**The 1964 Le Mans Disaster: A Ford Catastrophe**

As the hours ticked by in the 1964 Le Mans race, Ford's fortunes were about to take a drastic turn for the worse. Richard Atwood's car was already out of commission after bursting into flames due to a faulty fuel line, and now another blow had struck.

**Transmission Trouble Strikes Again**

Within an hour of the first incident, Master Gregory's car shared with Richie Gunter suffered a breakdown during the fifth hour of the race. The Colotti transmission had failed, leaving the team in disarray. It was a cruel irony that the transmission, designed and manufactured in Modena, Italy, the same hometown as Ferrari, had let Ford down.

**Ford Down to One Car**

With two cars already out of commission, Ford's hopes rested on the shoulders of Phil Hill and Bruce McLaren. They had managed to drive their car from 44th on the pole all the way up to fifth place by midnight, a remarkable feat in itself. But as the hours passed, their luck was about to run out.

**Transmission Failure Strikes Again**

At 5:20 am, McLaren set a lap record of three minutes forty nine point two seconds, but his joy was short-lived. The same Khiladi transmission that had failed earlier in the race had now failed again, forcing Hill and McLaren to pull into the pit. The final gt40 was out of the race.

**Ferrari Dominates**

In the end, Ferrari finished first, second, and third, while Ford was left with a DNF (did not finish). Henry Ford's frustration was palpable, but he vowed that Ford would return next year and show Ferrari that Americans could do just as good a job.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhen news of the failed signing reached henry ford ii he was stunned with rage issuing the iconic order build me a car that will crush ferrari at lamar don't you know the some sources say that the order was actually go to l'amour and today we are continuing on in our four part series on Ford vs. Ferrari at Lamar one of the greatest rivalries in all of sports and possibly all of everything every yea heaven verse hell yep barks versus a and W barks versus a W versus mug whoa on our last episode we did a deep dive into the life of Enzo Ferrari himself leading up to today's subject the deal between Ferrari and the Ford Motor Company that ultimately fell apart and set the whole rivalry in motion when people thought about American performance in the 1960s there was only one name that came to mind Corvette Chevrolet debuted their european-inspired sports car in 1953 to wide acclaim no mainstream manufacturer had ever built a car like it the Corvette was the first production car to have a body made out of fiberglass which when coupled with the 265 cubic inch v8 in 1955 made it fast as heck you could say it went like heck by the end of the 60s the Corvette had a solid Motorsports resume with wins all over the US and abroad henry ford ii was having none of that Henry or Hank the deuce hell yeah was the eldest hell yeah dude junior nope deuce was the eldest grandson of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford he had taken the reins of FMC in 1945 and ruled with an iron fist ever since knew that a surefire way to sway people away from Chevrolet would be to prove Ford superiority in the same place his grandfather began on the racetrack so he set his sights on the most important racing series in the automotive industry to date them all it is properly known as the 24 hours of the mom though it is a name that needs no further introduction for those who know the 24 hours of the MA is one of the most dangerous races in the world it is an arduous 24 hour long endurance race where manufacturers proved to the world that their cars are the best on the planet if you've ever wondered where the hierarchy of race cars comes from this is the place a win in Lamar meant that you were the best and the prestige associated with it has been seen by the whole world also the drivers pee in the seats and then the next guy to get in the car has to sit in his pee that's how big of a deal it is if I were in the mall with you like all your asparagus already having to pee yeah and in the time that it takes me to walk to the bathroom and start going I'm like wow already huh never ceases to amaze me it's one of my favorite things it's truly incredible Ford knew that the best way to draw interest away from the Corvette and back to Ford would be to outperform everyone at Lamar and Wow audiences as he did it there was no almost winning or almost being the best - Hank goose he was going to win at Lamont no matter how many resources it would require once his sights had been set on ylim all ford henry ford ii immediately started running into a few issues the biggest of those issues was ford's lack of racing experience Lou I could see how that could get in the way yeah Ford's cars had been used in racing in the past but largely by private teams and companies to Enzo Ferraris Scuderia Ferrari in our last episode he didn't race forwards but like that same principle a while a Model T had been run with a llama the real racial Mike Ford Model T with wooden wheels for 24 hours straight that's insane your back would be destroyed it's true the real racing history of Ford began as the flat just terrified going zero miles an hour as the flathead v8 had become legend among the hot rodding community in fact a Ford Lincoln said oh yeah Ford yeah had won the first ever NASCAR race in 1949 while their cars had been modified and used for racing in the past Ford themselves never had an official racing team in fact the only racing experience the company had up to that point was an occasional race driven by Henry's old man's old man Henry Ford senior even though thanks to Henry Ford the company could claim to have a motor sporting heritage it really was nothing more than just a claim every car manufacturer knew that to get investors you needed to win races and Ford was not a foreigner to that concept but while Ford may have participated within motor sports they certainly did not excel at it the same way that companies such as Ferrari and Porsche companies who design their cars with racing specifically in mind realizing he was lacking in certain necessary departments henry ford ii had an idea that is literally the embodiment of every rich person's version of the american dream he decided that if he was not able to become the best racing endurance team he was going to do the next best thing he was just going to buy the best unit endurance racing team yes that's what I love I love that yes you know what they say if you can't beat him own him if he can't beat him own he set his sights on one struggling company that had proven time and time again six times to be exact that they knew a thing or two when it came to going fast for long periods of time after visiting a ray in observing the cars on the track he pointed to one of them and said we need those red cars don't you know oh yeah while Ferrari was basically one of the best when it came to racing there was just one tiny thing that they were not so good at that was having money everything Enzo Ferrari did he did the expensive way which is not exactly known for being the most efficient way to run a company the company never made money due to the fact that every cent earned was funneled directly back into racing Ferrari had been in a large financial decline recently slowly meeting a fate worse than death bankruptcy without turning this into a macroeconomics lesson the supply and demand curve was hitting Ferrari hard all while John Locke was rolling in his grave that's an economics joke anyway Enzo Ferrari was suffering and that is when Henry Ford decided to try to get his foot in the door of motorsports one man's flaming dumpster fire of a financial burden is another man's opportunity at this point in history Ford and Ferrari were tailored to about as different a markets as was humanly possible Fort Lee built cars for the average consumer for the family man large cushy layin yachts that would slowly lumber down the highway Ferrari built race cars that were dumbed down and made street-legal as Enzo had never really wanted to sell street cars in the first place Ferrari sold street cars to fund racing development which was the exact opposite of what was expected of American manufacturers at the time when we last met Enzo he was about to meet with a man named Phil Murr paradise by the way weird name yeah it sounds like like in the 20s when movie men first showed up to Los Angeles and they're like this is a real film or paradise the Sun stays up 364 days a year I just realized why Hollywood is here yeah it's because of the weather I feel like an idiot and there's a lot of different terrain yeah it being a high desert you can get mountain shots you can shoot some cowboy movies out in the desert you can shoot on the beach if you want maybe a little beach ball bingo and then what do they do they erect it massive studios and shot everything inside that is pretty counterintuitive when you think about it anyway Phil in Paradise the president of the Italian branch of the Ford Motor Company at first paradise proposed a partnership where Ford would sell Ford Brent a Ford branded sports car designed by Ferrari and in return Ferrari would be make a bunch of money Enzo was interested but he knew that this was just a soft sell American car makers had history of beginning partnerships than buying a controlling share of the company they bought in fact Chrysler had done the same thing with small Italian maker Simca just a few years before Enzo was willing to give up control of Ferrari Road car production on one single condition James listen closely this is important Enzo would do it he would partner with the Ford Motor Company if he could keep complete independence when it came to managing his race team Scuderia Ferrari that was all Enzo asked that's all I ask you can have all the road cars you want but they're AC she is on my heart and I will not forgive you Amaya heart to Ford the idea of buying Ferrari made complete sense as it allowed them to incorporate into their company a subsection devoted to this new kind of sporty automobile that had only recently been introduced to the United States after all a gentlemen's agreement made between the major manufacturers in America nearly a decade earlier led to the promise that each company would not put any money into racing it wasn't until Chevy's started working on the corvette project that the gentlemen's agreement was blatantly violated leaving all of Chevys competitors in the dust when it came to the performance market Chevy was sweeping the floor with Ford and there was nearly a 15 percent market share increased by Chevy once the Corvette started winning races as the saying goes you win on Sunday you sell on Monday Ford was incredibly far behind Chevy in terms of performance and now sales figures as the purchase of Ferrari was a logical and on paper easy way to kick-start Ford's own performance division after all Ferrari would bring a competitor to the domestic markets and would bring along a very hefty racing pedigree so in 1963 Ford sent an offer a fifteen million dollars to buy out the entirety of the Ferrari company Enzo Ferrari obviously showed interest in the offer he was like hmm that's a lot of lira brother as he was desperate for funding for his company that had only sold 493 cars the year before Ford and Ferrari had come to an agreement there would be two separate divisions of the company a Ferrari Ford division that would exist to take part in races and afford Ferrari division that would exist in order to sell passenger sport GT cars on May 21st 1963 executives from the Ford Motor Company met with Enzo Ferrari at that Ferrari headquarters while Ford made sure to arm an army of suits for the deal Enzo Ferrari was surprisingly nonchalant about the entire situation calmly sitting across from them with only his local town lawyer by his side to oversee the deal the sticking point of the agreement came down to the racing side of the business you see Ferrari never had any huge interest in selling Road cars the sale of Road cars was how Ferrari funded its racing division like we said earlier it was a racing company at heart and had no interest in changing that the sale agreement between Ford and Ferrari stipulated that while Enzo Ferrari would still maintain control over the Ferrari Ford racing division Ford Motor Company would have to authorize any spending by Ferrari Ford after the division spent 450 million lira so I did some calculations with different inflation websites and 450 million lira which you know sounds like a lot converts to about seven hundred and seventy one thousand dollars if my math is correct that today's money that's back then right so for a racing program as large and successful as Scuderia Ferrari that's kind of nothing this did not please Enzo all he wanted was complete independence for his racing program and this spending limit took that away so Enzo pulled out his legendary purple fountain pen and underlined that entire section writing beside it no non verba na which translates to no that is no good after shouting a large amount of verbal abuse towards the executives from Ford in Italian Enzo turned to his lawyer and said let's go eat or something yelling at these Michigan men has made me young and they walked out leaving behind a room full of stunned bored suits now what I think happened is like at first the negotiations is like okay yeah you can have your racing division whatever and of course I don't have any direct proof to back this up but I feel like Ford might have been like here's this guy in Italy his company is struggling if we give him a huge amount of money like 15 million he's probably gonna ignore everything else in that contract yeah I think it's like they're like yeah we're gonna wave this big cheque in front of him like he's not on our level at all and take give him fifteen million dollars and then also only allow him to spend like less than a million dollars a year on the race team like that just like doesn't make sense yeah and it's just such like a big company move yeah totally like it's such like a well ok it'll be yours and you'll be in full control but I mean you gotta ask us yeah when news of the failed signing reached Henry Ford the second he was stunned with rage issuing the iconic order build me a car that will crush Ferrari at Lamar don't you know know though some sources say that the order was actually go to l'amour and beat his don't you know I'm hate dinky little actually eaten Italian tell me out on my company my father built the assembly wine and I'm gonna assembly one here's the issue was that Ford didn't exactly know how to assembly line Ferraris Ferrari was in their prime having won multiple races at limo in the years prior and Ford had only just recently tried to get back into the racing game by purchasing Ferrari all four new is they needed a car that could beat Ferrari and win at Lamar the car had to be fast in the straights at over 200 miles an hour all while enduring over 3,000 miles of mechanical torture so Henry Ford did what he knew best he paid someone to figure it out for him do you know what I came into this thinking Ferrari and right now I'm thinking before I was the same as you and then I read somebody both these guys are terrible yeah but Ferrari less terrible than I thought Ford more I don't think you'd get along with him with Henry Ford yeah no I probably would get along with Ferrari though yeah he seems for each shelf but he seems self-made I think what I'm realizing is I probably wouldn't get along with the heads of any major car company I'm more of a well you're you like you're ahead of you're ahead yourself you know yeah yeah I'm the boss yeah I don't need any more bosses in the room with me chief engineer Don Frey called for the creation of what would be known as the Ford advanced vehicle department and he hired an expert British engineer named Roy lund to lead it Roy Allen had a history with Lamar having been involved with and Martin's LeMond efforts in 1949 just 14 years prior he became where the most influential behind-the-scenes names of the automotive industry citing a prior trip to Europe lund hypothesized that a winning car would need to travel at over 200 miles per hour or one football field per second while having died said pitch yeah why do you guys call your sport soccer yeah why why you call it football you know any Venezia faint sent for that one time in the beginning and then after a touchdown and then one more time at halftime why didn't why couldn't you just come up with yo name he later said in an interview that with the exception with the exception of land-speed record calls no vehicle has ever been developed to travel at speeds in the excess of 200 miles per hour on normal highways these beans are greater than the takeoff speed of most aircraft but conversely the problem will be to keep the vehicle on the ground lund knew he had a big project on his hands bushy project but before you can get started you first had to get it approved on June 12th 1963 less than a month after henry ford ii AKA deuce had sworn vengeance on ferrari rory lund presented a highly confidential project to the board members at Ford he presented a mid-engine car filled with custom fabricated pieces it was a car that looked like no other car because it was like no other car except maybe in regards to the car it was based on the project was given the name gt40 because it was only 40 inches tall that's kind of a weird metric to name your car yeah there's no other car that's named after the Land Rover did cars named after the length that's also kind of I don't American car don't trucks named themselves after how much they can tow what's a 3500 it's like bed capacity yeah yeah and remember Ford also wanted to humiliate Chevy in a memo written by Lunt he addressed the gt40 as a high-performance - seen a sports car prototype that if produced in low volume will neutralize that call their image by substantially better performance and by surpassing in style and feature appeal according to participants the entire project took less than five minutes to get approved the remaining 55 minutes of the meeting was spent discussing market strategy the Ford's new Corvette killer well how are we gonna position this in the market I think posters yeah posters we'll put posters everywhere um what if we did what if we showed a picture of like a Corvette yeah and just like a gt40 on top of its Corvette brains out or maybe okay would it okay maybe not that okay what if we just make a poster right okay and the Corvette is like in the corner yeah crying okay and the gt40 is just Tom and it's wife's oh my job in the brains out of the Corvettes wife what the people at Ford what the people at Ford had determined was that in order to beat a European car company you had to do it on European soil using European pert in their own world so Ford contracted a small British motorsport company in a dingy industrial park located in slough UK just outside of London and sent his advanced Design Lead roylene back to his homeland as well as about 1.7 million dollars to utilize however he saw fit in order to kick the most Italian ass possible it's kind of lame that he gave a million dollars more than he was willing to give Ferrari what the heck Ford wanted someone with experience beating American Muscle to help lead the team you got some experience doing that and for that role they found no one more suited to the task than the Corvette killer himself Carol Shelby yeah as author aj beim statesman's book don't like hell Carroll Shelby had created a business model that depended on winning races if the cars didn't win the cars wouldn't sell his company lived and died on the track they brought along Shelby primarily to get the advanced vehicle division started as he was preoccupied with his own llama GT division entry which will cover in depth on her next episode once in England Shelby found a small racecar engineering company operating out of Huntington England Lola International Ltd a company named after the hit 1955 song whatever Lola wants Lola gets she sounds scary Lola international was founded in 1958 and unfortunately went out of business in 2012 2012 yeah they were around for a while huh in 2012 after failing to secure proper funding from f1 grants but at the time Lola was just starting to come into its own in fact compared to the conditions at Lola Ford's division in SLO looked like paradise Lola was famous for designing and producing hearty all-aluminum body race cars they initially made various single seater front engine race cars for formula 1 formula 2 and formula 3 but when lund entered their shop it wasn't the formula car that caught his attention he was enamored by the Lola mark 6 a fiberglass body Dre scar that still utilized the then-new ford 260 v8 which was capable of making about 350 pretty jacked her spares Wow the Turk alone could of Visser 8 tires turning the best Dunlop rubbers they could find into smoke aka it had a lot of torque only 3 Lola mark sixes were ever built of which LAN and Shelby bought two of them and Jay Leno owns the third my best friend Jay Leno yeah that's the Jay I know you're out there buddy know you're listening in the garage and then he's an early adopter podcast he loves it does he I don't know Jesse and Matt and I went to his garage right and we walk in and dude was eating a steak for lunch like a steak a baked potato and some steamed broccoli and it's just like hell yeah anyway the the mark 6 literally became the prototype for all gt40s if you look at the pictures the similarities of the two cars are pretty apparent Lola and Ford agreed upon a collaboration in the design of the gt40 and signed a two-year contract together though it did not take much time for Lola CEO Eric broadly to clash with Ford he recalled that Ford took a somewhat uptight approach to racing stating that there was no deviation from the script well motor racing is about as far removed from that as you can get I guess he's saying that motor racing is full of improv Wow yeah yeah tell you what I think you do pretty well done if someone told me not to deviate from the script I'd say Yeah right here's my amazon login how about you buy yourself a clue get same day delivery day scripted sure somewhat for the info and then the directors like sir you're a featured extra the guy from Lola wanted to be able to move around on his feet and Ford was like uh-uh sounds like Ford has a lot of opinions and not a lot of experience a lot of structure going on that Ford but following the script was all right for board especially for Carroll Shelby in fact he brought on his old friend and ex Aston Martin team boss John Wyer to the project and the two got crackin the hardest part about the design of the car was the time frame they had to do it in after the failed deal with Ferrari the team at Ford's advanced vehicle department were given less than ten months to design a perfect lamal car basically from scratch the 1964 24 hours of them all was only about 250 days away and the publicity of the project had already shied a major spotlight on them no no while the design of the car was still being created lund traveled throughout Europe purchasing the best state-of-the-art components he could find the selection of these components was crucial as the failure of even a single piece would lead to a DNF now hopefully there's some people who aren't already into cars listen to this DNF means does not finish yes sir and it would turn the entire project into a marketing disaster for Ford what I'm saying Nolan yes is the stakes were haha the eyes of the world were on shall be M Ford they had to succeed or they wouldn't be Corvette killers they be ford killers themselves themselves initially a 3/8 model of the car in Clay had been created back in Fords styling studio in Dearborn Michigan Dearborn Michigan great place designers painted it blue and white the American Racing colors and shipped the entire model to the University of Maryland where it would undergo extensive Windtunnel tests and kind of funny that they don't have their own wind tunnel over there it's just a funny sentence using the data they had collected in the tunnel i lund projected the top speed would be near 210 miles per hour faster than anything Ferrari could compete with you can't whistle hmm the style of the car represented a huge change in motor racing the size and shape alone made it extraordinarily unique to the race track yeah along with its shockingly low stature every square inch of the body had been designed to pierce through the air like a missile Windtunnel testing was not the only innovative technology used to design the gt40 another groundbreaking tech was the computer Wow the computer simulations were used to design every portion of the suspension allowing the car to simulate traveling on different ink lines and surfaces and speeds there's a sim that's crazy I built this in back in the 60s in the 60s they also really low-balled Ferrari like yeah you can have like four dollars to do your racing crap what no it was the most advanced method of suspension design done by any company in the entire world up to that point the obvious choice for the engine was a modified 256 cubic inch Fairlane v8 which made about 350 her Spurs for the race this engine made the most sense as the Fairlane v8 was available in most of the Ford lineup and a win in the mall with the revolutionary gt40 would be great publicity and marketing for the engine mmm it was sort of a no-brainer marketing wise it's kind of a no-brainer when engine are we gonna use but the car had to be durable the transmission was sourced from an Italian company called colotti which sounds like a frozen dessert yes it does delicious ooh can I get a pineapple Khiladi whoo-hoo delicious it was developed in the same town as Ferrari the 24-hour race basically amounted to a torture test of each individual component of the car and the transmission was obviously no exception drivers would shift gears over 9,000 throughout the race and had to decelerate safely from 200 miles per hour to 35 miles per hour in a matter of feet while parts had been sourced and engines had been modified the actual physical construction of the car did not start until mid-december seven months after the design had began he's looking wait yeah what are you doing other teams at the time had been experimenting with newer lightweight alloys and other material composites in their frame construction but since the gt40 project was on a tight schedule they had no choice but to stick with thick steels for the frame but the body was made of fiberglass like the Corvette a full-size mock-up had been sent from the styling studio in Dearborn to a company named specialized mouldings Ltd who then shipped the fiberglass skin to the project in Slough by mid-january the progress reports from lund were not looking hopeful he admitted that the car was well behind schedule and in tributed the delays to the human nature aspects of forming a new team ie in arguing the human nature aspects of forming a new team nobody likes me and nobody respects me as Alena because I say stuff like the human nature aspects of forming a new team they had spent 12 hour day after 12 hour day together and then had been forced to give up most weekends and holidays just to make certain members at this point in January weren't even on speaking terms which is not a level of communication you strive for in any engineering department they could barely force each other to get along and they were running out of time lund Eclair the build time would then be forced to run in tandem to race prep Oh No can you imagine like you're okay Lord has made your company millions of dollars to build this grace car but no one looks each other in the eye like hey can you pass me that spanner you get it sounds horrible on April 1st 1964 the first Ford gt40 was completed 11 months after putting pencil to pipe below this guy talks like a dick I have to wonder if it's just like all printed and hopefully he didn't actually sound like that but 11 months after putting pencil to paint he's like congratulating himself the car was finished only three weeks before lamont testing despite eric broadly pulling out of his two-year contract to supply bodies for the car everything else had turned out pretty good all things considered pretty good he's just like so like the one person who likes him yeah is the word these guys are just like sitting in their study drinking brandy smoking cigars talking about everybody else like everything is everybody Wow this was the biggest amount of money dumped into any race car up into this point in history I just want to remind everybody that they low-balled the f madame Enzo Ferrari and then went and built millions of dollars had been poured into the creation of the gt40 anything to the xym team wanted they got as long as it made the car faster hope I'm glad that last parts on there because it was like okay so the press conference was set to take place on April 3rd Don Frey wanted to reveal the car on the opening day of the New York Auto Show and despite protests by lund and wire claiming that car wasn't ready and needed to be tested they had no choice but to comply with the executives above them the car was shipped to New York City where it be revealed to a horde of reporters none other by Ford and mr. Lee Iacocca himself Lee Iacocca Iacocca people were absolutely enamored with this car this was a Ford that could go 95 miles per hour in Reverse when Henry Ford the second Hank goose saw the car for the first time he was awestruck he wondered what his grandfather Henry Ford who probably would have hated the car would have said about such an endeavor he knew that his father Etzel would have loved the damn thing but Hank dose was not the only one who was taken aback with the beauty of the car in fact everyone was reporters swooned not only over the car but over the story board verse Ferrari an epic showdown you couldn't write a better plot than that Lee Iacocca stood before a crowd of reporters thirsting for information on this beautiful marvel of engineering and gave his presentation this car is not just an American Racing car this is the world car an embodiment not of a Detroit company but of a global friggin Empire that's crazy aiya Coco was talking a big game back in New York but wire lund and the rest of the team were not so convinced just yet my mom practice days were just two and a half weeks away and the car had barely even been started at this point like the engine probably hadn't been started outside right yeah yeah because they finished anyway the team at Ford's advanced vehicle division knew they had a lot of sleepless nights at all I haven't slept in three months okay guys I know we've been working really hard under a really tight deadline but turns out that was the easy part a few days after the New York Auto Show the car touchdown back in England immediately testing the fluid Wow immediately testing began at Goodwood racetrack wires job was to bring it to the best driving talent he could find the first person he found was a young New Zealander with one leg longer than the other named Bruce McLaren oh well he may have worn corrective Footwear you could always identify him due to his limp when he wore his racing suits Bruce McLaren was a top-rated engineer and champion pilot and he was the first driver to be associated with Fords Lamar project McLaren loved test piloting cars he referred to them as untuned piano stating a racing car chassis is like a piano you can make something that looks right with all the wires the right length the right size and pretty close to the right settings but until it's tuned it won't play so well I love that quote yeah we're gave Bruce McLaren specific instructions to drive that quote medium speeds no faster than 145 mph alongside Bruce McLaren stood champion racing driver Phil Hill name that rhymes Phil Hill had a legendary history as a driver for Ferrari but in the year prior he had tested his luck with a new and soon debunked Italian racing firm called ATS unfortunately for fill that entire arrangement turned sour and he failed to win a single race or even finish a single event in 1963 which left him without a ride for the 1964 lamang until he was contracted by Weir to lead the American effort alongside McLaren so he's like a big name who goes to a small team probably wants to help out and then they just suck so everyone thinks he sucks and he's just without luck yeah the press claimed his poor performance was due to a loss of nerve stating he cracked under pressure which is one of the worst things a driver could have attributed to them yeah like yeah like in Ricky Bobby he saw the fear yeah or in Days of Thunder he saw the fear that's right the insults hurtled out of him by the press were nearly career-ending you know at this press oh I know I know you and I have gone through our troubles with the press leave us alone yes I mean my son once he signed on with Ford depressed somehow transformed from mocking him by calling him Mickey Mantle and a Ferrari years earlier to Hamlet in goggles and gloves that probably made sense at the time hasn't aged well as a good nickname it was a right I can't remember it's been a while since I took English in high school he was once one of the most accomplished racing drivers in the world and Ford had provided him the opportunity to prove once again that he had what it takes to keep that title on April 18 1964 lamal test days began for all teams McLaren and Hill were contractually obligated to race for the Cooper team that weekend at the entree 200 in England so to substitute drivers garages were procured for the test those two drivers were Roy Salvadori and jo schlesser Salvadori was a former Lamar champion driver having driven him one under wire in 1959 for Aston Martin while Schleicher was a French Ford dealership owner who was actually known more for his ability to crash cars then raced them great choice for a substitute driver another like that's like such another like rich guy yeah Yeah right like oh here's this race car we've spent millions of dollars in tons of time and tons of heartbreak developing hey you know that guy that crashes a lot yeah he owns one of our dealership yeah let's let him drive okay okay mediately Road testing began and Salvadori took the wheel after a single lap around the track Salvadori pulled into the pit and exited the car visibly upset I can't believe this but I think we're getting rear-wheel speed at 170 miles per he was right the car became terrifyingly unstable at speeds over 160 and mechanics weren't sure if it was due to a suspension or aerodynamic issued lund and Y are conferred and assumed that it was a suspension issue and began making adjustments accordingly to prevent rear liftoff regardless of the cause salvadore II was spooked and he refused to get back in the car my god slasher Oh slasher was eager to try out the amazing new car and he lept into the driver's seat he was given specific instructions to drive safely but he had a shudder raced off disappearing around the first Bend after roughly four minutes he appeared in and flew by the grandstands completing his first sight he did it again he raced down the track and disappeared the entire pit stood watching and waiting for the car to reappear but it never did a few minutes later a phone call came stating that the gt40 had been in a devastating crash but the driver had survived don't thank God it turned out that the car had begun fishtailing down the entire length of the Mulsanne straight and he lost control traveling at roughly 160 miles per hour good lord he crashed in a small wooded area at a kink in the Milan Street called Laguna mobile somehow he managed to escape such a high-speed crash with only a small gash on his forehead to show for it Ford's testing for the day had come to an abrupt end that's amazing crash this multimillion-dollar car that all these people had spent months of their life just in agony creating and he walks away with the coolest car you can have oddly with the freaking scar from lion car oh my goodness the next day they resumed testing in the second and only other prototype of the gt40 in existence soon after testing began Salvadori crashed that one too no why would you let him drive it for board representative called Don Frey with the news stating that he was up to his hips in shattered cars that makes it sound like it isn't his fault but I think I don't know what happened when you got literally like goofus oh my god Lamarr was only two months away and the test weekend had only brought multiple unexpected and unexplainable george w bush says okay fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on you yeah a New York Times article published days after the test had concluded stated that quote people who know money think Ford can build a winner people who know racing are not so sure that's some shade that's Shady Wow the gt40 tests were surrounded in bad publicity I wonder why but luckily for Ford Iacocca had it ace in the hole Iacocca managed to shroud the bad publicity in the race with a ten million dollar blitzkrieg of media in order to embed Ford's newest car deep deep into the public consciousness for I coca had Justin veiled at the World's Fair the new Ford Mustang oh yeah oh yeah that thing dude we spelled you an episode on that someday somewhere down the line but like car press today is not like it was back then people were obsessed with this thing because they didn't have phones to be obsessed with well it just took over like Mustang mania was real with the spotlight temporarily removed from the disastrous gt40 project the team had a chance to diagnose and repair what had gone wrong that day all while building brand new Ford GT 40s to replace the ones that had been mysteriously totaled the race was just around the corner weeks away we've looked into the crashes both of them and we found that the issue in both crashes was the drivers hands were covered in jelly and he was slipping and sliding all over the wheel oh my god June 20th a 1964 race day Ford's public debut of the gt40 drew millions of eyes from all over the globe the turnout at Lamar was incredible officials state that it was the largest crowd ever capping at over 300,000 participants most of them of course had come to see what newspapers and television had promised to be the biggest rivalry to ever grace the track at Lamar Ford versus Ferrari the final bout the big one sunday sunday sunday into Monday into Monday Saturday afternoon the Sunday afternoon you're gonna pay for the seat and you're probably gonna need it cuz there's a day long race it's a day long race you're gonna want to sit down for this you can stand for maybe an hour anyway few modifications were made to the gt40 in the few weeks after testing a spoiler had been added to the rear of the car to prevent the catastrophic liftoff at high speeds but that was about it quote the spoiler had the effect of putting feathers on an arrow as one described it have you ever shot an arrow without feathers no not as good I believe it it was immensely apparent on the first day of practice that this race would take place at historic speeds Ferrari was releasing a newer and faster car every year under the lead of their new young chief designer he proposed the idea of placing a 12 cylinder engine in the rear of the 250p making Ferraris first mid-engine racecar a little host note a rear-engine car is like the porsche where the engine is behind the rear axle mid-engine is when it's between the cockpit and the rear axle and front engine is when it's in front of the front axle or on it and then there's made front engine is when it's behind the front axle you learn something new every day and hopefully you learn it on doughnuts although the decision was met with much resistance from Ferrari employees it turned out to be the right one the new mid-engined Ferrari 250 P shattered almost every speed record in testing ferrari driver john surtees was breaking his previous years lapse record by over 10 seconds that's a lot most of all they had the confidence that Ford would never be able to truly compete with a purebred race car such as a Ferrari Ferrari driver Luigi Chinetti even said in an interview after all the best American sports car is the Jeep but no the biggest challenge that Ford was forced to overcome was the time they had to design their cars while most race cars evolved over time the gt40 was forced to evolve from nothing and hopefully have it done correctly on the first try uh so yeah the odds were against Ford at this race Ferraris were beautifully balanced in all fine tune machines that have been perfected for years while the gt40 was really just learning how to take its first steps that's like taking Serena Williams ok potentially the greatest athlete in history and then putting her up against you me in a tennis match yeah we don't know how it's gonna turn out while Ferrari was across the paddock ring in their own Bell wire was embracing his own racing philosophy unlike Enzo Ferrari wire believed in a team approach and that each driver was a cog in his victory machine each driver is a cog in my victory machine while I planned for Richie Ginther an ex Ferrari f1 driver and friend of Bill Hill to play the role of the rabbit and try and drive the Ferraris into breaking down so just to clarify that last part we're hope that the Ferrari driver would drive so hard to outrun the Fords then they would break themselves down yeah ok any tasks the one dude to be like hey make these guys chase you yeah and then the guys gonna win yeah they prepared to launch in the style of a famous Lamaze start as the clock struck four pm the race began drivers raced down across the track into their cars on foot yeah on foot engines roar to life as cars began to speed down the track and what inevitably became the world's fastest traffic jam at least most of the cars started except for Phil Hills gt40 that is Ford's rabbit was immediately plagued with fuel evaporation issues causing the car to stall as quickly as it had come to life how embarrassing that's so embarrassing other cars raced by him forcing him to endure a deafening screech of exhaust notes mechanics flooded to his car but no one was able to properly fix the complicated Italian carburetor design the only person qualified for such a repair was the representative sent by the carb company but he was denied entry into the pits from the race officials by the time he finally got going he had fallen 22 minutes behind and was now sitting in 44th place luckily for Ford though Hill was a master endurance driver and he knew exactly how to drive to catch up yeah so like in these big endurance races that sounds like a lot and it is but like there it is possible to come back from such a big deficit he was able to find and follow every perfect racing line shaving seconds off the expected lap time after all the difference between a four-minute lap and a three minute and 58 second lap equal to about 25 miles over the course of the race true concentration is not aware of itself he'll explained by 5:30 p.m. every gt40 was still incredibly on track and going strong that is impressive Richie Ginter was leading the race with Surtees behind in second at 5:30 he pulled in for a pit stop in Ford was faced with a terrible unexpected lesson if your car is the fastest and most agile on the field none of that matters if your pit stops are slowed by the time Ginter left the pits two minutes and seven seconds had passed just long enough for Surtees to take the lead yet again these guys are a bunch bonus a little more than four hours into the race Ford had its first catastrophe it's already had three Richard Atwoods car burst into flames as he was flying down the track thankfully Atwood recognized the smoke billowing from his engine just behind his head and stopped the car and pulled off to the side before it had the chance to cause any serious injuries one of the three gt40s was now out for the count totaled by the flames that engulfed its fiberglass body later investigation revealed the cause of the fire while the fuel line's that were suspended above the engine were supposed to be made of an ultra strong synthetic material they were actually constructed of regular nylon the lack of durability in the lines combined with the extreme temperatures had led to the fuel lines and Atwoods car to melt oh my causing their car to burst into flames wire commented on the entire incident stating this was a result of almost criminal negligence it was a miracle no others cars were affected the fuel line's went over the engine that's insane yeah and their me you you don't think it can get worse mmm-hmm and then it gets worse yeah shortly after this event within an hour Master Gregory who shared a car with Richie Gunter broke down during the fifth hour of the race Gregory was having issues getting the car out of second gear so he brought it into the pit within the pit it was discovered that the colotti transmission had failed roylene couldn't help but admire the irony in this specific component failing Khiladi transmissions were designed and manufactured in Modena Italy the same hometown that's Ferrari Ford was now down to one car and that was the car piloted by Phil Hill and Bruce McLaren at midnight McLaren took over for Hill he later described that four-hour shift as the best 500 racing miles I've ever covered Wow by 1:00 a.m. 20 of the 55 cars had dropped out of the race and Hill and McLaren had miraculously driven the Ford from 44th on the pole all the way up into fifth Wow onlookers were shocked as the gt40 blazed around the track the good kind of he's not the bad kind hey isn't that the car that the chocolate guy crushed hill and MacLaren's gt40 was easily the fastest on the field at 5:20 a.m. he'll set a lap record of three minutes forty nine point two seconds but the new record celebration was short-lived minutes later Hill was forced to pull into the pit the same Khiladi transmission had failed in third and the final gt40 was out of the race Wow Ferrari finished first second and third in 1964 while Ford was stuck with a DNF getting nowhere near the finish line Henry Ford's second filled with rage vowed that Ford would return next year and was determined to show Ferrari that Americans could do just too good a job as them I know I've said it before but this time I mean it Ford wanted to win and there was only one man he knew that was able to beat Ferrari at Lamar because he had done it before hi I'm Carol Shelby and performance is my business Wow that's where I'll pick up next time on past gas what hubris idiot we can do this yeah it's just like throwing money at a problem and that's what you get I mean that's the lesson here for sure yeah you can't just throw money at a problem Wow so next time we'll talk about the life of Carroll Shelby who list yeah he's really the coolest dude we'll talk about his early life his experience at LeMond and how he helped change the horrendous gt40 at this point he's like all of our favorite data he's the best he really is and I can't wait to dive really deep into him just right into Carroll I can't wait to get into that guy yeah check out if you're not a donut fan already I hope you are by now check out our YouTube and our Facebook and our instant gram all of those are at donut media follow me on instagram at James Humphrey follow Nolan at Nolan J sorry thank you this is really fun again and I can't wait I can't wait till the next one yeah all right super fun bang bang way we can stealwhen news of the failed signing reached henry ford ii he was stunned with rage issuing the iconic order build me a car that will crush ferrari at lamar don't you know the some sources say that the order was actually go to l'amour and today we are continuing on in our four part series on Ford vs. Ferrari at Lamar one of the greatest rivalries in all of sports and possibly all of everything every yea heaven verse hell yep barks versus a and W barks versus a W versus mug whoa on our last episode we did a deep dive into the life of Enzo Ferrari himself leading up to today's subject the deal between Ferrari and the Ford Motor Company that ultimately fell apart and set the whole rivalry in motion when people thought about American performance in the 1960s there was only one name that came to mind Corvette Chevrolet debuted their european-inspired sports car in 1953 to wide acclaim no mainstream manufacturer had ever built a car like it the Corvette was the first production car to have a body made out of fiberglass which when coupled with the 265 cubic inch v8 in 1955 made it fast as heck you could say it went like heck by the end of the 60s the Corvette had a solid Motorsports resume with wins all over the US and abroad henry ford ii was having none of that Henry or Hank the deuce hell yeah was the eldest hell yeah dude junior nope deuce was the eldest grandson of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford he had taken the reins of FMC in 1945 and ruled with an iron fist ever since knew that a surefire way to sway people away from Chevrolet would be to prove Ford superiority in the same place his grandfather began on the racetrack so he set his sights on the most important racing series in the automotive industry to date them all it is properly known as the 24 hours of the mom though it is a name that needs no further introduction for those who know the 24 hours of the MA is one of the most dangerous races in the world it is an arduous 24 hour long endurance race where manufacturers proved to the world that their cars are the best on the planet if you've ever wondered where the hierarchy of race cars comes from this is the place a win in Lamar meant that you were the best and the prestige associated with it has been seen by the whole world also the drivers pee in the seats and then the next guy to get in the car has to sit in his pee that's how big of a deal it is if I were in the mall with you like all your asparagus already having to pee yeah and in the time that it takes me to walk to the bathroom and start going I'm like wow already huh never ceases to amaze me it's one of my favorite things it's truly incredible Ford knew that the best way to draw interest away from the Corvette and back to Ford would be to outperform everyone at Lamar and Wow audiences as he did it there was no almost winning or almost being the best - Hank goose he was going to win at Lamont no matter how many resources it would require once his sights had been set on ylim all ford henry ford ii immediately started running into a few issues the biggest of those issues was ford's lack of racing experience Lou I could see how that could get in the way yeah Ford's cars had been used in racing in the past but largely by private teams and companies to Enzo Ferraris Scuderia Ferrari in our last episode he didn't race forwards but like that same principle a while a Model T had been run with a llama the real racial Mike Ford Model T with wooden wheels for 24 hours straight that's insane your back would be destroyed it's true the real racing history of Ford began as the flat just terrified going zero miles an hour as the flathead v8 had become legend among the hot rodding community in fact a Ford Lincoln said oh yeah Ford yeah had won the first ever NASCAR race in 1949 while their cars had been modified and used for racing in the past Ford themselves never had an official racing team in fact the only racing experience the company had up to that point was an occasional race driven by Henry's old man's old man Henry Ford senior even though thanks to Henry Ford the company could claim to have a motor sporting heritage it really was nothing more than just a claim every car manufacturer knew that to get investors you needed to win races and Ford was not a foreigner to that concept but while Ford may have participated within motor sports they certainly did not excel at it the same way that companies such as Ferrari and Porsche companies who design their cars with racing specifically in mind realizing he was lacking in certain necessary departments henry ford ii had an idea that is literally the embodiment of every rich person's version of the american dream he decided that if he was not able to become the best racing endurance team he was going to do the next best thing he was just going to buy the best unit endurance racing team yes that's what I love I love that yes you know what they say if you can't beat him own him if he can't beat him own he set his sights on one struggling company that had proven time and time again six times to be exact that they knew a thing or two when it came to going fast for long periods of time after visiting a ray in observing the cars on the track he pointed to one of them and said we need those red cars don't you know oh yeah while Ferrari was basically one of the best when it came to racing there was just one tiny thing that they were not so good at that was having money everything Enzo Ferrari did he did the expensive way which is not exactly known for being the most efficient way to run a company the company never made money due to the fact that every cent earned was funneled directly back into racing Ferrari had been in a large financial decline recently slowly meeting a fate worse than death bankruptcy without turning this into a macroeconomics lesson the supply and demand curve was hitting Ferrari hard all while John Locke was rolling in his grave that's an economics joke anyway Enzo Ferrari was suffering and that is when Henry Ford decided to try to get his foot in the door of motorsports one man's flaming dumpster fire of a financial burden is another man's opportunity at this point in history Ford and Ferrari were tailored to about as different a markets as was humanly possible Fort Lee built cars for the average consumer for the family man large cushy layin yachts that would slowly lumber down the highway Ferrari built race cars that were dumbed down and made street-legal as Enzo had never really wanted to sell street cars in the first place Ferrari sold street cars to fund racing development which was the exact opposite of what was expected of American manufacturers at the time when we last met Enzo he was about to meet with a man named Phil Murr paradise by the way weird name yeah it sounds like like in the 20s when movie men first showed up to Los Angeles and they're like this is a real film or paradise the Sun stays up 364 days a year I just realized why Hollywood is here yeah it's because of the weather I feel like an idiot and there's a lot of different terrain yeah it being a high desert you can get mountain shots you can shoot some cowboy movies out in the desert you can shoot on the beach if you want maybe a little beach ball bingo and then what do they do they erect it massive studios and shot everything inside that is pretty counterintuitive when you think about it anyway Phil in Paradise the president of the Italian branch of the Ford Motor Company at first paradise proposed a partnership where Ford would sell Ford Brent a Ford branded sports car designed by Ferrari and in return Ferrari would be make a bunch of money Enzo was interested but he knew that this was just a soft sell American car makers had history of beginning partnerships than buying a controlling share of the company they bought in fact Chrysler had done the same thing with small Italian maker Simca just a few years before Enzo was willing to give up control of Ferrari Road car production on one single condition James listen closely this is important Enzo would do it he would partner with the Ford Motor Company if he could keep complete independence when it came to managing his race team Scuderia Ferrari that was all Enzo asked that's all I ask you can have all the road cars you want but they're AC she is on my heart and I will not forgive you Amaya heart to Ford the idea of buying Ferrari made complete sense as it allowed them to incorporate into their company a subsection devoted to this new kind of sporty automobile that had only recently been introduced to the United States after all a gentlemen's agreement made between the major manufacturers in America nearly a decade earlier led to the promise that each company would not put any money into racing it wasn't until Chevy's started working on the corvette project that the gentlemen's agreement was blatantly violated leaving all of Chevys competitors in the dust when it came to the performance market Chevy was sweeping the floor with Ford and there was nearly a 15 percent market share increased by Chevy once the Corvette started winning races as the saying goes you win on Sunday you sell on Monday Ford was incredibly far behind Chevy in terms of performance and now sales figures as the purchase of Ferrari was a logical and on paper easy way to kick-start Ford's own performance division after all Ferrari would bring a competitor to the domestic markets and would bring along a very hefty racing pedigree so in 1963 Ford sent an offer a fifteen million dollars to buy out the entirety of the Ferrari company Enzo Ferrari obviously showed interest in the offer he was like hmm that's a lot of lira brother as he was desperate for funding for his company that had only sold 493 cars the year before Ford and Ferrari had come to an agreement there would be two separate divisions of the company a Ferrari Ford division that would exist to take part in races and afford Ferrari division that would exist in order to sell passenger sport GT cars on May 21st 1963 executives from the Ford Motor Company met with Enzo Ferrari at that Ferrari headquarters while Ford made sure to arm an army of suits for the deal Enzo Ferrari was surprisingly nonchalant about the entire situation calmly sitting across from them with only his local town lawyer by his side to oversee the deal the sticking point of the agreement came down to the racing side of the business you see Ferrari never had any huge interest in selling Road cars the sale of Road cars was how Ferrari funded its racing division like we said earlier it was a racing company at heart and had no interest in changing that the sale agreement between Ford and Ferrari stipulated that while Enzo Ferrari would still maintain control over the Ferrari Ford racing division Ford Motor Company would have to authorize any spending by Ferrari Ford after the division spent 450 million lira so I did some calculations with different inflation websites and 450 million lira which you know sounds like a lot converts to about seven hundred and seventy one thousand dollars if my math is correct that today's money that's back then right so for a racing program as large and successful as Scuderia Ferrari that's kind of nothing this did not please Enzo all he wanted was complete independence for his racing program and this spending limit took that away so Enzo pulled out his legendary purple fountain pen and underlined that entire section writing beside it no non verba na which translates to no that is no good after shouting a large amount of verbal abuse towards the executives from Ford in Italian Enzo turned to his lawyer and said let's go eat or something yelling at these Michigan men has made me young and they walked out leaving behind a room full of stunned bored suits now what I think happened is like at first the negotiations is like okay yeah you can have your racing division whatever and of course I don't have any direct proof to back this up but I feel like Ford might have been like here's this guy in Italy his company is struggling if we give him a huge amount of money like 15 million he's probably gonna ignore everything else in that contract yeah I think it's like they're like yeah we're gonna wave this big cheque in front of him like he's not on our level at all and take give him fifteen million dollars and then also only allow him to spend like less than a million dollars a year on the race team like that just like doesn't make sense yeah and it's just such like a big company move yeah totally like it's such like a well ok it'll be yours and you'll be in full control but I mean you gotta ask us yeah when news of the failed signing reached Henry Ford the second he was stunned with rage issuing the iconic order build me a car that will crush Ferrari at Lamar don't you know know though some sources say that the order was actually go to l'amour and beat his don't you know I'm hate dinky little actually eaten Italian tell me out on my company my father built the assembly wine and I'm gonna assembly one here's the issue was that Ford didn't exactly know how to assembly line Ferraris Ferrari was in their prime having won multiple races at limo in the years prior and Ford had only just recently tried to get back into the racing game by purchasing Ferrari all four new is they needed a car that could beat Ferrari and win at Lamar the car had to be fast in the straights at over 200 miles an hour all while enduring over 3,000 miles of mechanical torture so Henry Ford did what he knew best he paid someone to figure it out for him do you know what I came into this thinking Ferrari and right now I'm thinking before I was the same as you and then I read somebody both these guys are terrible yeah but Ferrari less terrible than I thought Ford more I don't think you'd get along with him with Henry Ford yeah no I probably would get along with Ferrari though yeah he seems for each shelf but he seems self-made I think what I'm realizing is I probably wouldn't get along with the heads of any major car company I'm more of a well you're you like you're ahead of you're ahead yourself you know yeah yeah I'm the boss yeah I don't need any more bosses in the room with me chief engineer Don Frey called for the creation of what would be known as the Ford advanced vehicle department and he hired an expert British engineer named Roy lund to lead it Roy Allen had a history with Lamar having been involved with and Martin's LeMond efforts in 1949 just 14 years prior he became where the most influential behind-the-scenes names of the automotive industry citing a prior trip to Europe lund hypothesized that a winning car would need to travel at over 200 miles per hour or one football field per second while having died said pitch yeah why do you guys call your sport soccer yeah why why you call it football you know any Venezia faint sent for that one time in the beginning and then after a touchdown and then one more time at halftime why didn't why couldn't you just come up with yo name he later said in an interview that with the exception with the exception of land-speed record calls no vehicle has ever been developed to travel at speeds in the excess of 200 miles per hour on normal highways these beans are greater than the takeoff speed of most aircraft but conversely the problem will be to keep the vehicle on the ground lund knew he had a big project on his hands bushy project but before you can get started you first had to get it approved on June 12th 1963 less than a month after henry ford ii AKA deuce had sworn vengeance on ferrari rory lund presented a highly confidential project to the board members at Ford he presented a mid-engine car filled with custom fabricated pieces it was a car that looked like no other car because it was like no other car except maybe in regards to the car it was based on the project was given the name gt40 because it was only 40 inches tall that's kind of a weird metric to name your car yeah there's no other car that's named after the Land Rover did cars named after the length that's also kind of I don't American car don't trucks named themselves after how much they can tow what's a 3500 it's like bed capacity yeah yeah and remember Ford also wanted to humiliate Chevy in a memo written by Lunt he addressed the gt40 as a high-performance - seen a sports car prototype that if produced in low volume will neutralize that call their image by substantially better performance and by surpassing in style and feature appeal according to participants the entire project took less than five minutes to get approved the remaining 55 minutes of the meeting was spent discussing market strategy the Ford's new Corvette killer well how are we gonna position this in the market I think posters yeah posters we'll put posters everywhere um what if we did what if we showed a picture of like a Corvette yeah and just like a gt40 on top of its Corvette brains out or maybe okay would it okay maybe not that okay what if we just make a poster right okay and the Corvette is like in the corner yeah crying okay and the gt40 is just Tom and it's wife's oh my job in the brains out of the Corvettes wife what the people at Ford what the people at Ford had determined was that in order to beat a European car company you had to do it on European soil using European pert in their own world so Ford contracted a small British motorsport company in a dingy industrial park located in slough UK just outside of London and sent his advanced Design Lead roylene back to his homeland as well as about 1.7 million dollars to utilize however he saw fit in order to kick the most Italian ass possible it's kind of lame that he gave a million dollars more than he was willing to give Ferrari what the heck Ford wanted someone with experience beating American Muscle to help lead the team you got some experience doing that and for that role they found no one more suited to the task than the Corvette killer himself Carol Shelby yeah as author aj beim statesman's book don't like hell Carroll Shelby had created a business model that depended on winning races if the cars didn't win the cars wouldn't sell his company lived and died on the track they brought along Shelby primarily to get the advanced vehicle division started as he was preoccupied with his own llama GT division entry which will cover in depth on her next episode once in England Shelby found a small racecar engineering company operating out of Huntington England Lola International Ltd a company named after the hit 1955 song whatever Lola wants Lola gets she sounds scary Lola international was founded in 1958 and unfortunately went out of business in 2012 2012 yeah they were around for a while huh in 2012 after failing to secure proper funding from f1 grants but at the time Lola was just starting to come into its own in fact compared to the conditions at Lola Ford's division in SLO looked like paradise Lola was famous for designing and producing hearty all-aluminum body race cars they initially made various single seater front engine race cars for formula 1 formula 2 and formula 3 but when lund entered their shop it wasn't the formula car that caught his attention he was enamored by the Lola mark 6 a fiberglass body Dre scar that still utilized the then-new ford 260 v8 which was capable of making about 350 pretty jacked her spares Wow the Turk alone could of Visser 8 tires turning the best Dunlop rubbers they could find into smoke aka it had a lot of torque only 3 Lola mark sixes were ever built of which LAN and Shelby bought two of them and Jay Leno owns the third my best friend Jay Leno yeah that's the Jay I know you're out there buddy know you're listening in the garage and then he's an early adopter podcast he loves it does he I don't know Jesse and Matt and I went to his garage right and we walk in and dude was eating a steak for lunch like a steak a baked potato and some steamed broccoli and it's just like hell yeah anyway the the mark 6 literally became the prototype for all gt40s if you look at the pictures the similarities of the two cars are pretty apparent Lola and Ford agreed upon a collaboration in the design of the gt40 and signed a two-year contract together though it did not take much time for Lola CEO Eric broadly to clash with Ford he recalled that Ford took a somewhat uptight approach to racing stating that there was no deviation from the script well motor racing is about as far removed from that as you can get I guess he's saying that motor racing is full of improv Wow yeah yeah tell you what I think you do pretty well done if someone told me not to deviate from the script I'd say Yeah right here's my amazon login how about you buy yourself a clue get same day delivery day scripted sure somewhat for the info and then the directors like sir you're a featured extra the guy from Lola wanted to be able to move around on his feet and Ford was like uh-uh sounds like Ford has a lot of opinions and not a lot of experience a lot of structure going on that Ford but following the script was all right for board especially for Carroll Shelby in fact he brought on his old friend and ex Aston Martin team boss John Wyer to the project and the two got crackin the hardest part about the design of the car was the time frame they had to do it in after the failed deal with Ferrari the team at Ford's advanced vehicle department were given less than ten months to design a perfect lamal car basically from scratch the 1964 24 hours of them all was only about 250 days away and the publicity of the project had already shied a major spotlight on them no no while the design of the car was still being created lund traveled throughout Europe purchasing the best state-of-the-art components he could find the selection of these components was crucial as the failure of even a single piece would lead to a DNF now hopefully there's some people who aren't already into cars listen to this DNF means does not finish yes sir and it would turn the entire project into a marketing disaster for Ford what I'm saying Nolan yes is the stakes were haha the eyes of the world were on shall be M Ford they had to succeed or they wouldn't be Corvette killers they be ford killers themselves themselves initially a 3/8 model of the car in Clay had been created back in Fords styling studio in Dearborn Michigan Dearborn Michigan great place designers painted it blue and white the American Racing colors and shipped the entire model to the University of Maryland where it would undergo extensive Windtunnel tests and kind of funny that they don't have their own wind tunnel over there it's just a funny sentence using the data they had collected in the tunnel i lund projected the top speed would be near 210 miles per hour faster than anything Ferrari could compete with you can't whistle hmm the style of the car represented a huge change in motor racing the size and shape alone made it extraordinarily unique to the race track yeah along with its shockingly low stature every square inch of the body had been designed to pierce through the air like a missile Windtunnel testing was not the only innovative technology used to design the gt40 another groundbreaking tech was the computer Wow the computer simulations were used to design every portion of the suspension allowing the car to simulate traveling on different ink lines and surfaces and speeds there's a sim that's crazy I built this in back in the 60s in the 60s they also really low-balled Ferrari like yeah you can have like four dollars to do your racing crap what no it was the most advanced method of suspension design done by any company in the entire world up to that point the obvious choice for the engine was a modified 256 cubic inch Fairlane v8 which made about 350 her Spurs for the race this engine made the most sense as the Fairlane v8 was available in most of the Ford lineup and a win in the mall with the revolutionary gt40 would be great publicity and marketing for the engine mmm it was sort of a no-brainer marketing wise it's kind of a no-brainer when engine are we gonna use but the car had to be durable the transmission was sourced from an Italian company called colotti which sounds like a frozen dessert yes it does delicious ooh can I get a pineapple Khiladi whoo-hoo delicious it was developed in the same town as Ferrari the 24-hour race basically amounted to a torture test of each individual component of the car and the transmission was obviously no exception drivers would shift gears over 9,000 throughout the race and had to decelerate safely from 200 miles per hour to 35 miles per hour in a matter of feet while parts had been sourced and engines had been modified the actual physical construction of the car did not start until mid-december seven months after the design had began he's looking wait yeah what are you doing other teams at the time had been experimenting with newer lightweight alloys and other material composites in their frame construction but since the gt40 project was on a tight schedule they had no choice but to stick with thick steels for the frame but the body was made of fiberglass like the Corvette a full-size mock-up had been sent from the styling studio in Dearborn to a company named specialized mouldings Ltd who then shipped the fiberglass skin to the project in Slough by mid-january the progress reports from lund were not looking hopeful he admitted that the car was well behind schedule and in tributed the delays to the human nature aspects of forming a new team ie in arguing the human nature aspects of forming a new team nobody likes me and nobody respects me as Alena because I say stuff like the human nature aspects of forming a new team they had spent 12 hour day after 12 hour day together and then had been forced to give up most weekends and holidays just to make certain members at this point in January weren't even on speaking terms which is not a level of communication you strive for in any engineering department they could barely force each other to get along and they were running out of time lund Eclair the build time would then be forced to run in tandem to race prep Oh No can you imagine like you're okay Lord has made your company millions of dollars to build this grace car but no one looks each other in the eye like hey can you pass me that spanner you get it sounds horrible on April 1st 1964 the first Ford gt40 was completed 11 months after putting pencil to pipe below this guy talks like a dick I have to wonder if it's just like all printed and hopefully he didn't actually sound like that but 11 months after putting pencil to paint he's like congratulating himself the car was finished only three weeks before lamont testing despite eric broadly pulling out of his two-year contract to supply bodies for the car everything else had turned out pretty good all things considered pretty good he's just like so like the one person who likes him yeah is the word these guys are just like sitting in their study drinking brandy smoking cigars talking about everybody else like everything is everybody Wow this was the biggest amount of money dumped into any race car up into this point in history I just want to remind everybody that they low-balled the f madame Enzo Ferrari and then went and built millions of dollars had been poured into the creation of the gt40 anything to the xym team wanted they got as long as it made the car faster hope I'm glad that last parts on there because it was like okay so the press conference was set to take place on April 3rd Don Frey wanted to reveal the car on the opening day of the New York Auto Show and despite protests by lund and wire claiming that car wasn't ready and needed to be tested they had no choice but to comply with the executives above them the car was shipped to New York City where it be revealed to a horde of reporters none other by Ford and mr. Lee Iacocca himself Lee Iacocca Iacocca people were absolutely enamored with this car this was a Ford that could go 95 miles per hour in Reverse when Henry Ford the second Hank goose saw the car for the first time he was awestruck he wondered what his grandfather Henry Ford who probably would have hated the car would have said about such an endeavor he knew that his father Etzel would have loved the damn thing but Hank dose was not the only one who was taken aback with the beauty of the car in fact everyone was reporters swooned not only over the car but over the story board verse Ferrari an epic showdown you couldn't write a better plot than that Lee Iacocca stood before a crowd of reporters thirsting for information on this beautiful marvel of engineering and gave his presentation this car is not just an American Racing car this is the world car an embodiment not of a Detroit company but of a global friggin Empire that's crazy aiya Coco was talking a big game back in New York but wire lund and the rest of the team were not so convinced just yet my mom practice days were just two and a half weeks away and the car had barely even been started at this point like the engine probably hadn't been started outside right yeah yeah because they finished anyway the team at Ford's advanced vehicle division knew they had a lot of sleepless nights at all I haven't slept in three months okay guys I know we've been working really hard under a really tight deadline but turns out that was the easy part a few days after the New York Auto Show the car touchdown back in England immediately testing the fluid Wow immediately testing began at Goodwood racetrack wires job was to bring it to the best driving talent he could find the first person he found was a young New Zealander with one leg longer than the other named Bruce McLaren oh well he may have worn corrective Footwear you could always identify him due to his limp when he wore his racing suits Bruce McLaren was a top-rated engineer and champion pilot and he was the first driver to be associated with Fords Lamar project McLaren loved test piloting cars he referred to them as untuned piano stating a racing car chassis is like a piano you can make something that looks right with all the wires the right length the right size and pretty close to the right settings but until it's tuned it won't play so well I love that quote yeah we're gave Bruce McLaren specific instructions to drive that quote medium speeds no faster than 145 mph alongside Bruce McLaren stood champion racing driver Phil Hill name that rhymes Phil Hill had a legendary history as a driver for Ferrari but in the year prior he had tested his luck with a new and soon debunked Italian racing firm called ATS unfortunately for fill that entire arrangement turned sour and he failed to win a single race or even finish a single event in 1963 which left him without a ride for the 1964 lamang until he was contracted by Weir to lead the American effort alongside McLaren so he's like a big name who goes to a small team probably wants to help out and then they just suck so everyone thinks he sucks and he's just without luck yeah the press claimed his poor performance was due to a loss of nerve stating he cracked under pressure which is one of the worst things a driver could have attributed to them yeah like yeah like in Ricky Bobby he saw the fear yeah or in Days of Thunder he saw the fear that's right the insults hurtled out of him by the press were nearly career-ending you know at this press oh I know I know you and I have gone through our troubles with the press leave us alone yes I mean my son once he signed on with Ford depressed somehow transformed from mocking him by calling him Mickey Mantle and a Ferrari years earlier to Hamlet in goggles and gloves that probably made sense at the time hasn't aged well as a good nickname it was a right I can't remember it's been a while since I took English in high school he was once one of the most accomplished racing drivers in the world and Ford had provided him the opportunity to prove once again that he had what it takes to keep that title on April 18 1964 lamal test days began for all teams McLaren and Hill were contractually obligated to race for the Cooper team that weekend at the entree 200 in England so to substitute drivers garages were procured for the test those two drivers were Roy Salvadori and jo schlesser Salvadori was a former Lamar champion driver having driven him one under wire in 1959 for Aston Martin while Schleicher was a French Ford dealership owner who was actually known more for his ability to crash cars then raced them great choice for a substitute driver another like that's like such another like rich guy yeah Yeah right like oh here's this race car we've spent millions of dollars in tons of time and tons of heartbreak developing hey you know that guy that crashes a lot yeah he owns one of our dealership yeah let's let him drive okay okay mediately Road testing began and Salvadori took the wheel after a single lap around the track Salvadori pulled into the pit and exited the car visibly upset I can't believe this but I think we're getting rear-wheel speed at 170 miles per he was right the car became terrifyingly unstable at speeds over 160 and mechanics weren't sure if it was due to a suspension or aerodynamic issued lund and Y are conferred and assumed that it was a suspension issue and began making adjustments accordingly to prevent rear liftoff regardless of the cause salvadore II was spooked and he refused to get back in the car my god slasher Oh slasher was eager to try out the amazing new car and he lept into the driver's seat he was given specific instructions to drive safely but he had a shudder raced off disappearing around the first Bend after roughly four minutes he appeared in and flew by the grandstands completing his first sight he did it again he raced down the track and disappeared the entire pit stood watching and waiting for the car to reappear but it never did a few minutes later a phone call came stating that the gt40 had been in a devastating crash but the driver had survived don't thank God it turned out that the car had begun fishtailing down the entire length of the Mulsanne straight and he lost control traveling at roughly 160 miles per hour good lord he crashed in a small wooded area at a kink in the Milan Street called Laguna mobile somehow he managed to escape such a high-speed crash with only a small gash on his forehead to show for it Ford's testing for the day had come to an abrupt end that's amazing crash this multimillion-dollar car that all these people had spent months of their life just in agony creating and he walks away with the coolest car you can have oddly with the freaking scar from lion car oh my goodness the next day they resumed testing in the second and only other prototype of the gt40 in existence soon after testing began Salvadori crashed that one too no why would you let him drive it for board representative called Don Frey with the news stating that he was up to his hips in shattered cars that makes it sound like it isn't his fault but I think I don't know what happened when you got literally like goofus oh my god Lamarr was only two months away and the test weekend had only brought multiple unexpected and unexplainable george w bush says okay fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on you yeah a New York Times article published days after the test had concluded stated that quote people who know money think Ford can build a winner people who know racing are not so sure that's some shade that's Shady Wow the gt40 tests were surrounded in bad publicity I wonder why but luckily for Ford Iacocca had it ace in the hole Iacocca managed to shroud the bad publicity in the race with a ten million dollar blitzkrieg of media in order to embed Ford's newest car deep deep into the public consciousness for I coca had Justin veiled at the World's Fair the new Ford Mustang oh yeah oh yeah that thing dude we spelled you an episode on that someday somewhere down the line but like car press today is not like it was back then people were obsessed with this thing because they didn't have phones to be obsessed with well it just took over like Mustang mania was real with the spotlight temporarily removed from the disastrous gt40 project the team had a chance to diagnose and repair what had gone wrong that day all while building brand new Ford GT 40s to replace the ones that had been mysteriously totaled the race was just around the corner weeks away we've looked into the crashes both of them and we found that the issue in both crashes was the drivers hands were covered in jelly and he was slipping and sliding all over the wheel oh my god June 20th a 1964 race day Ford's public debut of the gt40 drew millions of eyes from all over the globe the turnout at Lamar was incredible officials state that it was the largest crowd ever capping at over 300,000 participants most of them of course had come to see what newspapers and television had promised to be the biggest rivalry to ever grace the track at Lamar Ford versus Ferrari the final bout the big one sunday sunday sunday into Monday into Monday Saturday afternoon the Sunday afternoon you're gonna pay for the seat and you're probably gonna need it cuz there's a day long race it's a day long race you're gonna want to sit down for this you can stand for maybe an hour anyway few modifications were made to the gt40 in the few weeks after testing a spoiler had been added to the rear of the car to prevent the catastrophic liftoff at high speeds but that was about it quote the spoiler had the effect of putting feathers on an arrow as one described it have you ever shot an arrow without feathers no not as good I believe it it was immensely apparent on the first day of practice that this race would take place at historic speeds Ferrari was releasing a newer and faster car every year under the lead of their new young chief designer he proposed the idea of placing a 12 cylinder engine in the rear of the 250p making Ferraris first mid-engine racecar a little host note a rear-engine car is like the porsche where the engine is behind the rear axle mid-engine is when it's between the cockpit and the rear axle and front engine is when it's in front of the front axle or on it and then there's made front engine is when it's behind the front axle you learn something new every day and hopefully you learn it on doughnuts although the decision was met with much resistance from Ferrari employees it turned out to be the right one the new mid-engined Ferrari 250 P shattered almost every speed record in testing ferrari driver john surtees was breaking his previous years lapse record by over 10 seconds that's a lot most of all they had the confidence that Ford would never be able to truly compete with a purebred race car such as a Ferrari Ferrari driver Luigi Chinetti even said in an interview after all the best American sports car is the Jeep but no the biggest challenge that Ford was forced to overcome was the time they had to design their cars while most race cars evolved over time the gt40 was forced to evolve from nothing and hopefully have it done correctly on the first try uh so yeah the odds were against Ford at this race Ferraris were beautifully balanced in all fine tune machines that have been perfected for years while the gt40 was really just learning how to take its first steps that's like taking Serena Williams ok potentially the greatest athlete in history and then putting her up against you me in a tennis match yeah we don't know how it's gonna turn out while Ferrari was across the paddock ring in their own Bell wire was embracing his own racing philosophy unlike Enzo Ferrari wire believed in a team approach and that each driver was a cog in his victory machine each driver is a cog in my victory machine while I planned for Richie Ginther an ex Ferrari f1 driver and friend of Bill Hill to play the role of the rabbit and try and drive the Ferraris into breaking down so just to clarify that last part we're hope that the Ferrari driver would drive so hard to outrun the Fords then they would break themselves down yeah ok any tasks the one dude to be like hey make these guys chase you yeah and then the guys gonna win yeah they prepared to launch in the style of a famous Lamaze start as the clock struck four pm the race began drivers raced down across the track into their cars on foot yeah on foot engines roar to life as cars began to speed down the track and what inevitably became the world's fastest traffic jam at least most of the cars started except for Phil Hills gt40 that is Ford's rabbit was immediately plagued with fuel evaporation issues causing the car to stall as quickly as it had come to life how embarrassing that's so embarrassing other cars raced by him forcing him to endure a deafening screech of exhaust notes mechanics flooded to his car but no one was able to properly fix the complicated Italian carburetor design the only person qualified for such a repair was the representative sent by the carb company but he was denied entry into the pits from the race officials by the time he finally got going he had fallen 22 minutes behind and was now sitting in 44th place luckily for Ford though Hill was a master endurance driver and he knew exactly how to drive to catch up yeah so like in these big endurance races that sounds like a lot and it is but like there it is possible to come back from such a big deficit he was able to find and follow every perfect racing line shaving seconds off the expected lap time after all the difference between a four-minute lap and a three minute and 58 second lap equal to about 25 miles over the course of the race true concentration is not aware of itself he'll explained by 5:30 p.m. every gt40 was still incredibly on track and going strong that is impressive Richie Ginter was leading the race with Surtees behind in second at 5:30 he pulled in for a pit stop in Ford was faced with a terrible unexpected lesson if your car is the fastest and most agile on the field none of that matters if your pit stops are slowed by the time Ginter left the pits two minutes and seven seconds had passed just long enough for Surtees to take the lead yet again these guys are a bunch bonus a little more than four hours into the race Ford had its first catastrophe it's already had three Richard Atwoods car burst into flames as he was flying down the track thankfully Atwood recognized the smoke billowing from his engine just behind his head and stopped the car and pulled off to the side before it had the chance to cause any serious injuries one of the three gt40s was now out for the count totaled by the flames that engulfed its fiberglass body later investigation revealed the cause of the fire while the fuel line's that were suspended above the engine were supposed to be made of an ultra strong synthetic material they were actually constructed of regular nylon the lack of durability in the lines combined with the extreme temperatures had led to the fuel lines and Atwoods car to melt oh my causing their car to burst into flames wire commented on the entire incident stating this was a result of almost criminal negligence it was a miracle no others cars were affected the fuel line's went over the engine that's insane yeah and their me you you don't think it can get worse mmm-hmm and then it gets worse yeah shortly after this event within an hour Master Gregory who shared a car with Richie Gunter broke down during the fifth hour of the race Gregory was having issues getting the car out of second gear so he brought it into the pit within the pit it was discovered that the colotti transmission had failed roylene couldn't help but admire the irony in this specific component failing Khiladi transmissions were designed and manufactured in Modena Italy the same hometown that's Ferrari Ford was now down to one car and that was the car piloted by Phil Hill and Bruce McLaren at midnight McLaren took over for Hill he later described that four-hour shift as the best 500 racing miles I've ever covered Wow by 1:00 a.m. 20 of the 55 cars had dropped out of the race and Hill and McLaren had miraculously driven the Ford from 44th on the pole all the way up into fifth Wow onlookers were shocked as the gt40 blazed around the track the good kind of he's not the bad kind hey isn't that the car that the chocolate guy crushed hill and MacLaren's gt40 was easily the fastest on the field at 5:20 a.m. he'll set a lap record of three minutes forty nine point two seconds but the new record celebration was short-lived minutes later Hill was forced to pull into the pit the same Khiladi transmission had failed in third and the final gt40 was out of the race Wow Ferrari finished first second and third in 1964 while Ford was stuck with a DNF getting nowhere near the finish line Henry Ford's second filled with rage vowed that Ford would return next year and was determined to show Ferrari that Americans could do just too good a job as them I know I've said it before but this time I mean it Ford wanted to win and there was only one man he knew that was able to beat Ferrari at Lamar because he had done it before hi I'm Carol Shelby and performance is my business Wow that's where I'll pick up next time on past gas what hubris idiot we can do this yeah it's just like throwing money at a problem and that's what you get I mean that's the lesson here for sure yeah you can't just throw money at a problem Wow so next time we'll talk about the life of Carroll Shelby who list yeah he's really the coolest dude we'll talk about his early life his experience at LeMond and how he helped change the horrendous gt40 at this point he's like all of our favorite data he's the best he really is and I can't wait to dive really deep into him just right into Carroll I can't wait to get into that guy yeah check out if you're not a donut fan already I hope you are by now check out our YouTube and our Facebook and our instant gram all of those are at donut media follow me on instagram at James Humphrey follow Nolan at Nolan J sorry thank you this is really fun again and I can't wait I can't wait till the next one yeah all right super fun bang bang way we can steal