Racin ‘Today »Flat Spot On – Triumph and Confusion: Le Mans 1966

At the first annual Ford motorsport banquet, a photo of the Le Mans finish in 1966 was distributed for the company’s works drivers and team members to sign. It shows Bruce McLaren’s Mk II, who has the lead at the finish. (Courtesy photo of Bob Riley.)

By Jonathan Ingram | Senior Author
RacinToday.com

Ford conquered Le Mans 55 years ago and became the first American manufacturer to win the great sports car endurance race. After the 50the On our anniversary we were strongly reminded of Ford’s performance by the victory of Chip Ganassi Racing in the Ford GT at the great French 24-hour race. But then came the film which, with a traditional Hollywood approach, portrayed the 1966 race in the form of “Ford vs. Ferrari”.

The race turned out to be good fodder for a mainstream movie and was an integral part of HBO. How exactly was it? With this year’s Le Mans 24 Hours postponed to August due to the pandemic, take a moment during the traditional racing month of June to review how major American auto publications handled Ford’s groundbreaking win for the Mk II, the turned out to be so controversial.

If you can overcome the obvious Hollywood inaccuracies in actual racing, I’d say the film got the story pretty much right. It did so by focusing on the fate of Ken Miles, who was surprised by the Ford hierarchy’s emphasis on the presentation of the company and its cars when American drivers were out of the hunt.

This latter problem, attributed to the retirement of Dan Gurney and Jerry Grant’s Mk II, resulted in part from a minor plane crash involving Texan Lloyd Ruby that injured his back. If he had been paired with Miles as usual, instead of Deny Hulme, a last-minute appeal, the whole racing fuss might not have happened because an American was in the lead car.

The writers who covered Le Mans for the major auto magazines – Brock Yates, Henry Manney, and Griffith Borgeson – were all veterans of the knee-deep in pit coverage. They worked for the automobile buffet books, which faithfully reported on all major sports car races in the mid-1960s. For one man, these three observed Miles being hired from “Formation Finish,” supposedly a photo opportunity for Ford commercials, and perhaps more nefarious than that, according to the film.

To sum up, according to Motor Trend’s Borgeson, Enzo Ferrari made its share of mistakes, starting with the number of P3 chassis built and deployed, which appeared to be due to cash flow issues that only appeared in the late stages of preparing for Le Mans were resolved. His team manager, Eugenio Dragoni, exacerbated the lack of starters against a phalanx of Mk IIs by not pursuing a “rabbit” strategy of picking up the pace with one car and allowing the other two P3s to lag behind for stamina. And finally, both Ferrari and Dragoni got involved in inner-city politics that directed John Surtees, Ferrari’s number one in F1, to make way for backup driver Ludovico Scarfiotti alongside co-driver Michael Parkes. As it turned out, Scarfiotti would crash the P3 and Surtees would leave Ferrari’s F1 team for Cooper.

The attack on the Ford camp was meanwhile “carried out as classically as a von Clausewitz campaign,” said Car and Driver’s Yates, citing the Prussian military. But the final hour “left the race littered with mysterious anti-climaxes and corporate confusion”. Starting with eight Mk IIs, the Fords ran until the end of the 18th century.the Hour when the leading Gurney Grant entry was eliminated due to a loosened radiator hose. With six exhausting hours to go, Ford had the cars of Miles / Hulme and Bruce McLaren / Chris Amon ahead of the Mk II of Ronnie Bucknum and Dick Hutcherson, but well ahead of the surviving phalanx of Porsches.

According to Borgeson, several of the Ford drivers were busy beating their lap times, including Gurney, Miles, McLaren, Bucknum and Graham Hill. When the Gurney / Grant car disappeared, all drivers were told to stick to 4 minute lap times, which was nearly 20 seconds faster than the pace the Mk IIs could drive in race trim including gearbox. (As predicted, their 7.0-liter V8s allowed the Fords to comfortably outperform the Ferraris on the Mulsanne Straight while still sticking to the P3s on the twisty sections of the 8-mile route.)

Road & Track’s Manney reported that the usual rivalry among drivers would result in the occasional “Nelsonian blind eye” pointing in the direction of the instruction to slow down, referring to the loss of eyesight of the famous British Admiral Nelson one eye. Borgeson confirmed that Miles in the Ford pits drew notable anger with a lap of 3 minutes and 38 seconds. Miles was told by his team’s commander in chief and friend Carroll Shelby that if he tried to sneak one more lap like this, he would be knocked out of the race. Shelby was later quoted by Yates as saying, “I would have given fifty thousand dollars to make Ken win.” Miles, of course, wanted to be the only man to win Daytona, Sebring and Le Mans that same year.

But the Ford hierarchy, led by competition boss Leo Beebe, already had a plan for a formation finish and a photo of Ford’s dominance, which proved problematic. Manney, who spent much of the race in the pits consulting with drivers and crew members, said Beebe informed the drivers of the photo-finish schedule during their final pit stops. Borgeson was a familiar sight in the box too. Quoting Miles in response to being ordered to slow down to save his car, he said, “If you think I’m tough with a car, see what’s left of Gurneys.”

We all know how the story ends. A dead heat, i.e. a formation finish, led the French officials to decide that the McLaren / Amon Ford had won due to a higher average speed after more distance in the same time. This was because he started further back (under the old Le Mans start where drivers ran to their cars) after Amon qualified a second slower in fourth place behind Miles’ runner-up Ford.

Contributing to the eventual dismay was the lack of awareness, aside from the coverage from the box, of why Miles had slowed from a substantial lead over McLaren so that McLaren could catch up with him in the drizzle for the photo in the final hour. “We were told to quit head to head and we did,” said Miles, as quoted by Yates. “If they had let Bruce and me fight for it, we wouldn’t have had all this nonsense.” According to all magazine reports, neither television commentators, subordinate French officials nor the crowd expected McLaren and Amon on the podium because the Miles car had been at the top for so long .

As Manney reports and can be seen in photos, Miles deliberately braked at the finish to let McLaren pass the checkered flag, which indicated the target at about 80 km / h. Borgeson suggested that McLaren step on the gas and gain about three feet.

According to the film, Beebe played the Heavy because of his disdain for Miles and his stubbornness. Yates reported that the Ford hierarchy had been communicating with French officials over the past hour about their dead barrel calculations and how that would result in the McLaren / Amon car being declared the winner. But the photo finish went as planned.

Nobody argued with the idea that a race needed a single winner, although many took offense at the unsportsmanlike finish. “That way of ending the race was obviously invented, generally unpopular and, to say the least, deplorable,” said Borgeson. “It’s puzzling,” wrote Manney.

“The morning light,” Yates wrote, “came with Gurney and Grant well on their way to victory until cooling problems ended their good ride. With that, Ken Miles and Bruce McLaren had to live out their climate drama and send Ford away with the one checkered flag of Le Mans that they had sought with more determination, more bad luck, more frivolous waste and hard work from a small group of dedicated men than any other individual project in the History of automobile racing. “

It’s a shame how it ended.

(Editor’s note: Jonathan Ingram’s book “CRASH! From Senna to Earnhardt – How the HANS Helped Save Racing ”is an informative look at the safety revolution in racing. Published by RJP Books, signed copies of “CRASH!” Are available at www.jingrambooks.com.)

No comment