by A. J. Baime
The afternoon of September 24, 1965, was clear and crisp. Surtees watched his Lola teammate Jackie Stewart pull into the pit. Stewart stepped out of the car.
“It’s not right,” the young driver said in his Scottish accent.
Surtees stepped in, keen on figuring out the source of the Lola’s ill temper. Sitting in the cockpit, he revved the engine and listened to the exhaust note. The V8 let out an angry snarl. He put the car in gear and motored onto the track. That’s the last thing he remembered.
PART IV
THE RECKONING
17
Survival: August–December 1965
The Ferrari stands for all that is swift, virile, and enduring in automobile racing. Needless to say, the manufacturer who beats Ferrari can claim no little speed of his own, and the manufacturer who covets that distinction most ardently is Henry Ford II. This is the showdown year between Ford and his Italian antagonist. It began brilliantly. . .
—Sports Illustrated, February 14, 1966
JOHN SURTEES CAME TO. He was lying in a hospital bed, tubes snaking into his body. He had no idea where he was or how long he’d been there. He could barely move and he was mummified, bandaged head to toe. He needed answers.
What had happened?
Where was he?
Was he going to live?
He swallowed hard. His wife Pat was there, looking at him with bloodshot eyes. She had been sitting there a long time. Surtees had been in and out of consciousness for four days.
The doctors had already briefed reporters on the driver’s condition. He’d broken his spine and his pelvis, and he was in critical condition. “He was bleeding on the left side,” officials at Scarborough General Hospital outside Toronto had said when the patient first arrived. “We hope there is no internal bleeding.” But there was. When Surtees finally gained consciousness, his doctor explained to him that his pelvis had split in the middle, rupturing his kidneys. The pelvis had been ripped apart from the base of the spine. His left leg had been shoved four inches upward into his body, and his kidneys were still bleeding. He was not out of danger yet.
Surtees was in shock. He thought of a motorcycle accident his father had suffered that’d nearly taken his life, years before, during the war. History was repeating itself. Looking up at a doctor’s cold face from his hospital bed, he felt utterly helpless.
“We don’t want to open you up,” the doctor said. “We want to wait and see if your kidneys seal themselves.”
Which meant Surtees had to lie there and wait. There was time to think, too much time. He was tortured by the unknown. He knew he had crashed, but he had to understand: Was it his fault? Had he made a mistake? Mechanical failure? He had to know that he was incapable of a mistake, that he was a perfect driving machine. A Lola engineer who’d witnessed the accident arrived at the hospital and began to explain what happened on that practice day at Mosport. The engineer’s face was pained and he spoke slowly. A racing engineer understood his job was to build the vehicle that a man was going to place 100 percent of his trust in, and in this case, the car had failed.
“I’m sorry, John,” the engineer said. “You lost a wheel.”
It wasn’t Surtees’s fault. He absorbed the horrific details. He was moving into Turn 1, a swift downhill right-hander, which placed almost all of the weight of the speeding car on the left front wheel. It had come loose. The car ploughed through a barrier and cartwheeled down an embankment. When it came to rest, Surtees had been pinned underneath and not responding. The track marshals that rushed to his aid had no idea if he was alive, but they knew gasoline was leaking and there was a chance of fire. They had to get him out fast. Surtees regained consciousness briefly in the ambulance, though he did not remember this. His wife and his mother and father-in-law arrived at the hospital the next day.
Friends and colleagues started showing up. When the Ferrari team came to America to compete in the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen a week after the accident, team manager Dragoni and technical director Forghieri drove straight north to the hospital. Surtees was still woozy. It was no secret that he and Dragoni hated each other, but the team manager took a sympathetic tone.
“You just get my car ready for Mexico,” Surtees rambled, though he wouldn’t remember saying this. The Mexican Grand Prix was three weeks away.
“We’ll wait and see,” Dragoni answered, knowing there was no way Surtees was going to be leaving the hospital in the near future.
Enzo Ferrari phoned. Surtees heard affection in his boss’s voice. Yes, he said, his side was severely banged up. Ferrari wanted to know, was he going to make it? Would he be able to return?
“I’ll have a go,” Surtees said.
Ferrari asked, “Which side is it?”
“My left. I’ll be a bit shorter on one side when I get back.”
“We’ll build you an automatic,” Ferrari joked, since Surtees was unlikely to be pressing down on any clutch pedals anytime soon.
“Thank you for your support,” Surtees said and hung up. He soon learned that—even though he was not driving a Ferrari when he crashed, a fact that bristled the tempers of many in the Maranello organization—his hospital bills had all been paid. Ferrari’s insurance was going to take care of them.
After more tests, the doctors told Surtees his kidneys had stopped bleeding. They were going to perform surgery to realign his pelvis. The operation was brief and successful. Dr. Paul McGoey, chief surgeon at Scarborough General, informed reporters afterward that the thirty-one-year-old Briton’s injuries were stabilized. Dr. Frank O’Kelly added: “I would think he will regain full use of his faculties.”
But would he ever race again?
The days went by slowly, visitors filing in, Surtees’s wife Pat sitting through the hours with him. Pain set in. He could feel it heightening to peaks. Two weeks after the crash, his doctor told him they wanted him transferred for long-term treatment. “We are not really able to deal with your sort of injuries,” his doctor said. Surtees had a choice: he could go to America or back to Europe. The American doctors would be likely to do more surgery, where in Europe, the thinking was to let the body heal on its own.
Surtees knew he needed no ordinary doctor. He needed a doctor who could understand the mind of a racer, a patient fully focused on returning to the sport that defined him as absolutely fast as possible. There could be no equivocation. He decided on Dr. Urquhart of St. Thomas’s Hospital in London. Dr. Urquhart was the man who’d treated the great Stirling Moss after his 1962 crash at Goodwood, which had shattered nearly all of Moss’s bones and left him near death. A phone call was placed.
“Don’t let those Americans get their hands on you,” Dr. Urquhart told Surtees. “They’ll use the knife. Get back here as soon as it is safe to travel.”
Surtees’s friend Tony Vandervell, of Vanwall Formula One fame, arranged for the flight. The doctors told Surtees it was imperative that he remain still. Too much movement, and his kidneys could start to bleed again. Medics tied him tightly to a stretcher, and then carted him to the airport in a brand-new streamlined American ambulance on October 18. The big struts and automatic transmission made for a smooth ride. Vandervell paid for a whole row of first-class seats in a Boeing 707. The ambulance ride to St. Thomas’s from Heathrow Airport wasn’t as pleasant. In comparison to the American ambulance, this one was an English antique. The driver staggered through the gears as he maneuvered through the London traffic. It was agony, “an involuntary, and unwanted, vibro-massage,” as Surtees described the experience.
At the hospital, Dr. Urquhart appeared. He looked down at Surtees and smiled. “Right,” he said, “time’s getting on. You’re in a bit of a sorry state, but everything else is stable, so we’ve got to try and straighten you up. We’ve got to get your left side down a bit to match your right side. Do you see my assistant here?”
“Yes,” Surtees said.
“He’s big, isn’t he? He plays rugby.”
“Yes.”
&
nbsp; “I’m well built too, aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we’re going to take you down and put you on a table. He’s going to get one end, and I’m going to take the other, and we’re going to tug like bloody hell.”
The next day Surtees was on the table getting yanked. The doctor on one side, the assistant on the other. They’d likely given Surtees enough muscle relaxants and pain relievers to floor a horse, but still—if this hadn’t occurred in a hospital, it would’ve looked like medieval torture. At the beginning, Surtees’s left side was four inches shorter than the other. At the end, it was a half-inch shorter, and that’s how it would remain for the rest of his life. When it was done, the nurses came in. Surtees was so tired, he could barely open his eyes.
“We reckon you’ll be working that leg on your own in about a week’s time,” a nurse said.
“Let’s see if we can’t do it in five days,” replied Surtees.
He began exercising the top of his body by pulling himself up and down on a piece of rope slung over the back of his hospital bed, the stiff muscles in his arms and back swelling with blood. The nurses wheeled him in a chair down to the physiotherapy pool, which was actually a military water tank used for fire services during wartime, a simple construction of corrugated iron sheets bolted together. The buoyancy of the water allowed him to experiment putting weight on his left leg. After one hour in the pool, Surtees later said, “I felt as though I had driven the Le Mans 24-hour race single-handed.”
On November 24, exactly two months after the accident, the big day came. A nurse arrived. “Today,” she said, “we’re going to try and get you walking on one leg.”
Nurses handed him a set of crutches and helped him out of bed. The pain was unbearable. Do not, under any circumstances, they told him, put weight on the bad leg. Surtees stood, holding himself up on the crutches. He took one step. Then another. He took a third step and then collapsed from exhaustion. The nurses caught him and pulled him back to the bed. “Feeling very poor and depressed,” he wrote in his diary that day. The next day he managed eight steps. The next day he counted eighty-three. Dressed in a bathrobe over a pair of pajamas, his feet tucked into slippers and arms curled over crutches, he walked four hundred steps on November 28.
In December, the hospital’s hallways filled with Christmas decorations, and Surtees’s depression began to lift. He had begun the long, slow walk back to the cockpit.
At the Modena Autodrome, Enzo Ferrari invited the first members of the press to see his new racing sports car, the car that would take on America in the battle for Le Mans in 1966. It was still winter, the grass around the old racetrack a dull yellow, the gray Modena sky the color of lake ice. When Ferrari presented the car, the public saw the 330 P3 for the first time. On one side stood the man, on the other the car. They did not resemble each other at all. Ferrari was antiquated, wrinkled and ordinary in appearance. The car looked as if it could beat the Russians and Americans to the moon.
The so-called “P Cars” had developed one after the other during Surtees’s time with Ferrari. The 250 P in 1963, then the following incarnations: the 330 P, the 330 P2, and now the P3. With each, the technology was more aggressive. Weight reduced while power increased. The new P3 had about 110 more horsepower than the original P car, and it was about 40 kilograms lighter. The shape was more aerodynamic. In profile the body was one continuous rising and dipping line, the nose arcing up into the front wheel wells, dipping down into the midsection, rolling into the wraparound windscreen, curving into the small of the back, then rising again into a wicked set of muscular hips. The entire package stood only 37.4 inches off the ground, even lower-slung than Ford’s Le Mans car. It stood so low the driver would be situated almost horizontally, as if, cynics noted, one would be in a coffin.
“I have real confidence in the excellent work done by my staff,” Ferrari told reporters. “This car will enter competition at Sebring.”
The reporters circled the 330 P3 and jotted notes. Peering inside they saw a stark, functional cockpit. It was all business: black leather driver’s seat, big tachometer front and center, leather-wrapped steering wheel with its Prancing Horse badge. Ferrari and his men went over the nuances. For the first time, they had equipped a Ferrari sports car with fuel injection. As for the engine, the car’s heart and soul, they had stuck with the time-honored V12. At four liters, Ferrari’s engine would be far smaller than the seven-liter Ford power plant.
“Four liters are enough because our experience tells us that this is the right capacity for a proper all-around balance,” Ferrari said. “In fact, with an increase in capacity we would have an increase in [fuel] consumption and an increase in weight on the wheels, weight to move, and especially weight in braking. All these values create a lot of problems which are not compensated by the few kilometers per hour more that it is possible to obtain.”
The V12 engine pumped out 420 horsepower on the test bed, less than the Ford 427 V8, which rated on the dynamometer in 1966 at 486 horsepower. But the Italian car weighed far less. On the track the Ford would be superior in top speed; it would outdo the Ferrari on the Mulsanne Straight. The Ferrari was more lithe and agile; it would spend less time in the pit refueling and would outrun the Ford in corners. The contest would be one of philosophy as much as muscle.
As Sebring and Le Mans approached, Ferrari was faced with the question of his number-one driver. Would Surtees make it back in time? If so, would he have the nerve to corner at 99 percent again? A bruised nerve was a fragile thing. Even if a man could physically step into a cockpit and close the door behind him, he couldn’t know if he was fully healed until he hurtled into a tight corner at speed with cars an inch away on either side. Some at the factory were already working their own agendas, hoping they’d never see Surtees again. Ferrari knew there was no one in Maranello who could take Il Grande John’s place. He decided to gamble on his champion. He would sit back, watch, and wait.
18
Rebirth: August 1965–February 1966
IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1965, Henry II sent a card to the top executives in all the departments of his company. Each man who received this card would never forget looking down at it for the first time. The card had a Le Mans decal on it and a short message.
You’d better win.
—Henry Ford II
As of that moment, all those men knew their jobs were on the line. The failure of any car part at Le Mans would mean the failure of one man and the people who reported to him. If the transmission blew, then the head of transmissions would get hung out to dry. The same went for engines and foundry, brakes, and suspension.
The whole company was going to pool its resources and go racing.
Ever the champion of committee rule, Henry II’s longtime confidant Leo Beebe formed a new group: the Le Mans Committee. It was a new regime, a task force made up of the heads of all of Ford’s divisions. The group would meet every two weeks until the race. When the committee gathered for the first time in a conference room at the Dearborn Inn, a grand old brick hotel on Oakwood Boulevard five minutes from the Glass House, Beebe stood tall and slim, watching his colleagues file in—roughly twenty men, the engineering brain trust of Ford Motor Company. Don Frey, head of the Ford division. Roy Lunn and his team from Kar Kraft. Head of engines Bill Innes. Young faces and old. The men settled in and the room began to fill with tobacco smoke.
None of them had ever attended a meeting like this one. They were a group of executives—few of whom had the slightest experience in motor sport—charged with the task of building the perfect mechanical athlete and winning a historic race. Whatever they needed to do to beat that wily fox in Italy, they had to figure it out, and do it.
“Anything you want, let me know,” executive vice president Charles Patterson told Beebe before the meeting. “We’ll gold plate the gearboxes if necessary.”
Beebe called the session to order. The onetime high school basketball coach had given his share of locker room spee
ches. Thus far the Ford Le Mans program, two years old, had been nothing but an embarrassment. In the automobile business, the launch of a car could be delayed if it wasn’t ready. But they couldn’t change the date of Le Mans—ten months away, June 18, 1966.
By the time the company men filed out of the conference room, a plan was set in motion. They were going to complicate the plot. There would be two Ford Le Mans teams,* one headed up by Carroll Shelby, the other by Holman Moody, who ran Ford’s champion stock car team, the fastest NASCAR outfit going. John Holman and Ralph Moody knew how to make machines go fast. They were old-school stock car gurus, and their relationship with Ford Motor reached back to NASCAR’s wild years in the 1950s. They were based in Charlotte, North Carolina, a hotbed of American speed talent. If Henry II sold cars on the heels of racing victories, Holman Moody had made Mr. Ford a lot of money over the years.
This arrangement would pit Shelby American against Ford’s NASCAR boys, the glitz and sophistication of the Los Angeles sports car scene against southeastern stock car grit. Shelby’s team worked with European-style sports cars on twisty tracks. Holman Moody raced souped-up showroom Fords on oval tracks that had nothing but fast straights and left turns. Shelby obviously had the advantage, but if Holman Moody proved faster, Shelby would be humiliated. Which team would out-speed the other would be nearly as fascinating for the fans as would which team could beat Ferrari. Pitting their own men against each other—Ford Motor Company had stolen a page out of Enzo Ferrari’s playbook.
