Go Like Hell Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Frontispiece

  Introduction

  Prologue

  KINGS OF THE ROAD

  The Deuce

  Il Commendatore

  Total Performance: Ford Motor Company, 1963

  Ferrari, Dino, and Phil Hill: 1957–1961

  The Palace Revolt: Italy, 1961

  Ferrari/Ford and Ford/Ferrari: Spring 1963

  A CAR IS BORN

  Means and Motive

  Il Grande John: Italy, Spring 1963–1964

  The Ford GT40: January–April 1964

  Loss of Innocence: April–June 1964

  Le Mans, 1964

  Aftermath: June–December 1964

  SPEED RISING

  Henry II, Shelby, and Daytona: January–February 1965

  220 mph: February–June 1965

  Le Mans, 1965

  Le Mans, 1965: The Finish and the Fallout

  THE RECKONING

  Survival: August–December 1965

  Rebirth: August 1965–February 1966

  Blood on the Track: March–April 1966

  The Blowout Nears: May–June 1966

  The Flag Drops: June 1966

  Le Mans—Record Pace: June 18, 1966

  The Most Controversial Finish in Le Mans History: June 19, 1966

  The End of the Road: June–August 1966

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2009 by Albert Baime

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Baime, A. J. (Albert J.)

  Go like hell : Ford, Ferrari, and their battle for speed and glory at Le Mans / A. J. Baime.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-618-82219-5

  1. Grand Prix racing—History. 2. Sports cars—United States—History. 3. Ford, Henry, 1863–1947. 4. Iacocca, Lee A. 5. Shelby, Carroll, 1923– 6. Industrialists—United States—History. 7. Automobile engineers—United States—History. 8. Automobiles—United States—Design and construction—History. 9. Sports cars—United States—Design and construction. 10. Ford Motor Company—History. 11. Ferrari automobile—History. I. Title.

  GV1029.15.B35 2009

  796.7'2'094417—dc22 2008052948

  This book was produced without endorsement from or obligation to any corporation.

  eISBN 978-0-547-41656-4

  v5.0915

  I believe that if a man wanted to walk on water, and was prepared to give up everything else in life, he could do it. He could walk on water. I’m serious.

  —STIRLING MOSS, race car driver, early 1960s

  However one looks at it, Ford of Dearborn has set the cat among the pigeons. We are on the threshold of possibly the most exciting racing era in history.

  —Sports Illustrated, May 11, 1964

  Introduction

  In 1963, following a business deal gone sour, two industrialists from either side of the Atlantic became embroiled in a rivalry that was played out at the greatest automobile race in the world. In its broad strokes, this book chronicles a clash of two titans—Henry Ford II of America and Enzo Ferrari of Italy—at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In its finer lines, the story is about the drivers who competed and the cars they raced to victory and, in some cases, to their doom.

  The men whose names will appear form a list of automotive icons: Henry Ford II, Enzo Ferrari, Lee Iacocca, Carroll Shelby, Phil Hill, John Surtees, Ken Miles, Dan Gurney, Bruce McLaren, and a rookie named Mario Andretti. Equally as important is the automobile that is born in these pages: the Ford GT, a racing car that, more than forty years after it first made its mark, is still an automobile magazine cover staple. The car was designed and built for one reason: to beat the blood-red Ferraris on their home turf, during a time when Enzo Ferrari was enjoying the greatest Le Mans dynasty in history.

  The 24 Hours of Le Mans was (and still is) a sports car race. But in the 1950s and 1960s, it was more than that. It was the most magnificent marketing tool the sports car industry had ever known. Renowned manufacturers built street-legal machines that would prove on the racetrack that their cars were the best in the world. Sports car races were as beautiful as they were dangerous, and none of them was more so than Le Mans. In 1964, the first year Henry Ford II fielded a car at the 24-hour classic, Car and Driver magazine called the event “a four hour sprint race followed by a 20 hour death watch.” It was “probably the most dangerous sporting event in the world.” A win translated into millions in sales. It was a contest of technology and engineering, of ideas and audacity.

  No major American car concern since the Duesenberg brothers in the 1920s had won a major contest in Europe, where racing marques were fueled by decades of innovation on twisty, unforgiving courses. American stock car racing—on oval speedways—was a different game, involving less sophisticated drivers and cars. Success could only be achieved by the marriage of brilliant design and steel-willed courage. It would require a greasy-fingered visionary to run the show, a team of the most skilled drivers in the world, and the swiftest racing sports car ever to hurtle down a road. All things of which, the optimistic Americans believed, could be purchased with the almighty dollar.

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

  This is a work of nonfiction. All the events described in these pages actually occurred. The dialogue has been carefully reconstructed using countless interviews and contemporaneous accounts. Extensive notes on sources can be found in the endnotes.

  Prologue

  June 11, 1955

  6:24 P.M.

  Le Mans, France

  HIS NAME WAS Pierre Levegh and—sitting tight in the open cockpit of a silver Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR at the 24 Hours of Le Mans—the forty-nine-year-old Frenchman was about to become motor racing’s most infamous man.

  Two hours and twenty-four minutes into the race, Levegh found himself well behind the leaders. Coming out of a slight bend, he shifted from third to fourth gear and accelerated into a straight. The engine’s exhaust note rose in pitch and volume, the wooden steering wheel throbbing in his hands. He was wearing goggles and earplugs, a United States Air Force fighter pilot helmet, blue trousers, light tennis shoes, and no seatbelt. Switching off with his teammate, the American John Fitch, he had nearly 22 hours of racing ahead of him, but already fatigue was gnawing at his discipline, his focus. He was alone in the cockpit; there was only himself and the car. Every intimation—a tug on the wheel, a second guess on the pedal—resulted in immediate response, fractions of a second gained or lost. On the dashboard, the tachometer needle arced across the gauge as Levegh accelerated past 135 mph, past 140.

  Legions of fans crowded both sides of the pavement. A quarter of a million had come to this flat patch of central France to see what had been billed as a three-way battle for world domination between the silver Mercedes-Benzes, the green Jaguars, and the red Ferraris: the Germans, English, and Italians. No one had ever seen such beautiful cars travel so fast. Even
at idle, they were the stuff of science fiction. Each ticket had a warning printed on it about the dangers of motor racing, but the spectators were otherwise occupied. The glamour of Le Mans was as intoxicating as the local wine.

  To his left, Levegh saw the #6 Jaguar D-Type pull past him driven by Mike Hawthorn, an Englishman whom the French called The Butterfly because of the spotted bow tie he wore in the cockpit. Hawthorn was in a hurry. He was leading the race, setting a record pace on the 8.36-mile course that snaked through rural public roads. Levegh had just been lapped.

  For the French driver, this was more than a race. It marked the culmination of more than thirty years of his life, three decades he’d spent chasing victory at Le Mans. He was nudging fifty and his future hinged on this one car, this last drive. As Hawthorn stretched his lead, Levegh saw the dream that had defined his life vanishing into thin air like the smoke from the Jaguar’s exhaust pipes. It was all slipping away.

  Levegh had had a vision years before—on May 26, 1923, the day the first Le Mans 24-hour Grand Prix d’Endurance was held. Two Frenchmen, Charles Faroux and Georges Durand, created the event to test the stamina and performance of cars and drivers, mapping out a roughly egg-shaped course through the countryside with twists and a backstretch for flat-out speed. A team of two Frenchmen won that first year and they walked away heroes. Levegh was there that day. He was seventeen years old. He promised himself that he would drive in the race one day. That he would win it.

  Levegh began to study the craft of racing. He competed in his first Le Mans in 1938. Each year the race drew more fans, and each year the cars traveled faster. Like the spectators, Levegh sensed something magical about this race, something indescribably great. The rules were simple: a team of two men to each car, one man in the cockpit at a time. The car that completed the most laps over 24 hours won. Levegh nearly took the race once—in 1952. Leading with just one hour to go, he bungled a gear shift and blew his engine. By 1955, his prime was well past. They said he was washed up.

  That spring, Alfred Neubauer, legendary manager of the Mercedes-Benz factory team, contacted Levegh. He wanted the Frenchman to have a car for the 1955 Le Mans. Mercedes officials knew that having a Frenchman on the team would be good public relations for the German company. There were a lot of car buyers in France who could remember the events of a decade earlier, when the Nazis leveled broad swaths of their nation. Meanwhile, Levegh knew that a spot on the Mercedes team—the world’s most dominant in 1955—would make for the best shot he’d ever had. The 300 SLR was an open-cockpit racing car with two seats, trunk space, and headlights, all according to Le Mans rules. Underneath its lightweight magnesium skin lived a mechanical animal unlike any other. A 3.0-liter inline eight-cylinder engine dictated a long, bullet-like nose. The car featured a technology new at Le Mans called fuel injection. Top speed: in excess of 185 mph.

  Levegh took the job.

  In practice runs in the days before the race, however, he clocked slower times than the other Mercedes drivers, causing the portly team manager Neubauer to wonder whether the aging Frenchman had it in him. As the start of the race approached—4:00 P.M. on Saturday, June 11—Levegh paced the Mercedes pit with the look of a haunted man. He confided in his teammate about his fear of a particular part of the course—the narrow straight past the pits. “It is too narrow for these fast cars,” Levegh said. “Each time I go by it I get a feeling of unease.” Then: “A driver needs to feel comfortable, and I do not feel comfortable in this car.”

  “Levegh was going about with the face of a man in mortal terror,” remembered journalist Jacques Ickx (father of the future star driver Jacky), who was covering the race. “It was the stuff of Greek tragedy. His pride, his immense obstinacy, would not let him admit that the car was beyond his capacity, that he should step down. All the time Mercedes believed that he would ask to be released. They did not want to tell him that he was not up to it. So they waited for the resignation that never came.”

  At the wheel Levegh was stepping hard on the accelerator. Through a thin gauze of exhaust, he saw the grandstands at Le Mans rising in the distance, like an overflowing stadium sliced down the middle by a two-lane road. At the opening of the grandstands was the narrow straight past the pits. Directly in front of Levegh, “The Butterfly” Mike Hawthorn’s Jaguar was pulling away. Hawthorn eased into the middle of the lane and lapped an Austin Healey with a British driver named Lance Macklin at the wheel.

  Hawthorn, followed by Macklin, followed by Levegh at speed headed for the grandstands.

  Suddenly the brake lights on Hawthorn’s Jaguar flashed on. He was pulling to the right for the pit and braking hard, cutting off Macklin’s Austin Healey. Levegh saw the Austin Healey’s brake lights and smoke from under the rear tires as the car fishtailed. He had but a second to make his move. He eyed a 16-foot-wide alley on the narrow straight through which he could pass the Austin Healey on the left. He lifted his hand to signal the driver behind him to the obstruction, then turned the wheel, aiming to thread through. Traveling some 30 mph faster than the Austin Healey, he clipped its sloped rear.

  Instantly the Mercedes was airborne. A 3,000-pound metal projectile with a tank of flammable liquid was 15 feet off the ground, rocketing at about 150 mph toward a crowd of spectators, with Levegh still hunched over the wheel. The car hit an embankment and exploded, hurtling fiery chunks of metal into the gathered mass. What was at one moment the social high point of the year—a party accented by the clink of wine glasses and the bellowing of sports car engines—became something unimaginably horrific. Dozens lay prostrate and bleeding. Fire raged; the car’s magnesium body, made of a material similar to that used in early camera flashes, melted quickly into a thick soup of white-hot metal. Panic ensued. Those who were able to get on their feet fled and into that wave of foot traffic, photographers covering the race aimed and snapped, freezing shocked faces in black-and-white celluloid.

  No one will ever know what went through Levegh’s mind in that final second of his life. Madame Levegh? The fear of pain? Or was he seeing that checkered flag waving in the wind?

  In the following days, readers all over the world opened their newspapers and absorbed the details of the tragedy in France. Photos resembled wartime images. The number of dead varied according to account, between seventy-seven and ninety-six.

  But that wasn’t the only strange part of the story. The race went on. Organizers believed that if they called it off, incoming roads would fill with traffic, blocking emergency vehicles. The Mercedes team pulled out in respect for the dead. This was a German car crashing into a crowd of predominantly French spectators; the Germans didn’t want to start World War III. But the other competitors continued. Drivers dueled through the evening and into night. When the sun rose, they were at it still. At 4:00 P.M. on Sunday, nearly 22 hours after what was—and still is—the worst racing disaster in history, Mike Hawthorn took the checkered flag. He and his teammate Ivor Bueb had traveled 2,569.6 miles at an average speed of 107.07 mph, including pit stops and night driving. Record speed.

  Following his win, a mob gathered around Hawthorn, who sat draped in victory flowers in the cockpit of his D-Type Jaguar, with its sharklike fin on the rear deck and feminine curves over the front wheel wells. Many were horrified by what they saw on the British driver’s face. Framed between his flaxen hair and bow tie was the hint of a smile. They thought it scandalous, as many believed Hawthorn had caused Levegh’s accident. But others in the crowd who knew Hawthorn couldn’t blame him.

  Racers came to Le Mans to become champions. And of the many champions crowned here, Hawthorn was the fastest of them all.

  PART I

  KINGS OF THE ROAD

  1

  The Deuce

  I will build a motor car for the great multitude.

  —HENRY FORD, 1909

  HENRY FORD II opened his eyes. It was just before 8:00A.M. on November 10, 1960. His toes hunted for his “HFII”-monogrammed slippers. He shaved left-handed, donned a fin
e-tailored suit over an “HFII”-monogrammed dress shirt, and stepped out of his seventy-five-room Grosse Pointe mansion into the Michigan sun.

  He was forty-three years old, stood six feet tall, and weighed well over 200 pounds. Bright blue eyes blazed. Brown hair was side parted and slicked. Like many wealthy men of his generation, he had learned to show little emotion; his features had a stony quality, as if he was already turning into a bust that was going to sit in a museum. In his driveway, a black Lincoln limousine was idling—ample chrome, big V8 engine. The limo was not unlike the one Elvis Presley had just purchased, an update of the 1950 Lincoln that carted President Eisenhower around. Only this Lincoln had “HFII” discreetly painted on the door.

  His commute took him west on Detroit’s main artery, a highway named for his father, the Edsel Ford Expressway. He traveled through the city where, sixty-four years earlier, his grandfather first drove his “Quadricycle,” a gas buggy with four bicycle wheels and a doorbell for a horn. In town, people liked to refer to Henry II as The Deuce, for he was the second Henry Ford, born the grandson and namesake of the world’s richest man. But to his face, he was always “Mr. Ford.” At the Michigan Avenue exit, the chauffeur veered off and pulled into the parking lot of the “Glass House”—Ford Motor Company world headquarters.

  In his twelfth-floor corner office, Henry II took command of the world’s second largest company. The Glass House, an aluminum and glass monolith he had constructed four years before, served as the brain center that maneuvered the tentacles of the man’s increasingly global operation. Wherever there were roads, there were cars with his name on them. Ford Motor Company made Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury passenger cars; Ford trucks and tractors; Dearborn farm equipment; industrial engines; and military trucks. There was the Ford Motor Credit Company, the American Road Insurance Company, and the Ford Leasing Development Company.