The SHELBY AMERICAN
Spring 2016 18
FORD GT - How Ford Silenced the
Critics, Humbled Ferrari and Con-
quered LeMans
by Preston Lerner;
photography by Dave Friedman. 10
1/4˝ x 12 1/4˝ hardcover; 76 color pho-
tos, 227 black & white. Published by
Quarto
Publishing Group USA
www.motorbooks.com
Haven’t there been enough books
written about GT40s already? Until
we saw this one we would have said,
yes. But if you are intrigued about
Ford’s campaign to beat Ferrari at Le-
Mans in the mid-1960s, this is the
book you’ve been waiting for.
Author Preston Lerner, who has
been writing for
Automobile
magazine
for the past 30 years, teamed up with
former Shelby American photographer
Dave Friedman for this book that cen-
ters around Ford’s LeMans victories in
1966 and 1967. The story of Ford’s
GT40 program has been told and re-
told almost since the mid-1960s when
it was breaking news. The cars are as
exciting now as they were fifty years
ago and this is reflected in Lerner’s
text. Some of the people who were
there when history was being made
are no longer alive, but those who are
still with us prove they have excellent
memories and the perspective gained
over the past five decades makes for
interesting reading.
Like any proper telling of Ford’s
LeMans victory, the story begins with
Henry Ford II’s desire, encouraged by
Lee Iacocca, to purchase Ferrari. After
Enzo Ferrari paraded his company
like a teasing suitor under Ford’s nose,
he promptly withdrew it, angering HF
II. “
You go to LeMans,”
Ford told Don
Frey, the Assistant General Manager
of the Ford Division, “
and beat his
ass
.” This prompted a swarm of Ford
corporate underlings to begin scouring
the landscape for a suitable starting
point for a Ferrari-beating endurance
race car. That was in 1963 and the
book includes Ford’s discovering Eng-
lishman Eric Broadley and his Lola
GT which morphed into what became
the new Ford GT.
The story continues through con-
struction of the earliest GTs, testing,
and the first foray to LeMans in 1964.
Conventional wisdom was that a new
car required a minimum of three years
of trial and error before it could win
LeMans. This proved to be true, and
the book covers all of the high and low
points. Finally the planets aligned in
1966 and Ford had its never-to-be-
forgotten 1-2-3 photo finish. The story
includes the circumstances around the
“Ken Miles affair” and it is even more
poignant in the retelling.
The saga, as you know, did not end
in 1966. Henry Ford II did not want
the victory to look like a fluke so he or-
dered a new car, built at Ford in the
U.S., which became the MK IV. It won
again in 1967 and was then outlawed
by the French in the FIA. Ford then
pulled the plug on its factory effort. If
you’re looking for yet more Ford GT
pictures you’ve never seen, you’ll find
a bunch of them in this book. We’re
happy to have it on our shelf.
Peter Cavallo of Essex, England
sent us this photo of a chrome trailer
hitch receiver cover. It arrived in Eng-
land attached to a Dodge truck that
somebody purchased and he brought
it into Cavallo’s shop to show him. It
is metal and about six-inches high.
The electrical trailer hitch plug acti-
vates the snake’s eyes when the
brakes are applied.
With us so far? Good, because Cav-
allo added a few more details. Accord-
ing to him, during the GT40 vs.
Ferrari chapter of racing history, Car-
roll Shelby carried this winkling cobra
(said to have been created in the place
that was to become A.O. Smith in the
future) and the battery from a 427
Cobra with him around Enzo Ferrari’s
villa. In the middle of the night,
Shelby would hold the cobra up to
Enzo’s bedroom window and, using an
original Cobra horn switch, would ac-
tivate the glowing red eyes in the dark
of the night in order to instill in Fer-
rari the fear of the cobra’s bite.
Does that sound, maybe, a bit far-
fetched? We’re only relating what Cav-
allo told us. We report and you decide.