Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans

by A.J. Baime

Henry Ford II’s vision of his company as a Le Mans champion began as a marketing campaign, an investment he hoped would pay off at the cash register. In the end, it became something far more. Nationalism, glory, a quest to make history like no automotive magnate ever had—Henry II had discovered a way to conquer Europe in the unfolding era we now call globalism.

But that wasn’t the only strange part of the story. The race went on. Organizers believed that if they called it off, incoming roads would fill with traffic, blocking emergency vehicles. The Mercedes team pulled out in respect for the dead. This was a German car crashing into a crowd of predominantly French spectators; the Germans didn’t want to start World War III. But the other competitors continued.

“If you want to be in this business and not lose your mind, you’ve got to be a little bold,” he said. “You’re going to make some mistakes, but go ahead.”

Only recently had he come to understand all Edsel Ford had endured. This thing killed my father, Henry II thought to himself. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it kill me. Henry II accepted the position—on one condition. That condition set the tone for the company’s next forty years: “I’ll take it only if I have completely free hand to make any change I want.”

It was this world of money and cutthroat competition that Lee Iacocca stepped into in the winter of 1960. Iacocca’s promotion to top man at the Ford division occurred the same week that John F. Kennedy was voted into the Oval Office. Inside Iacocca’s nerves slithered, but his outer shell was impenetrable. His colleagues saw a salesman through and through. After listening to Lee talk about a car, one once said, “I didn’t know whether to drive it home or make love to it.” Iacocca lunched with Mr. Ford in the Glass House’s penthouse dining room—hamburgers with ketchup served by waiters in white coats. There were meetings in Henry II’s office, and company parties that went on and on. Henry II could mix scotch, wine, and cigarettes all night and never seemed to have a hangover.

As the engine took shape on paper, and the young man’s condition deteriorated, a macabre irony became apparent. For Enzo Ferrari, the internal-combustion engine was a symbol of life. It had revolutionized society. He had watched it all happen during his lifetime. He spoke of automobiles as if they were animate. Cars possessed unique behaviors. They breathed through carburetors. They were skinned with metal. “Ferrari’s aim,” he once told a reporter, addressing himself in the third person, “is to perfect an ideal, to transform inert raw material into a living machine.” The engine of a car was both heart and soul. Ferrari engineer Luigi Bazzi had called its rumble “the heartbeat of the creature.”

Ferrari was a metal worker’s son; his name came from the Italian word ferro, meaning iron. He could describe himself as neither a designer nor an engineer, but rather “an agitator of men.” Mornings found him exiting his apartment wearing a plain baggy suit, suspenders holding up his pants. On his wrist was an old chronometer with the black Prancing Horse—the Ferrari logo—in the center of the dial. He visited his barber Antonio for a shave, then drove a Fiat 11 miles to the rural village of Maranello, where an Alsatian named Dick greeted him at his factory gate, tail wagging. The factory porter Seidenari—whom Ferrari’s wife called “Sei di Denari” (“You have money”)—snapped to attention in the porter’s lodge. The boss’s office was there by the gate, so he knew who was coming and who was going.

When they came to Modena to take possession of their vehicles, they always stayed a little longer to meet Ferrari. They addressed him by the title the Italian government had given him in 1927 —Commendatore. To the journalists who sought to define him in their articles, Ferrari was a riddle: A man who built racing cars, but refused to attend races. Who worked tirelessly to perfect state-of-the-art machines, yet feared elevators. They called him The Magician of Maranello, a “speed-bewitched recluse.” But here in his home city, where he had grown up, there was no mystery. He looked and dressed like any other man sitting in the cafes of the Piazza Grande. He was a Modenese, a paesano.

On June 30, 1956, a priest arrived at 11 Viale Trento e Trieste. Dino was dying, and the priest came to sit with his parents through the final hours. In the chair by Dino’s bedside, Ferrari sat with his son. They talked, and from their conversation, Ferrari learned, as he would later describe, “what life means to a young man who is leaving it.” When Dino had taken his last breath, Ferrari opened the notebook that he had filled with charts and graphs and wrote one final sentence: “The match is lost.” “I have lost my son,” he said. “Let us say a prayer for our Dino, who has left us,” the priest said. “Since I took First Communion as a child I have forgotten the prayers that so many people say every day,” Ferrari responded. “The only thing I can say is: God, help me to be a good man.”

At age twenty-three, he joined Alfa Romeo as a test driver, mechanic, and competitor. He earned his first victory on June 17, 1923, at a race in Ravenna. While he looked out from the podium, a man pushed through the crowd and introduced himself as the Count Enrico Baracca, father of the Italian war hero Francesco Baracca, a Modenese who’d shot down thirty-four enemy planes before he was killed in 1919. The ace pilot flew with a black Prancing Horse, the symbol of his squadron, painted on his plane’s fuselage. It was Baracca’s mother who told the young racing driver: “Ferrari, why don’t you put my son’s Cavallino Rampante on your car? It will bring you luck.” Ferrari laid this Prancing Horse symbol against a yellow shield, the color of Modena. This badge would one day become one of the most recognizable brand symbols in the world.

In Jano and Nuvolari, Ferrari had prototypes: an engineering mastermind and a champion pilot.* The duo powered the Scuderia Ferrari into the limelight in Italy. During these years “the agitator of men” studied the psychology of winning. Certain principles were self-evident. Competition is the impetus for innovation. The fiercer the competition, the faster cars will go. There is in some men a need to achieve greatness. When matched with talent, this necessity can turn humans into demigods. A man who is willing to die at the wheel is always likely to beat a man in a faster car—if he can survive until the end of the race.

At home in Modena, Ferrari’s phone rang. He heard the news: Nuvolari had won the German Grand Prix. In Italy, racing was a passion that joined all classes in every region; entire cities erupted in celebration. Ferrari’s reputation was cemented. The Prancing Horse came to represent not just a man and his cars, but a nation.

Money was tight, and the business model demanded that races be won. Why would a wealthy sportsman buy a Ferrari if a Jaguar had proved the finer machine on the track? It was survival of the fastest.

Years later Ferrari was asked: Which of his cars was his favorite? He answered, “The car which I have not yet created.” And which of his victories meant the most? “The one which I have not yet achieved.”

Most of Shelby’s employees looked as if they were straight out of high school. They weren’t college types, but they were street smart. Shelby called them “hot-rodders trying to prove that they weren’t the dipshits everyone in the world thought they were.” They knew how to weld, how to fabricate, how to make cars go fast. Walking around the shop, hearing the hiss of air hoses and smelling the sweat and oil, Iacocca knew that Shelby had tapped into something very real and powerful.

“I’m not an engineer. I’m not even very smart. The only thing I understand is human nature. I just like to bring the right people together and see what happens. I think I’ve put the right people together at Shelby American.”

“Only those who do not move do not die,” the French driver Jean Behra said after de Portago’s death. “But are they not already dead?” (Behra crashed a Porsche at the Grand Prix of Berlin on August 1, 1959, and was hurled from his mount. A witness described his final moment: “For an instant he could be seen against the sky with his arms outstretched like a man trying to fly.”)

Though other teams suffered casualties, none suffered such loss of life as did Enzo Ferrari’s. The Vatican publicly attacked Ferrari in its official newspaper I’Osservatore Romano, calling him “a modernized Saturn turned big industrialist [who] continues to devour his sons. As it is in myth, so too is it in reality.”

“I want to create a car,” Ferrari said, “with the greatest possible speed, the least weight, the least fuel intake, and all parts of equal durability.”

The story quoted Enzo Ferrari: “Of course I am concerned about my drivers. Each time I shake hands with one of them and give him a car, I wonder: Will I ever see him again?”

“After all,” he said, “everybody dies. Isn’t it a fine thing that Von Trips died doing something he loved, without any suffering, without any warning? I think Trips would rather be dead than not race, don’t you?” “What are you going to do, Phil?” Hill thought for a moment. Then he said, “When I love motor racing less, my own life will be worth more to me, and I will be less willing to risk it.”

“I never felt myself to be an industrialist, but a constructor,” Ferrari told the Ford man. “The production development of my firm is only of interest to me if conducted by others.” Then: “But be quite clear that in the construction and management of the racing cars I want absolute autonomy.”

A prominent Italian journalist once described Ferrari: “The Drake was big and robust and with his way of doing things seemed like a monument, before whom everyone, absolutely everyone (heads of state, kings, businessmen, actors, singers and all others) felt great embarrassment.”

“Boy is it clean,” Lunn remarked. “It’s amazing that you can keep the foundry like this.” Ferrari answered through an interpreter: “I have taught these men how to wipe their asses.”

As Ferrari read the final document, the Ford men saw him underlining certain passages in violet ink. In the margin, he drew a large exclamation point. It was clear that he was angry. “But here,” Ferrari said to Frey, holding the document. “It is written that if I want to spend more for racing I have to request authorization to do so from America! Is it also written that way in the official English text? Where is the freedom that I demanded right from the start to make programs, select men and decide on money?”

Ferrari paused. “Dottore Ingegnere,” he began, “if I wish to enter cars at Indianapolis and you do not wish me to enter cars at Indianapolis, do we go or do we not go?” Frey replied without hesitation. “You do not go.” Ferrari’s face contorted. Something uncoiled inside him. “My rights, my integrity, my very being as a manufacturer, as an entrepreneur, cannot work under the enormous machine, the suffocating bureaucracy of the Ford Motor Company!” he shouted. This was followed by a lengthy invective. Gozzi, who was present, described it as “a tirade that I had never seen or heard before in my entire life and have not done so since.”

They say automobile racing is as old as the second car. Since Karl Benz first patented the “motorwagen” in 1886, cars evolved into two diverse species on either side of the Atlantic. In America, with its vast roads, mapped out by urban planners who literally moved mountains to make way for them, cars were all about the big engine. Racing stock American cars on an oval track was a tradition that reached back to 1896. With grandstand seating, a promoter could funnel spectators through turnstiles and charge them to see the show. Spectators could witness the entire race rather than a small slice of it. Oval track racing was staged theater, a performance before a paying audience. Whether it was comedy or tragedy depended on the day.

In 1922, two Frenchmen came up with an ambitious idea: to hold the ultimate motor race. Charles Faroux was a brilliant engineer and France’s doyen of motoring journalists. Georges Durand ran France’s Automobile Club de l’Ouest. Their idea was to arrange a 24-hour contest that would test every facet of an automobile. The endurance race would reveal a car’s weaknesses. Racing at night by headlamp would force competitors to improve upon primitive electrical systems. The winning car would be not only the fastest, but the most fuel efficient and durable, overall the most intelligently engineered.

Ferrari called Le Mans The Race of Truth. Over 24 hours, two men (one in the car at a time, the other filling up on nutrients in a catering tent, or catching a bit of sleep in a trailer) traveled the 8.36-mile circuit attempting to go faster than all others. The car that completed the most laps at the end won. By the early 1960s, competition had been divided into two basic classes: Grand Touring cars or GTs (production cars that customers could purchase) and Prototypes. While both were required to have headlights, a two-seat cockpit, and trunk space, the Prototypes were in fact purpose-built racers. Prototypes topped GTs by some 70 mph in flat-out speed in some cases. They were meant to exemplify the sports cars of the future, the science of speed pushed to its limit in street-legal cars.

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 extra 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.”

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.

The New York Times on Monday morning: “In trials that ended yesterday, a Ferrari car driven by John Surtees was clocked at 194 miles per hour down the three-mile Mulsanne Straight. Nothing has ever traveled here that fast before. And two Ford prototypes crashed. These Fords were new, unbelievably sleek and expensive . . . People who know money think Ford can build a winner. People who know car racing are not so sure.”

Privately, he seethed with discontent. Iacocca’s delight in the pages of Time was both portentous and naïve: “I see this as the start of a new golden age for Ford that will make the peaks of the past look like anthills.”

The Dearborn suits were on edge before they arrived at Le Mans. There was hell to pay for the deaths of Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald at Indy three weeks earlier. A full investigation was underway. Ford’s PR chief made a statement: “We are all shocked and saddened by this tragedy. But I don’t think it should be a factor in making us pull out of racing. It’s dreadful that it happened. But this is built into racing.”

“Our team is comprised of about twelve or thirteen mechanics, one engineer, and one team manager.” Moss looked around the garage. There were seven cars. “What are the extra cars for?” “In case anything unusual happens,” Surtees said. “For instance, the other night we were out and we hit a fox in the middle of the road at about 140 mph. It could have damaged the car rather badly.” “Well I imagine it damaged the fox rather badly,” Moss laughed. A smile crept out of the side of Surtees’s face.

“We want to finish the race,” Wyer said. “We aim to keep our cars running. We all must remember, this is an endurance race, not a sprint race.” Phil Hill and Bruce McLaren, Ford’s two superstars, comprised the number-one team. Wyer’s master plan had them winning. They would keep pace with the front-runners. “Stay close at court,” Wyer ordered. “Speed must be as high as possible while conserving brakes and gearbox. You must stay in a position to strike if attrition takes its toll on the leaders, which it always does.” Wyer advised the junior members of the team—Briton Richard Attwood and Frenchman Jo Schlesser—to stay back with the pack and go easy on the car. Their job was simply to finish the race.

Hill began to rip off a series of perfect laps. Experience told him how to make up time at high speed without overtaxing the engine. There can be only one shortest distance around a racetrack, achieved when the driver chooses the perfect line on every turn. When he moved the car through a bend he could ease the tires within an inch of the pavement’s edge. The great endurance racer possessed a kind of compassion for the machine and its countless moving parts, allowing it to breathe and flex its muscle.

No two laps were the same. Hill’s brain filtered stimuli, automatically ranking it in order of importance in nanoseconds. Photographers leaning in and waving at him. A piece of newspaper floating in the wind. Pit signals: P2 (pit in two laps), P1, along with lap times. With each lap, fuel burned off, lightening the car, increasing its speed. Perception was near extrasensory. “True concentration is not aware of itself,” Hill explains. When the driver forgets himself is when he becomes one with the machine. The engine is ignored unless there is a problem. The heart is racing, maybe 160 beats a minute, but it, too, is ignored. “The flagmen, unless they are holding a yellow flag or some such thing, are perceived and forgotten,” Hill says. “A small car you are overtaking is registered and erased as you safely pass.” Always there is the danger that a driver in a car moving 80 mph slower will make an unexpected move.

Wyer later learned that the fuel hoses, which were supposed to be made of an ultradurable synthetic material, had in fact been made of plain nylon, and the heat of the engine compartment had melted one of Attwood’s hoses. “This was the result of almost criminal negligence,” Wyer later commented. “It was a miracle the other cars were not affected.”

“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.”

“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?”

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.

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.

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.

“This is a team effort,” Shelby began, the drivers gathered around him. “The goal is to finish as many cars as high up as possible. Just let things take their natural course. If you happen to be in front, fine. If you happen to have an extra long pit stop that puts you back to fourth, I’ll give you instructions as to whether you should try to pick up time or hold your position.”

“Women are more intelligent and dominating than men,” Ferrari said. “Men are creatures of their passions, and this makes them victims of women. Ettore Bugatti, a great driver and racing car builder, and a fine gentleman, once told me, ‘The perfect machine does not exist, mechanically speaking. The only perfect machine is a woman.’”

Once, in my racing days, I was in third position when I suddenly saw a car ablaze on the edge of the track. I could make out the number: it was the car that had been just in front of me. What thoughts do you think passed through my head in that instant? Well, my first thought was: One less, now I am second. My second thought was: I wonder if he’s hurt. And my third thought was: It could have been me. —ENZO FERRARI

A tornado of controversy had touched down in the nation’s capital. A young activist named Ralph Nader had published a book called Unsafe at Any Speed on December 1, 1965. Its message: Automobiles were killing off Americans at the rate of nearly 48,000 a year and that number was rising fast, and car manufacturers were to blame. Fueled by greed, Nader claimed, they peddled the drug of speed and style, ignoring safety altogether. Unsafe at Any Speed’s tone was extreme, so much so that it read like a document of religious fanaticism from the first page: “For over a half century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people. With Medea-like intensity, this mass trauma began rising sharply four years ago reflecting new and unexpected ravages by the motor vehicle.”

Surtees had an insatiable desire to think technically, improve, make faster, and he seemed incapable of compromise. “John’s idea of the perfect team is one in which Surtees is the owner, Surtees is the designer, Surtees is the engineer, Surtees is the team manager, and Surtees is the driver,” one critic said of him. “That way he could be certain of one hundred percent team effort from his staff!”

And his controversial exit from Maranello? “Ferrari said to me before he died, ‘John, we must remember the good times, not the bad,’” Surtees says. “I still love Italy and I love Italians and that’s it.”