1965 Le Mans

1965 — Ford opened the year at Daytona with a win in the 2000Km Continental. Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby were five laps ahead of the GT-winning Cobra. Bob Bondurant and Richie Ginther were third in another GT40. Ford was being strategically selective, and it was a good omen.

Ferrari had just one car entered in Florida, and that was through the good auspices of NART. John Surtees and Pedro Rodriguez won the pole, but the race was a Ford affair after qualifying. Ferrari was even beaten to GT honors by a Porsche 904, and the April Le Mans test weekend indicated the 904/8 Porsches had the sort of speed required for an overall victory. A month later, Ford took Sebring one-two-three.

This meant almost nothing by June. All the great marques with long Le Mans tenure and tradition were simply props for the Ford vs. Ferrari war.

Ferrari’s John Surtees raised the bar during the April tests lopping 14sec off the Le Mans lap record in a new 4.0-liter 330. Ford understood Ferrari’s manner of psychological warfare and concentrated on its own problems. New iron block 4.7-liter pushrod V8s replaced the dry sump Indy-derived alloy blocks of 1964. The Colotti transmission was banished, replaced by the robust ZF. A new table of organization was drawn, rearranging the Ford family of Le Mans players; at least one line from every Ford-powered entrant connected with the big box at the top of the chart labeled "Shelby America".

They entered the two new 7.0-liter Mark IIs fresh from Ford Advanced Vehicles at Slough. These were the biggest engines ever entered for Le Mans. Phil Hill and Ginther were joined by Ken Miles and Bruce McLaren in Ford’s Seven-Liter Le Mans A Team.

Ford was obsessed with top speed. The Mulsanne straight is nearly four miles from Tertre Rouge to Mulsanne corner and the less time spent there . . . or so the theory goes. And Ford tuned accordingly. Ginther finally calculated that one of his better passes down the RN 158 worked out to something in the 218mph neighborhood. Ford had the biggest engines, horsepower, speed and wallet – not to mention on site corporate staff.

When Carroll Shelby dispatched Hill to set a new course record, the ’61 World Champion gave everyone a dose of wide eyes: 142mph. A whopping 16sec (no typo, no misprint: sixteen – or, from another perspective, two seconds faster over each mile!) faster than his existing lap record and two seconds faster than Surtees had gone trying to demoralize FoMoCo in the April tests. Once the tricolor fell, the Ford’s actual race pace advantage per-lap was closer to three-seconds.

ABC television was again live for the start with Jim MacKay and Ford’s Hill in the announce booth. But a technical problem meant no pictures were broadcast to America where many sat staring at a black screen while Hill talked us through the start. The hero of the opening laps was Dan Gurney’s Cobra Coupe which ran seventh at the end of the first lap behind the Ford 427-armada, Surtees, Jean Guichet, Bondurant and Jochen Rindt in Luigi Chinetti’s Goodyear-shod Ferrari 275LM.

The big Fords led at five o’clock, but overheating struck before 8:00 p.m. First Bondurant and Luigi Maglioli’s No. 7 with the 325cid motor had head gasket failure. Then, on the same lap, Herbert Mueller and Ronnie Bucknam’s No. 6 overheated terminally. All the Fords were using a new, improved, secret gasket concoction guaranteed to . . . fail, apparently.

Just before dark the John Whitmore/Innes Ireland Ford Advanced Vehicles (England) began overheating. The McLaren/Miles No. 1 Mark II was already gone with none of the bigger, more important gearbox ratios working. Until the 45th lap the No. 1 Ford had been the fastest car on the circuit with a 199mph pass down Mulsanne: 22mph faster than the best Ferraris. But by midnight, the red cars were first through fourth.

By then the top Ford-powered car was the amazing Gurney/Jerry Grant Cobra Daytona coupe. Hill and Amon were stopped by further gearbox problems, and Hill could now concentrate on his ABC broadcast duties. He had retired from Formula 1 after a dreadful season with the decaying Cooper team. His television work, delightfully erudite and pithy to the seriously dedicated in the audience was perhaps too cerebral for his yellow-blazered co-workers who had trouble keeping up. The late Peter Collins, with whom Hill had won Sebring, once called the reserved, thoughtful American "egghead" in respectful tones.

The Fords, regardless of their position on the corporate organizational chart, were gone by the first minutes of Sunday and the works Ferraris were staggering as well. Brake troubles with the new F1-style ventilated discs kept the Ferrari crews entirely too busy. Surtees and Ludovico Scarfiotti had fallen from first to seventh by 4:00 a.m., and the top of the order was all privateers, though well connected Ferrari teams. Pierre Dumay’s long shot Belgian yellow 275LM led the NART 275LM of Jochen Rindt and Masten Gregory.

Rindt, dispirited by the pace of the Fords and works Ferraris, lost interest early Saturday and wanted to go home and forget the whole thing. He drove accordingly, thrashing the NART coupe, hoping to break something that couldn’t be blamed on him. But the NART car was well prepared, and they kept migrating up the order. In the darkest hours before dawn, Gregory realized what was happening and began to take their chances seriously. He asked for and got some welcome night driving relief: American Ed Hugus stepped into the NART car until daylight. As attrition ate away the top of the field, Rindt’s attitude changed. By the halfway hour, they were just two laps behind.

Gurney and Grant had penetrated the Ferrari brigade around midnight, finally rising to third overall and gaining an average of 10 seconds each lap on the limping red prototypes. That was when the Cobra's motor mounts began to crack, and the vibration was awful and that exported all sorts of other problems down the drive train. Gurney parked the blue coupe after 204 laps.

The best Porsches hadn’t missed a beat all night and were beginning to intrude on the front runners. With sun up, they still sounded remarkably healthy. By noon the 2.0-liter Herbert Linge/Peter Nocker 904 was fifth overall and leading the Index of Performance, just two laps behind the 4.0-liter Mike Parkes/Jean Guichet 330P. Gerhard Kock and Anton Fischaber’s 904GT was sixth overall.

There was still time for the whole thing to get turned inside out, but by Sunday morning the blood fued between Ford and Ferrari was long over. The Surtees/Scarfiotti Ferrari, last of the major players, went behind the wall just after 10:00 a.m. The race was in the hands of the privateers. Rindt and Gregory had taken back the two-lap deficit and were about 30sec away from the Belgian Ferrari and were driving the Goodyear-shod NART car as hard as they dared when the 18-hour positions were distributed.

A sliver of flint robbed ABC’s American TV audience – now with full audio and video – of a race to the flag. The Belgian Ferrari ran over the fragment on the run to Mulsanne and the right rear tire began to deflate. The damage was nearly complete. It took the heroic crew five laps to have the No. 26 Ferrari ready to rejoin the race. They still had distance on the new third-place 275GTB of Willy Mairesse and "Beurlys", but Gregory brought Chinetti’s Ferrari home with that five-lap margin intact. The Ferraris were three deep in front of the Index of Performance-winning 904 of Herbert Linger and Peter Glocker. Kock and Fischaber were behind them in the 2.0-liter GT and Index of Thermal Efficiency winning 904.

The best Ford was the Daytona Coupe of Dick Thompson and Jack Sears, and they were only a lap ahead of the shoestring Chevy-powered Iso Grifo. The factories were beaten by the best of the private sports cars, a team that knew where to look for talented and reliable relief.

Ford execs weren’t necessarily bad losers, but took quiet comfort that this was only the second year of a three-year program. Three weeks earlier they had won the Indy 500 on the third attempt.