cubic-inch engine. The huge engine was dominating NASCAR, starting from its first appearance, a win in Tiny Lund’s Ford at the 1963 Daytona 500, the first race after Henry II had pulled out of Detroit’s Safety Resolution. In terms of displacement, the 427 was more than twice the size of the engine in the Ferrari Surtees had raced at Reims. Enzo Ferrari was surely building an even faster prototype Le Mans car for 1965, and Ford’s 427 was “a way to solve the problem with a sledgehammer,” as Lunn put it. In stock car trim the engine could produce almost 500 horsepower.
Wyer shook his head furiously. The idea was ludicrous, he said. The Ford Le Mans car didn’t need a bigger engine; it needed durability. Besides, no one had ever shoved an engine that big in the back of such a lightweight sports car. Europe was the domain of small, sophisticated engines. It would never work.
“More power is always welcome,” Wyer said, his voice tinged with exasperation, “but not at the expense of development and durability. I understand the 427 engine weighs 600 pounds. This would result in a car weighing 3,000 pounds. For practical purposes it would be a new car. We’d be putting back the clock exactly 12 months and running the risk of going to Le Mans again with a car that was untested and untried.”
It was a daring idea. Putting all the 427’s torque and power to the pavement
in such a lightweight vehicle would require incredibly durable components. No braking system on earth could slow down 3,000 speeding pounds. There was fuel consumption to think about. And there was the transmission. If the transmission couldn’t hold together under the stress of 350 horsepower, was an additional 100-plus-horsepower engine going to help?
If all these problems could be solved, however, Ford would have a 225-mph racing car.
Dinner that night at the Dearborn Country Club spilled into another office meeting the next day, during which the committee made its decisions. Roy Lunn was to return to Dearborn from England and set up a new shop to build an experimental next-generation Le Mans car. The Ford might have been a lightweight European sports racing car, but it was going to have a huge pushrod power plant, a big fat Detroit NASCAR engine. Wyer had his own marching orders. He returned to England and began to prepare two of the existing Fords for the Nassau Speed Week in the Bahamas in early December. It was a minor race, without serious contention from Ferrari. Surely the team could bring Henry II a victory.
Wyer’s face looked especially grim as he stood on the wharf in Nassau three months later, watching as two cars were wheeled off a cargo ship. They were late. While loading onto a plane in London one car was shoved into a pallet, resulting in front-end damage. To get to the Bahamas, the flight made stops in Montreal, then New York, and en route to Miami, the pilot received a message that there was a bomb onboard. The plane made an unexpected stop in Savannah, Georgia.
If the trip was a fiasco, the event itself was worse. Both Phil Hill and Bruce McLaren suffered mechanical failures. In the pit, Leo Beebe stood watching under the beating Caribbean sun. He’d made the trip from Dearborn, and he’d seen enough. At the end of the affair he called a meeting in a local hotel. He stared down Wyer and the technicians.
