BY Wallace A. Wyss
They became a household name. Ironically, Ferrari couldn't take advantage of their wins with more sales because, with their small work force, they could only make about 700 -1,000 cars a year. Ford made that many in an hour. Ford saw a solution for Ferrari. If Ferrari were to allow itself to be tucked under Ford's generous wing, they could get the money to make more street cars and Ford could get some rub-off from Fords participating at LeMans. Ford had started a promotion called "Total performance"around 1962 which resulted in dollars being thrown at every type of motorsport.
A pitch was made to Ferrari but after two weeks of talks, Enzo sent the Ford negotiators away from the table, reportedly because he was worried about how the resulting cars would be billed("Ford-Ferraris? Ferrari-Fords?) . That's when Henry Ford II decided Ford didn't need Ferrari. They could build their own endurance racer.
The Ford Design department started to make renderings and clay models, concentrating most on a coupe, which would be aerodynamically more stable than an open car and more suited for a race that often required driving in pouring rain at 200 mph plus.
Mid-Engined
One of the first key decisions was to make it mid-engined, That was because Ferrari already had the 250 P mid-engined car, and making a front-engined race car would be a definite step backwards. Mid-engined cars, by virtue of having the mass of weight between the axles, had a better "polar moment of inertia."
The benefit was that when you start to change lanes, it changes lanes faster because
it the mass is already within the wheelwells.
By 1963, they had the clay models built, and were thinking of adapting the tubular space frame of the four cylinder Mustang I show car. Then a lucky thing happened. Eric Broadley, a British engineer and race car builder, with a company called Lola, debuted his mid-engined Ford V8 powered race car, the Lola GT, at LeMans. He crashed the car, but Ford was not disappointed by Broadley's faux pax.
They remained most impressed by the engineering breakthroughs that Broadley had made, most significantly in his car's tidy packaging. They also appreciated it was monocoque built, not a tube frame car. They made a deal with Broadley to buy two of the Lola GT's. a third had already been sold to John Mecom, a Houston oil millionaire who dabbled in racing.
When Ford sent some negotiators to buy Mecom's car, one of them waiting in a hotel suite made a remark, not knowing Mecom had arrived. The remark was to the effect of "When is that fat-ass Texan going to get here so we can buy his car?" And when Mecom heard it, he identified himself and said the car wasn't for sale. It was a good thing for Ford that GM had a little too much of the "not invented here" philosophy and or else they could have taken the Lola GT in house and worked with it to develop a mid-engined Corvette. Instead they were developing Zora Arkus-Duntov's front-engined Corvette Grand Sport, a secret project that they hoped would made the Corvette an International winner.
English Factory
Ford hired Broadley as a consultant, and then hired John Wyer, who had run the Aston Martin effort at LeMans for several years running, and set Wyer up in a company called Ford Advanced Vehicles in Slough, Surrey, to build the car. Why England? Well, England was already a hotbed of race car builders. Dozens were located within a few miles of each other and it was easy to find suppliers for steering, brakes, wheels, etc.
The two Lola GT's were stripped of their bodies and fitted with the Ford parts developed in Dearborn, a lot of which were created at Kar Kraft, the racing subsidiary of Ford that had previously worked on the redesign of the Shelby Cobra when it went from a 289 leaf sprung car to a 427 coil sprung car. The Lola GT race cars were then set up to serve as test mules, and as each Ford part was designed, it was put on the Lola GT to be run in a durability test. Meanwhile there was a work being done on the engine, an aluminium block 255 cu. in. engine. This had been developed originally as an
Indy type engine, and it was thought ideal for the Ford GT, since the Ferraris had aluminum blocks as well. The gearbox chosen was the Italian-made Type 37 Colotti 4-speed, previously used on some Maserati mid-engined cars, so it was thought capable of taking the torque loads of the Ford V8. The brakes would be discs all around, and the fuel would be carried in unusual rubber fuel cells in the huge rocker panel areas. The idea of rubber fuel bladders
was new to racing but not new overall, as helicopters had used them for years. The idea of two separate tanks was so that the weight could be equalised on both sides of the car.
The Styling
The styling of the Ford GT40 consisted of a low (42" high, hence the name , though one wonders why it wasn't GT42?) coupe body with doors cutting into the roof area to make it easier to enter and exit. The side windows would be fixed in place for aerodynamic reasons with small 'toll booth" openable windows. The radiator air intake would be below the nose, and there would be two large air pressure relief ducts on the hood to allow air that had been through the radiator some place to escape.
The rear deck had a grate in them to allow hot air to escape, and the valance panel between the taillights was an open mesh area allowing air to escape. The engine had an air scoop at the rear of the roof, which rammed cold air to an air box containing the tops of the Weber carburetors. The sides of the car had big air scoops to ram air to the rear brakes. Originally Ford hoped to have a side radiator on each side for the engine, a la the Countach years later, but the side air scoops didn't take in enough air to feed an engine radiator so they had to settle for a conventional front-mounted radiator and use the scoops for something else.
The headlamps were either Marchel or Cibie, both from France and both rectangular, faired into the body under plexiglass so they wouldn't cause air drag. French-made lamps were selected because the French had more modern lights than the American car industry. The core of the design was a massive bulkhead behind the seats, in essence the firewall. From that extended sponsons cradling the engine, and from that was hung the rear suspension. The rear suspension layout, with very widely spaced transverse links and long radius arms, was a Broadley design used later by many builders for all types of racing. The front suspension consisted of front wishbones and coil springs used in conjunction with rather short arms. As originally set up, the engine fitted was the all aluminium "Indianapolis" version of the Ford Fairlane 4.2 litre (260 cu. in.) V8 rated at 350 bhp at 7200 rpm. The gearbox ratios in the unsynchronised Colotti 4 speed were 1.29; 1.70 and 2.50 to 1. Top gear ( l : l ) was 3.09:1.
A Cautious Entry
The Ford investment of personnel in the GT project was incredibly small, considering the huge size of Ford Motor Company at the time. They only had about ten people working on engineering the Ford GT in Dearborn and scarcely more than that in England with about 24 people on the FAV shop floor. They only managed to complete and run three cars that first season, entering the races they entered purely as "shakedown" exercises to see what broke and what needed to be redesigned.
Three Races, Three failures
During 1964 the Ford GT's were entered first in the 1000 km race at the Nurburgring in West Germany; then the 24 hour race at Le Mans; followed by the 12 hours at Reims, and finally at Nassau, the latter not considered a true race. In the Reims event, two Ford GT's were entered and they had trouble with the transmission breaking as well as fuel problems.
There was even the suspicion the fuel had been sabotaged. At the LeMans test runs in April, both Ford GT's careened off the track at speed. Neither driver was seriously injured and they concluded after separate testing at the MIRA track in England that the rear of the car was lifting at speed, resulting in a lack of rear traction. Following the suggestion of Richie Ginther who remembered that, when he was at Ferrari, they had added a spoiler lip to the rear deck of a couple of cars to prevent the "corkscrewing" of the rear end at speed, they were able to add similar lips to the rear of the GT40 after the tests at MIRA. That solved the Ford problem. At the actual LeMans race, the official Le Mans lap record went to Phil Hill in a Ford GT at 3 minutes. 49.2 seconds or 131.37 mph, with Ginther only a tad slower at 3 minutes. 51 seconds.
Only the 4 liter Ferraris were able to approach these speeds but in the course of 110 laps the leading Ford had recorded a 1% margin over its nearest rival. Better yet, a GT40 was clocked on the Mulsanne straight at 207 mph, which was a good 20 mph faster than the Cobra Daytona coupe could do; the Daytona a more by-guess-and-by-Gosh design penned by Shelby's own in-house designer, Pete Brock. In the race, the Ginther/Gregory GT40 lasted six hours before the transmission took it out of the race. The Colotti 4-speed was troublesome as there was no continuity in gearboxes, each being hand-made. The engines weren't reliable, either, being that they were developed from an engine that only had to last a couple hours at Indy, a big change from 24 hours. During the 1964 season the GT40's had 10 starts and 10 DNFs (Did Not Finish). The team was depressed. Broadley 's contract was up and he left, going on to build the Lola T70, another mid-engined car that, ironically, later tried unsuccessfully to unseat the GT40.
The final event of the 1964 season was the Nassau Speed Week, a series of short races that were more looked at by automakers as a place to test new designs rather than regarded as a serious race. Both Ford GT's had suspension failures on the track, which was made up of old airport runways. The Ford GT's were poorly prepped, though the drivers were among the most skilled at that event. Bruce McLaren only completed three laps in the first Tourist Trophy race before he DNF'd. The Phil Hill GT40 came in third in the preliminary race but went out in the 17th lap of the next race. Neither car was entered in the main race, the Governor's Cup. The front engined Corvette Grand Sports did well, and got all the publicity, but those with engineering knowledge knew the specially fabricated lightweight Corvettes were obsolete before they had turned a wheel compared to the Ford GT40's. Ford could prove that if they could just get their act together.
Shelby Given the Nod
For some reason Ford had ignored Carroll Shelby during both the development period of the GT40 and the European racing program, even though he had been on their payroll with the Cobra project since 1962. Maybe the feeling was that his plate was too full already or that Shelby, dealing with the Cobra , a car based on a 1953 car, wouldn't be able to handle such a sophisticated car as the Ford GT. But in the winter of 1964, the phone was picked up in Los Angeles and Shelby answered. It was Ford, having reached the point of terminal embarassment when Shelby's Cobras were beating their computer engineered GT40's. Two of the first GT40's were shipped by TWA air freighter from Nassau to Los Angeles, California, in December 1964. Shelby's brief: make the SOB's reliable, then put together a racing team to race them. Shelby appointed Carroll Smith to be the Team Manager for the GT40 program. And put his chief engineer Phil Remington and his chief test driver, British ex-pate Ken Miles, onto the task of sorting out the flaws. Meanwhile, over in England, Ford Advanced Vehicles was continuing to assemble GT40's from sub-contracted parts. As Shelby's crew modified the GT40's, a target was set before them--Daytona in eight weeks. Ken Miles, Bruce McLaren and Bob Bondurant test drove the cars at Riverside to see what broke.
One problem discovered was that the cars displayed both understeer and oversteer at the same time! This was due to the narrow tires on the Borrani wire rims, which were flexing. Spokes were breaking right and left. So solid wheels - Halibrands-were added that didn't flex as much. They weighed less, saving 30 lbs. overall, and the new Goodyear tires worked better too.
The exotic Indy F.A.V. (Fairlane) 4.2 liter aluminum block went next. The trouble with aluminum is, if your aluminum engine overheats you can have warpage of the block. Less likely with a cast iron block. In went the race proven iron block 289. Another exotic piece thrown out was the dry sump system. While the dry sump oil system was theoretically better for cooling the oil by locating the oil supply away from the block, replacing it with a wet sump saved another 50 lbs.
The Colotti transaxles were modified -they had to last because though new ZF transaxles were ordered, they hadn't arrived yet from Germany. No Colotti had lasted more than six hours in any one race. A Ford engineer fashioned a hardened ring and pinion gear to replace the unreliable stock ones.
Aerodynamics
The sloping nose of the first-gen GT40-the one that looked like a duck billed platypus-was changed so the car would have less front end lift. The grille cavity was deepened. The vents in the front hood were doubled in size to exit more air. The cooling system was enlarged. Oil and trans cooling was improved. Much larger disc brakes were installed up front. Shelby was big on graphic continuity so the GT40's were painted Shelby American colors - dark blue with twin white "LeMans" stripes. Development continued right up to the Daytona Continental 2,000 KM Race in 1965. Somewhere along the line, additional front and rear spoilers were added after instability was noted on the banking. But all the work paid off--the GT40 driven by Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby won the Daytona Continental race. Leo Beebe and Ray Geddes--both high ranking Ford executives-- were there to shake the hands of the winners. In eight weeks, Shelby-American had converted a loser into a winner. They wouldn't win all the races in the '65 season and, in fact, would lose LeMans, but the 1964 cars should still be remembered as the first Ford GT's. Ironically the body style shown here was not kept and Ford re-fitted the first three cars with the new nose shape developed by Shelby. So a handful of pictures are all GT40 race fans have to go on as far as knowing the way the GT40's first appeared in prototype form. It's shocking that Ford -- a firm that has more reverance for history than most Detroit automakers--had a brain=fade on this car, altering the first three GT40's built but, hey, you could argue that they were fighting a battle then, and it was a battle in which every weapon counted.