Twenty-Four Hours at Le Mans, 1966

In June 1962, Henry Ford II issued a statement that the Ford Motor Company was withdrawing from Detroit's Safety Resolution, meaning that it would now openly sponsor motor racing. This decision was a tremendous about-face, considering that Henry II—“the Deuce,” as some called him behind his back—was then head of the Automobile Manufacturers Association and therefore responsible for enforcing the Safety Resolution, a 1957 agreement in which, journalist A. J. Baime explains, “Detroit automakers agreed not to advertise ‘the specific engine size, torque, horsepower, or ability to accelerate or perform, in any contest that suggests speed’” (13). It was an open secret, though, that Ford and its main competitors, General Motors (GM) and Chrysler, were quietly backing stock-car racers, and so Ford executive Lee Iacocca persuaded his boss to ditch the agreement. Iacocca, the wunderkind who masterminded the Ford Mustang in the 1960s and later spearheaded Chrysler's near-miraculous post-1979 comeback, said, “We had to beat the hell out of everybody” (15). Initially, Ford tried to purchase the Italian sportscar manufacturer Ferrari, which had come to dominate European endurance racing by the early 1960s, but Ford lost out to Italian car company Fiat. Over the next several years, Ford pumped millions of dollars into developing a race car that could win the grueling, twenty-four-hour endurance race held near Le Mans, France.The climax of Baime's book, Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans (2009), as well as the movie based on that book, James Mangold's Ford v. Ferrari (2019), is the 1966 Le Mans contest, in which Ford's teams dramatically outraced Ferrari and captured the title. This race had a controversial end, in which Ford manufactured a photo finish to emphasize the company's sweeping victory, in the process effectively (and unfairly) relegating dominant veteran driver Ken Miles to second place. The book and movie tell the captivating story of Ford's nearly quixotic quest to defeat Ferrari, but in different ways. While Ford v. Ferrari focuses on the tempestuous friendship between Miles (Christian Bale) and race car developer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), Go Like Hell focuses more on the transatlantic rivalry between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari. In the film, Ford and his underlings are out-of-touch suits who can barely understand racing's appeal, while Ferrari is primarily a foil, an old and inscrutable Italian in dark glasses who largely dismisses his American challengers. The book, however, gives a more nuanced picture of both men, along with their backgrounds and motivations: Ford is a middle-aged man trying to rescue his grandfather's historic company and exit a failing marriage, while aging Ferrari mourns the loss of his beloved son Dino to muscular dystrophy.Mangold's Ford v. Ferrari is a visually impressive movie that captures the drama of high-speed auto racing. It develops the interpersonal relationship between Shelby and Miles, as well as between Miles and his wife and son. The film truly conveys the excitement of Ford beating Ferrari at its own game. Yet Go Like Hell does a better job of crafting a narrative of post–World War II globalization and transnational competition in the auto industry. (Yes, Enzo Ferrari likely used protracted negotiations with Ford as leverage in his dealings with Fiat, but it was not as dramatic as the process portrayed in the movie.) Baime's book has an extensive cast of complex characters. In Go Like Hell, Leo Beebe is a taciturn World War II veteran, Henry Ford II's mature right-hand man who is tasked with supervising development of the Le Mans racers; in Ford v. Ferrari, he appears as a younger and more devious man (played by Josh Lucas), a veritable cartoon villain. Baime also unpacks the backgrounds of drivers like Englishman John Surtees and Italian American phenom Mario Andretti, figures who do not appear in the film.Go Like Hell is a not an academic book, yet it contains endnotes keyed to quotations or phrases. The author has mined primary-source publications such as Car and Driver, Sports Illustrated, and the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, along with memoirs by or interviews with key figures, including Lee Iacocca and driver Phil Hill. Baime writes: “The dialogue has been carefully reconstructed using countless interviews and contemporaneous accounts” (xiv). By contrast, one suspects that most of the film's dialogue originated with a Hollywood screenwriter. Instructors could use either text successfully in a course unit focused on motor sport history, but I would not ask students to watch the movie without also assigning the book.The story of Ford's attempt to defeat Ferrari is rooted in the hot-rod culture of Southern California, an idea conveyed in the book and film. Readers who want to know more about this facet of motor history would do well to consult David N. Lucsko's The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915–1990 (2008). Additionally, the tale of mid-twentieth-century auto racing is that of a very dangerous sport. Go Like Hell begins with the notorious crash at Le Mans in 1955, when Pierre Levegh's Jaguar went airborne and exploded into a crowd of spectators, killing dozens. Indeed, young racers who signed up to race for Scuderia Ferrari in the early 1960s practically understood that they were signing their own death warrants. While Ford v. Ferrari does an excellent job of illustrating the trepidation that Ken Miles and his family felt regarding his return to racing, Go Like Hell is even better at detailing the widespread knowledge that any driver's race could be his last. Auto racing was (and still is) a deadly game, and perhaps some people refuse to acknowledge it as sport because we want the competitions that we call sport to celebrate bodily performance rather than glorify a mechanical competition that can destroy bodies instantaneously.Motor racing fits a category known as technoscientific sport, one analyzed in Rayvon Fouché’s Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (2017). Ford v. Ferrari clearly shows the physically, mentally, and technologically demanding aspects of auto racing, something a hysterical Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) realizes in the movie when Carroll Shelby gives him a quick and terrifying spin in a race car powered by a massive, 427-cubic-inch powerplant. More generally, the story of Ford's showdown with Ferrari illustrates connections between racing and the auto industry. Horse racing proponents once argued that their sport improved the breed, a shibboleth that grew increasingly hollow over time as some horses were bred only for racing. Yet both Go Like Hell and Ford v. Ferrari show a clear connection between motor sport and the marketing of big, powerful cars. Racing might or might not have produced better consumer cars, but it was certainly used to sell them.An important takeaway here is that the story of Ford's 1960s racing program is basically the story of the rise of the muscle car. The postwar United States was a society of prosperity and mobility—both upward and outward—and many young men of the Baby Boom era desired horsepower. (Iacocca's presentation of this idea to the other executives at Ford's corporate headquarters is one of several funny moments in Ford v. Ferrari.) Although Congress in the 1950s pressured Detroit to focus on safety, not speed—and additional pressure later came from consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 1965—Iacocca realized that a racing team was one way for the Ford Motor Company to market “total performance” (34). By the mid-1960s, Detroit automakers produced big cars with big engines, steel monsters with names plucked from Europe's legendary tracks. GM, for instance, introduced the Pontiac Le Mans and Pontiac GTO in 1963, with the latter borrowing its name from a Ferrari model. After one reads Go Like Hell, the muscle car boom of the late 1960s makes a lot more sense. I grew up in central Illinois in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was not uncommon to hear tales of the powerful cars in my family's past: my father drove a dusky blue 1967 GTO, while my maternal uncle had a white 1968 GTO. Neither of these men ever participated in motor sport, yet it is easy to imagine them poring over car magazines and following racing news from Le Mans, Daytona, Indianapolis, and Sebring. This is a case where sport had a tremendous impact on the economy and culture of a generation, with significant ramifications for transportation infrastructure and the environment. Detroit had already spent decades marketing automobiles to the masses, and now it did so with a popular type of heavy rolling stock that topped out around fourteen or fifteen miles to the gallon.Sport historians should pay closer attention to the history of motor racing, a significant and often overlooked aspect of modern society and its sporting cultures. The story of Ford's quest to beat Ferrari at Le Mans in the 1960s, in print and/or on a screen, is a good place to start.