by A. J. Baime
Beebe began with a familiar refrain: “I don’t know anything about racing.” Then he added, “But there is one thing that has become increasingly apparent to me in the past few months. You don’t either!”
He needed to make a change. When Beebe got back to Dearborn, he placed a call to Los Angeles. He took Ford’s prototype Le Mans racing campaign away from Wyer and put it in the hands of Carroll Shelby.
When the first Ford GT40 arrived at the Shelby American shop, via air freight to Los Angeles International Airport, employees gathered outside to take a look. It was a cold, drizzly day in mid-December 1964. The car was not what anyone expected. It was banged up and filthy, hardly the historically expensive, state-of-the-art racing machine it was billed to be.
Shelby walked onto the wet pavement outside his shop and stared down at the car. Racing Cobras was one thing; they were his machines, with his name on them. This car had Henry II’s name on it alone. Shelby’s first race with the Ford would be the Daytona Continental 2,000 Kilometers. He knew with a glance at the Ford that he and his team were going to have to work around the clock. Daytona was eight weeks away. The whole racing world would be watching to see if Shelby’s band of hot-rodders were the real thing.
Shelby never claimed to be a technical genius. His strategy was to surround himself with talent and to inspire his men to achieve beyond what they believed they could. He had his chief engineer Phil Remington, the most underrated technician anywhere in the world, Shelby would argue. Next he needed a project manager.
“You want ‘em?” he said to Carroll Smith, an ex-driver and Goodyear tire engineer who worked at the Venice shop.
“What do you mean?” Smith answered.
“Do you want to be the team manager for our GT40s?”
“Shit!” Smith said. “Well yes I do, but I’ve already agreed to work for John Wyer.”
Shelby said, “John has released you.”
The most responsibility would land in the hands of the development driver, the engineer and pilot who would live with the car 24/7, on the track and in the shop. Shelby put his competition manager Ken Miles on the job.
Before the team did anything, they gave the car a complete steam cleaning. Then they craned out the engine and swapped in their own Shelby-prepared Ford 289. They gave the car a new coat of paint: Shelby American colors, guardsman blue with two white racing stripes down the nose, roof, and deck. The racing stripes looked sharp but they also had a function. They enabled engineers to better judge the behavior of the car in turns. Once the paint was dry, the team loaded the car onto a trailer and drove 70 miles inland.
At Riverside International Raceway, Ken Miles was waiting. A tall, taught-muscled Englishman, he was wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt, black wraparound shades, a filthy pair of chinos, white socks, and tennis shoes. He had a short crop of brown hair and a large nose that had been remodeled by a broken bottle during a tavern brawl in his teen years. He watched as the crew rolled the Ford off the trailer. They opened up the engine compartment. Miles leaned up against the right rear wheel with both hands so the grooves in the Goodyear dug into his palms. He gazed down at the Ford V8, its carburetors and its tangle of exhaust pipes. His son Peter, fourteen, stood next to him looking through an open door into the cockpit.
Miles was forty-six, older than most of the young bloods at Shelby American. His job was to take raw cars and turn them into racing machines. Many who knew Miles thought he was a sarcastic bastard. Carroll Shelby knew Miles was a genius.
On that December day, Miles slid on his helmet and goggles, climbed into the Ford, and took to the track. A handful of Shelby American employees, including new team manager Carroll Smith and chief engineer Phil Remington, watched as Miles threw the car around the circuit. The drive didn’t last long. He pulled back into the pit and stepped out. Everyone waited to hear his impressions. He shook his head and said, “It’s bloody awful.”
At the end of the 1964 season, the whole sporting world turned its eyes to Mexico City. The Mexican Grand Prix was the final Formula One race of the year and three drivers had the title in their sights. All Surtees had to do was place second or better. Fought on bumpy pavement at seven thousand feet—the elevation wreaking havoc on his fuel-injection system—Surtees was in third when he entered his last lap. He passed his teammate Lorenzo Bandini and crossed the finish line in second, becoming the first man ever crowned World Champion on two wheels and four.
He had never shaken so many hands, he recalled. There was Prince Philip of Engl and, and the president of Mexico, who presented him with a gold Longines watch. When Surtees arrived back in Italy, there was a formal banquet awaiting. Eventually the time came to celebrate the Italian way. They would sit down and eat.
Across from the gate of the Ferrari factory, a small inn called Il Cavallino stood on the Via Abetone. Ferrari owned the place. He’d opened it for his lunches, for there was little else in Maranello. One afternoon after the 1964 racing season, Ferrari arrived with his lieutenant Gozzi and Surtees. Ferrari desired an aperitivo and instantly his favorite drinks appeared: Formula 1, Formula 2, and Formula 3 cocktails, each one more watered down than the next.
“Formula 1 is for hard men only,” Ferrari warned.
Surtees picked up a Formula 3. This sent the old man into hysterics.
Six female students were visiting the factory that day and Ferrari invited them to the table. His affection for women was no secret. A waiter popped the corks from two bottles of Tocai and then the dining room filled with the aroma of traditional Modenese fare.
At the table, Ferrari showered Surtees in affection. While praising the local delicacies, he slipped his fork into a bite and fed it to Surtees while the girls and Gozzi looked on. No one had ever seen Ferrari pull one of his drivers so close. A confidant once described the old man’s temperament as “closed, like a walnut.” And yet here he was, fawning over the English pilota publicly.
After lunch, Surtees and Ferrari left the group behind and strolled together into the racing shop. The driver climbed into a Formula One car and wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel. When he looked over his shoulder, Ferrari was standing there on the red tile floor looking down at him, smiling like a father who’d just given his son a new bicycle.
Surtees was the prince of a strange kingdom. Ferrari had created a Shakespearean world where intrigue was always brewing and men sometimes paid for mistakes with their lives. All season long the tension had nagged Surtees, poked at his explosive temper. The clashing with team manager Dragoni, the challenge of number two Bandini. Who knew what role Ferrari himself was playing in it all. As Surtees looked at Ferrari’s smiling face that day in the racing department, he must’ve wondered what the old man was thinking. Ferrari wrote in his memoirs: “The facial expression, smile or frown or whatever it might be, is merely a form of defense and should be taken only as such.” Was Ferrari’s affection genuine? Was he in tune with Dragoni’s machinations? Was he in fact behind them himself?
Sitting in the red car, Surtees turned his face forward and saw the steering wheel in his hands. Ahead of him lay 1965.
PART III
SPEED RISING
13
Henry II, Shelby, and Daytona: January–February 1965
Grand Prix racing has hundreds of men and girls of all ages who follow the cars and drivers everywhere and who worship openly at the shrine. Drivers see a romantic, reflected image of themselves in the eyes of these people. There is awe and the most naked kind of admiration there. As he settles into his cramped machine, revving the engine up and down, tense, eyes glued on the starters’ flag, the crowd gulping with excitement—at such a moment a driver feels himself a god. What is danger next to that?
—ROBERT DALEY, The Cruel Sport
BY 1965, AMERICA WAS fully in the throes of a speed revolution. The baby boomers had gotten their driver’s licenses and the roads were thick with pimple-faced pilots, enjoying for the first time the seductive freedom of the highway.
The avatar of manhood was the racing driver, the ultimate figure of bravado and virility. Heretofore a hero exclusively among the cult of motor-sport enthusiasts, this athlete’s fame went mainstream. For the first time, races were being aired on television with some frequency. The revolution was being televised.* Spectacular crashes, the thrill of the chase—cameras mainlined speed into the nation’s living rooms.
Fifty million went to see car races in 1964, more than double the number that saw pro baseball games, putting the sport second only to horse racing in spectator popularity. In Hollywood, four major motion pictures were in the works with top actors portraying death-defying racers—James Garner, James Caan, Tony Curtis, Steve McQueen. “The sudden outpouring of automotive features reflects a curious car-mania that has overtaken the film colony,” the New York Times reported in 1965, noting the country’s “rampant automania.” In the Bonneville Salt Flats, Craig Breedlove was busting the land speed record in his jet-powered car Spirit of America, busting 600 mph in 1965.
All this served to tighten the strings that tied sport to industry. The iconography of racing drivers spurred the sale of fast cars, and fast cars heightened the popularity of racing. “Never before has a romance between man and machine blazed so strongly,” wrote a Los Angeles Times columnist.
In Dearborn, Ford executives were riding the wave. Three years after Henry II had pulled out of the Safety Resolution, he could stand up at the stockholders meeting and make the announcement: “The company is now enjoying the most successful operations in its long history.” He reported all-time-record sales ($9.67 billion worldwide over twelve months), all-time-record profit ($505.6 million worldwide), all-time-record employment (336,841 workers). The Mustang was on its way to becoming the best-selling car launch of all time. Iacocca already had his friend Shelby working on a racing version of the Mustang. (“Can you do it?” he’d asked Shelby. “I don’t know,” came the answer. “It’s a secretary’s car.”) In newspapers all over the country, readers saw Ford ads with the company’s Le Mans racing car (“The Ultimate Total Performance car”) next to a Mustang (“The car it inspired”).
On January 15, 1965, Henry II announced the promotion of Iacocca to vice president in charge of Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury cars and trucks. Iacocca packed his things and moved from Ford division headquarters on Michigan Avenue to the Glass House. The memory of his first job at Ford Motor Company was still fresh in Iacocca’s memory. Now he was one of the most powerful men in Detroit.
Henry II installed Don Frey as top man of the Ford division. Frey never dreamed he’d make a paycheck of more than $100,000 a year. He’d always been the behind-the-scenes brain. Now reporters were coming to see him. He leaned back in his swivel chair and placed his feet on his desk next to a picture of his six kids.
“Six potential car buyers,” he quipped. “It’s a big, booming, glorious, red rosy market.”
Henry II was making his own news. His lawyer issued a statement: “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II have decided upon a legal separation.” From that moment, the Italian mistress of America’s most famous industrialist began to appear in newspapers and magazines seemingly for no reason, as no one would print that she was romantically linked to Henry II and his hundreds of millions. It wouldn’t be proper, as they weren’t yet married. No self-respecting journalist would print something that invaded a public figure’s private life. Cristina Vettore Austin was photographed by Richard Avedon for a two-page spread in Harper’s Bazaar, headlined “An Eclectic Beauty.”
On February 19, 1965, Henry II married his Bambina at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. Immediately after, the couple caught Pan Am flight 100 to London. Their honeymoon, in Europe naturally, swept through St. Moritz to the French Riviera to Rome. Back in Dearborn, Henry II’s old wife moved out of their Grosse Pointe mansion and his Italian wife moved in. Her exotic style, her very foreignness, made her the toast of Motor City instantly. To Henry II’s chagrin, American cars were not her thing.
“Henry, look at that beautiful Mustang,” she said one day.
“That is a Chevrolet,” he answered. “I told you ten times, it’s a Chevrolet.”
Rebellion, sex, risk—Henry II’s new persona embodied the spirit of the new Ford Motor Company. His wife symbolized his commitment to Europe and to change. One day in the not-so-distant future he’d take Cristina on another trip to Europe—to Le Mans, where, he believed, a Ford racing car (not a Chevrolet!) was going to make history.
Carroll Shelby dug his fingers into his thighs. He was sitting in the back of a small private plane with a couple of Ford executives. The engine buzzed like a gnat. At the helm, a Shelby engineer was piloting the plane onto a straightaway at Riverside International Raceway. The straight was a slightly downhill strip of pavement with a bridge at the end. As the bridge approached, the ground seemed to get farther away because of the gradient. The bridge kept getting closer and Shelby was getting nervous. He was himself a pilot, and he sensed they were headed for trouble.
Were they going to fly over the bridge or under it?
The pilot forced the plane down and it bounced back up into the air. By the time Shelby’s feet touched pavement, he was ready to get on his knees and kiss the ground.
It was January 27, 1965, a Wednesday. Ford Motor Company was holding a press conference at Riverside to unveil the season’s new machinery. Don Frey was there, as was Leo Beebe, and Shelby’s presence always assured a good turnout. The gathering of reporters and photographers stood trackside as Beebe took to the podium and announced that Shelby American would be building and racing all of Ford’s competition sports cars.
“We are taking this move to consolidate the construction and racing of all our GT-type vehicles within the same specialist organization,” Beebe said.
Drivers paraded the new cars down a straightaway, cars that Ford would be racing and that, for the most part, customers could buy. First came the street version of the new Mustang GT350 built by Shelby ($4,547), hopped up with a Ford 289-cubic-inch engine, a four-barrel Holley carburetor, and a host of weight-reducing, performance-enhancing modifications. In all-out racing trim, the new Shelby Mustang went for $6,000. Then came the new Cobra with a 427-cubic-inch engine. Street version: $7,000, well more than a Jaguar XKE and nearly the cost of a Mercedes-Benz 230 SL. The racing Cobra cost as much as $9,000. For Ford-branded cars, these were incredibly expensive automobiles. Still, no one could imagine they’d fetch hundreds of thousands—if not millions—on the vintage car market in forty years time.
Finally, the crowd got a first look at the Ford GT40 in Shelby American colors, America’s Ferrari fighter. It was not for sale, nor could anyone put an accurate figure on how much it had cost to build. For 1965, Beebe said, the GT40 would see action at a host of American and European races. The focus would be the big three: the Daytona Continental 2,000 Kilometers in February, the 12 Hours of Sebring in March, and Le Mans in June.
After the drive-by, the whole gaggle headed to the nearby Mission Inn for a schmooze-fest. The GT40s were trailered back to the City of Angels, to a new Shelby American plant, where Shelby’s team was waiting to get their hands on it.
The new Shelby American factory made the old Venice shop look like a two-car garage. It sprawled over 12.5 acres bordering Los Angeles International Airport, consisting of two huge hanga
rs where North American Aviation used to build Sabre military jets, a total of 96,000 square feet. The official move was March 1, 1965, but already the space was filling up fast. One hangar housed the racing shop and administration, the other the assembly line, where Cobras and Shelby Mustangs would be built by hand at a rate of roughly 125 cars a month. The pavement between these two hangars was already blackening with tire marks. All day the shriek of passenger jets taking off and landing at LAX rattled eardrums, and at night Shelby American test drivers gunned racing cars up and down the runways under the stars.
Three years after he had debuted his Cobra at the New York Auto Show, Shelby had become the largest independent sports car manufacturer in America, with sales edging up past $10 million a year. The business employed nearly two hundred people. Though Shelby had publicly declared Enzo Ferrari his nemesis, his organization bore a startling resemblance to the one in Maranello, Italy. Shelby had become the Ferrari of America, the charismatic man behind a small automobile company that produced handcrafted sports and racing cars. In contrast to Ferrari’s reclusivity, however, Shelby was a bit of a showman.
He was on the road much of the time. When he was at his factory, he darted from task to task and office to office, his feet moving as fast as his mouth. As one visitor described him: “Shelby paces about restlessly like a lawman who expects trouble suddenly to bust out behind every swinging door in town.” He moved so fast his secretary quit out of frustration. “You have to go 90 mph to keep up with him,” she said, “and I’m just an old-fashioned 80-mph girl.”
