Le Mans '66: When The Blue Oval Saw Red

Well, if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. Within days a plan was hatched to kick Enzo where it’d hurt most: squarely in Le Mans.

Hey, how hard could it be?

All three Fords retired in 1964. All six retired in ’65. And Ferrari won each time.

Hanging American muscle from a pared-to-the-bone British structure created an unwieldy, untrustworthy beast, with two heads: common purpose divided by a common language.

So Lola’s Eric Broadley, whose design provided the basis for GT40, and John Wyer, whose Slough-based team built and ran the cars, stepped away and were pushed aside before the end of 1964 – in favour of a skunk works in Detroit and a chicken farmer from Texas.

Carroll Shelby cultivated a grandiose dislike of Enzo Ferrari. But beneath that Stetson and behind those shades lay similar men: driven and manipulative motivators, successful, but with a whiff of snake oil about them.

Icons. With emphasis on the i. Or perhaps the con.

Shelby relocated from his Venice workshop in LA to a brace of vast hangars on the fringes of LAX and there began to rework GT40. He was assisted by a hawkish expat from Sutton Coldfield.

Ken Miles was nicknamed ‘Sidebite’ because he spoke from the corner of his mouth. He was called worse things because of a sharp, sarcastic tongue. But his words carried weight.

When this fit – he was already 46 – fast and fastidious racer/tester expressed a preference for the new car – even though he had won February’s 2,000km Daytona Continental in the old – bigger was officially better.

Under the auspices of Roy Lunn, another British expat, an engineer formerly of AC, Aston Martin, Jowett and Ford of Britain, those Kar Kraft ‘skunks’ in Dearborn had levered a NASCAR 7-litre V8 lump between GT40’s shapely haunches.

MkII was quick – Phil Hill put his on pole at Le Mans by five seconds – but untested and unresolved. It led the early stages – Hill setting fastest lap, too – but both Shelby American cars were sidelined by drivetrain failures within seven hours.

It was also ‘blamed’ for MkI’s early retirements.

The British arm had long complained that Ford’s cast-iron ‘Cobra’ 4.7-litre V8 was this package’s weak link. Yet nothing was done about it and three of the four retired with a blown head gasket.

Wyer insisted that his be driven to destruction in a bid to outlast the MkIIs – and still it fell an hour short.

The whole thing was an unholy tangle: five teams to run six cars, two models in two types – five coupes and a roadster – fitted with three sizes of engine (during practice at least).

Project leader Leo Beebe had plenty to chew on over breakfast.

This no-nonsense former sports coach was the fixer who had closed the doors on Ford’s Edsel embarrassment. But motorsport had tested his mettle.

Within weeks of accepting his new role as the first boss of Special Vehicles in 1964, he had witnessed the horrifying accidents at Charlotte and Indianapolis that claimed the lives of Glenn ‘Fireball’ Roberts, Eddie ‘The Clown Prince’ Sachs and Dave MacDonald.

Now Le Mans was testing his patience.

Ford had won the 1965 Daytona 500 (shortened by rain), thanks to Fred Lorenzen and Holman & Moody, and also that year’s Indy 500, thanks to Jim Clark and Team Lotus – yet had gone west down Sarthe.

Perhaps, mused Beebe, he should have let the vastly experienced Wyer get on with it.

Instead he went all in for 1966.

"This is a victory meeting,” he told his deflated crew at the team hotel. Querying glances were cast. But he didn’t blink: “Next year, we’re going to come back and win, and we might as well start right now.”

Holman & Moody was drafted to support Shelby American and between them they would prep, test and run no fewer than eight 7-litre ‘monsters’.

“We were included to give the car longevity,” says Lee Holman, son of co-founder John. “We had 450 employees – far bigger than Shelby’s – and one customer: Ford Motor Company. We could produce an entire car in our building and we applied that to what [the Le Mans] car needed.”

They were to be joined by UK affiliate Alan Mann Racing of Byfleet.

“We only found out in April that we’d be running [two] 7-litres at Le Mans,” says the Surrey-based team’s fabricator Jim Rose. “The next thing, six of us – plus my wife, who had friends up in the Valley – were on a plane to LA.

“All the teams worked together at Shelby’s for about six or seven weeks. We didn’t know which car was going where, so there was no favouritism.

“Of course, when we got ours home we rebuilt them the way we wanted to.”

Rivalry between its teams, however, was nothing compared to the politicking within Ford itself. Charismatic vice-president Lee Iaccoca, ‘father of the Mustang’, was for Shelby, whereas Henry Ford II was for Holman & Moody.

Holman, present at Le Mans 1966, says: “There was more infighting over who controlled the budget than there was between us and Shelby American.”

There was a further complication: Lunn was pushing like hell for his J-car to be included. The programme’s first all-American, this radical machine featured an aluminium-honeycomb structure and a very different take on aerodynamics.

Thus Ford arrived at the Le Mans Test in early April with two lightweight GT40s (by Mann) and two MkIIs, plus its new interloper, and suffered a chastening weekend.

J-car, crammed with recording instrumentation – Ford was computerising motorsport as well as turning it corporate – lapped a second slower than Hill’s 1965 pole time, but was still two seconds faster than Miles, who beached his MkII on a sandbank.

Meanwhile, Walt Hansgen was fighting for his life. The popular 46-year-old New Jerseyman had crashed his MkII in damp conditions. Choppered to the US Military Hospital in Orléans, he was unconscious and critical.

Was it all turning Blue Oval-shaped again?

Photography courtesy of LAT