In June 1966, the Ford Motor Co. did what everyone said couldn’t be done: It beat legendary European sports-car maker Ferrari at Le Mans, then the most storied and prestigious road race in the world. And did it in record time.
For 24 hours the Ford team sped around an eight-mile road course that wound its way through the French countryside, subjecting local residents to the growling sound of shifting gears and the amazing sight of sleek, top-of-the-line cars sluicing at lightning speed along twisting rural roads.
According to A.J. Baime, the Ford team logged “3,009.6 miles at an average speed of 131 mph (including pit stops), faster and further than anyone had ever gone before at Le Mans.” At a time when Italy is, so to speak, invading Detroit, it is a pleasure to read Mr. Baime’s “Go Like Hell,” an engaging account of Ford’s herculean efforts, in the 1960s, to unseat Ferrari at Le Mans.
The 1966 race felt momentous within minutes of its finish. As Ford drivers Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon were showered with champagne and accolades, “The “Star-Spangled Banner” could be heard wafting over the countryside, replacing “Il Canto degli Italiani,” the Italian national anthem that had been, for years, the routine background music for post-Le Mans celebration.
The victory was a motoring feat, of course, but also the culmination of a personal battle between Henry Ford II—“the Deuce” and arguably Detroit’s last great autocrat—and Enzo Ferrari, Italy’s so-called Il Commendatore. Viewed broadly, Le Mans was key to Ford’s plans to expand both its footprint and its prestige in the competitive postwar European car market.
All this drama is told well by Mr. Baime, a car enthusiast and an editor at Playboy. He begins his narrative with the 1955 crash at Le Mans that killed some 80 spectators, most Frenchmen. The tragedy was made even more gruesome because the car that flew into the crowd, just 10 years after the end of World War II, was a Mercedes. All the German teams, out of respect for the dead, pulled out of the race immediately and didn’t come back for years, opening the way for a decade of domination by Enzo Ferrari and his fleet, hand-made roadsters.
The Italian rein would have continued if not for Henry Ford II and a smart young Italian kid from Allentown, Pa., named Lee Iacocca, a marketing genius who saw the baby boomers coming before they even had a name. He understood that the rising generation of young Americas—more prosperous than generations before—would want cars that were as brash and throaty as postwar America. His defining moment came with the development of the Mustang, which—along with the Chevy Camaro, Pontiac GTO and Dodge Charger—defined the Muscle Car era.
Mr. Iacocca understood that these cars had to have not only distinctive styling and over-the-top horsepower but credibility, even prestige. The place to get both, in the 1960s, was the race track—in a fledgling American sport called Nascar and on road courses in Europe such as the Nurburgring, Spa and, most of all, Le Mans.
While “Go Like Hell” focuses on the racing, Mr. Baime does a nice job of briefly explaining the corporate battles that went on behind the scenes. When Ford lost badly at Le Mans in 1965, many auto executives expected “the Deuce” to be furious. “Henry II had spent, by one reliable estimate, $6 million (roughly $39.5 million today) to win one motor race in 1965,” Mr. Baime writes. “All he had done was help Enzo Ferrari sell more cars. People were comparing Ford’s attempted invasion of Europe’s racetracks to President Johnson’s troops in Vietnam.”
Instead, Henry II passed out buttons that read: “Ford wins Le Mans in 1966.” More important, he threw more money at the problem. Thanks to tens of millions of dollars in research-and-development, a stable of talented young drivers, and a mechanic named Carroll Shelby, the Ford Motor Co. found itself on the podium at Le Mans in 1966.
Shelby’s contribution cannot be understated. He and his team of mostly high-school dropouts personified the California speed-shop culture. They knew exactly out to wring every ounce of horsepower out of a car, and that’s exactly what Ford needed to do to win Le Mans. Ford—particularly Mr. Iacocca—was also smart enough to understand how Shelby’s genius could serve the consumer market. Today, Shelby Mustangs are collectors’ items—and justifiably so.
The business story and Mr. Baime’s narrative reach their peak with the picture-perfect finish to the 1966 race. By the halfway point, the leading Ferraris had either crashed or broken down trying to keep pace with Shelby’s Fords, which were running 1-2-3. By the end of the race, the Fords were so far ahead that the lead car slowed, allowing the other two to catch up. All three crossed the finish line at nearly the same moment, abreast, making a dramatic statement to the automotive world.
Are there lessons to be learned—and applied—from this episode in auto history? After all, Ford is the only U.S. auto maker that hasn’t become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Obama administration. It would be wonderful to think that “Go Like Hell” might help Ford, if not the rest of Detroit, go like hell again in the marketplace.
Unfortunately, there are no such lessons—because the world in which Ford achieved this great success no longer exists. Winning at Le Mans isn’t as prestigious today as it once was, or as exciting. For one thing, safety-conscious bureaucrats have broken up the Mulsanne Straight, the three-mile stretch of road where Shelby’s Mustangs went well over 200 miles per hour. Today there is a chicane—or kink—in the straight. It forces cars to brake and not even begin to approach the speeds they once reached routinely there. But Formula One and Indy car racing are also less important to car success and consumer technology, existing in their own rarefied worlds. As for Nascar, it is a tool more often used by auto makers for marketing than for R&D.
Detroit is also hobbled by federal mandates that favor miles per gallon over miles per hour. Muscles cars—like the reinvigorated Chevy Camaro and Dodge Charger—are mere shadows of their former selves. And the regulations are only going to get more onerous, pushing out into America’s streets and highways little fuel-sipping jellybeans instead of the cars that Americans really want to buy.
Thank goodness it wasn’t always that way. “Go Like Hell” chronicles a time when an unfettered Detroit, led by “car guys,” could achieve great things. Those days are gone.
—Mr. Yost is the author of “The 200 MPH Billboard: The Inside Story of How Big Money Changed NASCAR.”Go Like Hell
By A.J. Baime
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pages, $26
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