Here's the real story behind the Le Mans-winning Ford GT40

It was born out of motorsport’s most infamous grudge.

Following months of careful negotiation, Ford was ready to do a deal with Enzo Ferrari to purchase his company. The Old Man, as wily as he was, knew he needed some major investment, and Ford wanted to go endurance racing. By May 1963, a deal was on the table, bringing the US behemoth together with the Italian upstart to create road cars and competition machinery. 

But when Enzo, who may never have intended to sell at all, baulked at losing the autonomy he so cherished, he sent the Americans packing. Empty-handed on his return to Detroit, Ford’s point man, Don Frey, was told by Henry Ford II to ‘go to Le Mans, and beat his ass.’ Or so the legend goes.

The result was the GT40, a car that most definitely is a legend. As impassive a motorsport legend as the statues on Easter Island, as looming a presence as the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey – everyone knows that the GT40 cleaned up in 1960s sports car racing, but the fact that you’d probably struggle to name any of the winning drivers confirms the star power of this particular car.

Yet its development was decidedly ad hoc, its engineering improvisational, and success far from guaranteed, not least because Ford as an organisation had precious little racing expertise when the boss issued his ultimatum. In fact, it was an expat Brit called Roy Lunn - who sadly passed away earlier this month - who had been involved with Aston Martin’s 1949 Le Mans effort and was running Ford’s advanced vehicle department, who got the gig. Lunn’s team had developed 1962’s Mustang concept, a forward-thinking, mid-engined, aluminium-bodied roadster (the pony car that arrived two years later was rather different).

On June 12th, Lunn and Frey presented a confidential competition programme to Ford’s cigar-chomping execs, envisaging a mid-engined racecar called the GT40 (it stood just 40in high), and a road-going GT46 iteration. According to Preston Lerner’s new book on Ford’s big adventure, Lunn wanted to ‘create a high performance, two-seater sportscar prototype that, if produced in low volume, would neutalise the Corvette image’. Apparently it took five minutes to get sign-off, the other 55 being spent discussing the marketing strategy…
Lunn was packed off back to Blighty, where a thriving homespun racing subculture and the urgency of the mission soon led him to Lola. As tiddly as the firm was, its racing car was the right configuration, had an aluminium body, and used a Ford V8. It was effectively a prototype GT40 in all but name.

Lunn bought two, squirrelled away $1.7m from the Dearborn bean counters, hired ex-Aston Martin team boss John Wyer, and got to work. The Ford Advanced Vehicles HQ was in Slough, deemed, amazingly enough, a step up from Lola’s base in Bromley. Lola’s owner Eric Broadley soon clashed with Lunn, while Broadley’s deputy, Tony Southgate (who would go own to design numerous F1 cars, and the Le Mans-winning Jaguar XJR-9), recalled that the Ford approach was somewhat uptight. 
‘There was no deviating from the script. Well, motor racing is about as far removed from that as you can get.’

Bruce McLaren was hired to evaluate a prototype in August 1963, and work swiftly progressed. The steel-bodied GT40 was heavy but durable, while a primitive computer program helped calibrate the suspension geometry. The first completed car, chassis no. GT/101, ran a Ford Fairlane-sourced 4.2-litre V8, but with an aluminium block and pushrods.

Coventry-based Abbey Panels fabricated the body, and the whole thing was finished barely in time to make its flight from Heathrow to JFK ahead of a big unveiling the day before the New York auto show, in April 1964. ‘In going into GT racing, we feel we are accepting the toughest challenge presently available to the minds and talents of motor car builders,’ Ford boss Lee Iacocca told the press.

Ref: Here's the real story behind the Le Mans-winning Ford GT40 (topgear)