1964 Le Mans

1964 — Enzo Ferrari finally had an intimate enemy. Ford had nearly purchased Ferrari. The deal got to the stage where fountain pens were readied: Ferrari asked a question. Naturally it concerned the racing team, his reason for living. The answer was the deal breaker.

Ford decided that they didn’t need Ferrari to win the 24 Hours and added a Le Mans program to its "Total Performance" campaign. There wasn’t a dram of hyperbole or PR-speak in the new slogan. They were serious about racing and had the receipts to prove it.

Ford had come within an oily mist of winning the Indy 500 on its first try with Lotus: the Indy Ford was a fine engine for the new Ferrari-beater. Since the A.C.O. had conveniently removed the displacement limits, everyone in Dearborn thought the 4.2-liter aluminum block Fairlane engine would serve with some distinction.

The new white and blue wedges debuted in April during Le Mans’ extraordinarily populous test days. The results were not as encouraging as Dearborn had hoped, but Ford’s Roy Lunn found an aerodynamic fix and sent one car to Germany for Phil Hill and tireless test driver Bruce McLaren to race in the Nurburgring 1000Km. The futuristic coupe qualified a surprising second to the John Surtees/Lorenzo Bandini works 275P. A private Cobra roadster was the fastest of the GT players. The GT40 retired after 15 fast laps, and one of the 904 Porsches was first in GT. Now all the players knew their lines for Le Mans.

Carroll Shelby had perhaps the nicest lines of all on the Sarthe. They were drawn by our man Peter Brock. His Daytona coupes were correct right off the drafting table and, like the GT40, required only minor touches and tweaks to soothe and refine.

A dozen of the 55 starters were Ferraris, and the works had summoned prototype help from Ronnie Hoare’s Maranello Concessionaires, Jaques Swaters' Belgian Ferrari team and, of course, stalwart NART. Ferrari knew he was facing his most serious foe since he ran Alfa’s racing program in the Thirties. He remembered all too clearly how things turned out when The Big Wallets arrived.

Ford sent three GT40s against a quartet of works prototypes including a 330P. Shelby had two Daytona coupes backed up by three private Cobras, plus two Shelby-powered works Sunbeam Tigers from the Rootes Group against three semi-private GTOs (the usual suspects). This was one of those delicious moments upon which history pivots and reorders itself.

Surtees was fastest in evening practice, but Pedro Rodriguez was first under the bridge in the NART 330P. Phil Hill’s GT40 was last away, moving only as the leaders emptied out of Tertre Rouge onto the RN 158 to Mulsanne.

Then on the second lap, Richie Ginther won the annual gauntlet-throwing award for Ford. Ginther picked off the top four Ferraris on raw speed and slipstreaming, as the red train headed toward Mulsanne. ABC Television had included the 24 Hours as a feature on the Wide World of Sports anthology show. Ginther was borderline giddy when he handed over to Masten Gregory.

He was all smiles when he saw Phil Hill and told him how he had strafed the cream of the Ferraris on Hunaudiers. He found a circular slide rule and worked out his revs and ratios: "Two-eleven!" he shouted at Hill. "Man! 211!" The tach touched 7200rpm as he blew past Rodriguez, and nobody at Ford – not even John "Death Ray" Wyer – gave him grief for breaching the mandatory 6500rpm limit. Ginther was the best test driver of his era and a better engineer in the cockpit than many who sat at drafting tables. And to its credit, ABC caught it all live.

Ford power led overall, and Gurney had Pete Brock’s Daytona Coupe ahead of the GTOs and the Sears/Boulton AC Cars Cobra (with Italian coachwork drawn by Alan Turner). New World Order indeed.

Ginther further rubbed the Ferraris noses in it on the first fuel stops, which came after an hour and 24 minutes: Richie stretched his fuel another three laps, but still lost the lead to Surtees’ No. 18 Ferrari.

It was too good too soon to last. When Hill’s GT40 got a new engine on Thursday, everything but the carbs was replaced. So naturally, Hill spent the first hours of the race chasing a crippling carburetion problem. Finally new jets put things right, but he seemed to be too far back for anything but recreation. However, he was having plenty of that. After the second load of fuel had been replaced and the cool – actually cold (ice had to be scrapped off the leading Ferrari’s windows during one small-hours pit stop) – set in, Hill was the fastest man on the course, reeling off a string of 3:50 laps to harass the Ferrari spies.

Rodriguez’s NART 330P was the first of the guns to go to the dead car park. Richard Attwood’s No. 12 Ford GT40 was the most spectacular. Before full dark, he noticed fire following him to Mulsanne. Artfully he slowed the car without amplifying the growing blaze and abandoned ship just after the signal pits, leaving Ford ‘s Mulsanne exiles to call it in. GT40 chassis #104 burned to the axles and made all the cine-news highlight reels.

Then Mike Parkes’ Ferrari cracked a piston and Gregory drove in with only first and second gear in the GT40 he shared with Ginther. Now the Fords, actually Ford-singular, was outnumbered. The "son-of-bazooka" 5.0-liter Maserati T151 was running a very impressive and racy third overall when the brakes and generator quit in congress.

There were still two Fords in the top five, but they were Shelby’s Daytona Cobra coupes: Jochen Neerpasch from Gurney leading GT behind the trio of Ferrari Prototypes: Surtees, Jean Guichet and Graham Hill. The impressive and alarmingly fast Porsche 904/8s were next leading a trio of Ferrari GTOs. Maranello was under attack from all quarters.

Then tragedy and near tragedy. Giancarlo Baghetti crashed his works 275P avoiding the tumbling corpse of the Sears/Boulton AC Cars-entered Cobra coupe. It was dark and the Ferrari finished in the brambles near White House. When the car was retrieved it was discovered that three boys had sneaked into this non-spectator area for a better vantage point and were killed when the 275P left the road. Cobra dealer Ed Hugus suffered a violent explosion in the diff of his Ferrari GTO as he passed the pits. Shrapnel raked the Jaguar pits peppering the Sargent/Lumsden E-Type. Luckily no one was injured.

The No. 6 Daytona Cobra was disqualified after a 3:00 a.m. pit stop. A Ferrari operative lurking near the Cobra pits witnessed the crew jump-starting the Neerpasch/Chris Amon coupe. The leading Surtees/Bandini Ferrari was not disqualified when it stopped for water and service after only one lap. But it was leaking more than one type of fluid.

None of the leaders, save the newly promoted Jean Guichet/Nino Vaccarella 275P, were particularly healthy. Gurney and Bob Bondurant had moved into fourth OA and first in GT despite a protracted stop to bypass a weepy oil cooler. Soon the sole surviving GT40 broke into the top three. Phil Hill was in one of those moods and had come from 32nd to third through some serious midnight motoring. When he was done the lap record stood at 131.375mph.

Just before 5:30 a.m. Phil brought the white and blue Ford to pit lane and had a heart to heart with team manger Wyer. The official autopsy said "boite vitesse": engines never fail. Thus began Tour du Mans, traditionally a Ferrari event lasting until 4:00 p.m. Guichet and Vaccarella’s works 275P was the only truly healthy Ferrari prototype and won from Jo Bonnier and Graham Hill in Ronnie Hoare's Maranello Concessionaires 330P. The leaky Surtees/Bandini 330P was third. It was Ferrari’s seventh victory at Le Mans.

Gurney and Bondurant carried the Ford banner just four laps behind the third place Ferrari in Peter Brock’s GT icon.

At the bottom of the list was a new name. Coming-man Jochen Rindt and orthodox Le Mans veteran David Piper were first out in one of the new Ferrari 275 LMs that was the nexus of a row between a very cranky Enzo Ferrari and the CSI. And the FIA and the Italian Sporting Commission and anyone else who said that his new mid-engined GT was anything but a true GT car: not much more than a slightly modified GTO, in fact. And hardly a prototype.

Graham Hill won the final three rounds of the ’64 Sports Car Championship – all in Ferraris. In the final F1 race of the year, fighting for his second World Championship, the Londoner was punted off by Ferrari’s Bandini, who promptly moved over and let teammate Surtees through into second place and victory in the '64 World Driving Championship.