GT40 and Ford GT

Ford's Revenge: The GT40 and the Rebirth of the Ford GT

In the spring of 1963, Henry Ford II thought he had bought Ferrari. Ford's negotiators had spent months auditing Ferrari's books and hammering out a deal that would fold Enzo Ferrari's road-car and racing operations into Ford, with Ferrari retained to run competition. The contract was reportedly on the table for signing in May 1963 when Ferrari walked away, the sticking point being control: Ferrari wanted to keep directing his own racing program independently, including at the Indianapolis 500, where Ford did not want a Ferrari entry competing against its own investment. Whatever the precise mix of pride and control at issue, the deal died, and Henry Ford II is said to have come away determined to beat Ferrari where it would sting most: at Le Mans, which Ferrari had won six years running from 1960 to 1965.

That determination became a program. Ford's engineers, working initially with Lola's Eric Broadley and later under Ford Advanced Vehicles in Slough, England, built a mid-engined endurance racer low enough that its designers reportedly measured its roofline against a man's outstretched hand. In period lore, that is the origin of the 'GT40' name (40 inches of height). Early development was rough: the car that debuted at Le Mans in 1964 was fast and fragile, and 1965 brought more of the same. Ford brought in Carroll Shelby's operation to sharpen the racing program and scaled the engine up to 7 litres for the Mk II built for 1966.

The payoff came on 19 June 1966. Ford entered eight Mk II GT40s at Le Mans, and for the first time an American manufacturer's cars finished first, second, and third. The finish became almost as famous as the win: as the leading cars approached the flag together, Ford staged a photo finish, and Miles/Hulme slowed to let McLaren/Amon draw level; the ACO ruled the No. 2 car had covered more distance and awarded it the win. Bucknum and Hutcherson brought the third GT40 home to complete the sweep. Three years after Ferrari had walked away from the table, Ford had its answer.

Ford kept winning. In 1967 an American-built Mk IV, driven by Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt, took overall victory. It is the only time an all-American car and driver combination has won Le Mans outright. For 1968 and 1969, Ford's works effort passed to John Wyer's operation, racing the lighter Mk I chassis in Gulf livery. One chassis, numbered 1075, won Le Mans twice: 1968 with Rodriguez/Bianchi, then 1969 with Ickx/Oliver, in what is often cited as the closest finish in the race's history. Ickx crossed the line roughly 120 metres ahead of Hans Herrmann's Porsche 908 after 24 hours.

Alongside racing, Ford built a small, genuinely road-focused version. When Ford Advanced Vehicles wound down, John Wyer's JWA took over Slough and built the Mk III: a longer-tailed, more usable GT40 with opening door windows and a central gear lever. Only seven were built, in 1966 and 1967 (four left-hand-drive, three right-hand-drive), at $18,500 each; all seven reportedly survive today. Totals for GT40 production across all marks depend on how prototypes and the Mk IV's twelve numbered chassis are counted: Wikipedia gives about 105 cars, and a Hillbank Motor Corporation history counts 124, a figure that includes twelve prototypes and ten completed Mk IVs.

The name went dormant for more than three decades before Ford revived the GT for its 2003 centennial, producing 4,038 cars across 2005-2006 model years. That was short of Ford's internal hope of roughly 4,500. A second, more ambitious revival followed a decade later: unveiled at Detroit in January 2015, developed with Multimatic, and paired with a GT race program built to chase the 2016 Le Mans 50th anniversary. On 18-19 June 2016, Ford's GTs took the GTE Pro class pole and finished first in class. It was a class victory, not an outright win of the kind the original GT40s had claimed, but one deliberately timed to the exact date of the 1966 sweep. The road car that followed sold in extremely small numbers through Multimatic's Markham, Ontario facility, dressed in Heritage Edition liveries retelling the GT40's own history, with total production across two tranches (2017-2022) reported by Motor1 at roughly 1,350 cars.

A chassis-by-chassis accounting shows why the GT40's total is disputed. Before the numbered production run at chassis 1001 began, Ford Advanced Vehicles built twelve pre-production prototypes, GT/101 through GT/112, a category distinct from, and not obviously folded into, either of the two headline totals, 105 and 124. The Mk I run itself carries an asterisk: alongside the eighty-five cars numbered 1001 to 1085 were a further eight cars that left the factory without chassis numbers at all, receiving them (1086 and 1108 through 1114) after the fact. Even the Mk II count has layers: two of the original prototypes were converted to Mk II specification, eight more were built new for 1966, and five of those were later rebuilt again to a revised Mk2B specification in 1967, three of which went on to Alan Mann Racing rather than Ford's own team. The GT40's chassis history was tangled in period, and no single surviving ledger appears to count it the same way twice, which is why totals as far apart as 105 and 124 both circulate.

The Engineers Who Actually Built It

Two Ford-side names, largely absent from the popular Shelby-centric telling, did the specific engineering work that turned Ford's Le Mans ambition into a running car. Roy Lunn, an English-born engineer who had designed Ford's mid-engined Mustang I concept car, was the only Dearborn engineer with hands-on experience with a mid-engine layout when Ford went looking for someone to run the GT program in England in 1963; Ford's management gave Lunn engineering control of the project, and he held the director's role across the GT40's entire competition life, even as different outside teams (Lola, Ford Advanced Vehicles, Shelby American, and later John Wyer's operation) rotated through running the actual race programs. Alongside Lunn, master fabricator Phil Remington, a veteran hot-rod builder who had already worked on Indianapolis and Formula One cars before joining Shelby's operation, did much of the unglamorous problem-solving that made the GT40 competitive at all. That included rerouting cooling and brake-duct airflow through the body in ways that, by some retrospective accounts, recovered close to 79 horsepower's worth of previously wasted aerodynamic drag. Where Carroll Shelby's specific contribution is best documented is in personnel and program discipline rather than any single component: Shelby's operation retained overall charge of the works racing effort even after Ford brought in its NASCAR partner Holman-Moody for additional manufacturing capacity, and it was Shelby's team that put Ken Miles into the car as the GT40's primary development driver, the same Miles who oversaw the fuel-injection, suspension, and brake changes that turned it from a fast but fragile 1964-65 also-ran into the car that would win Le Mans outright.

What the 1966 Photo Finish Cost

The staged three-abreast finish that gave Ford its 1-2-3 sweep at Le Mans in June 1966 had a human cost the image itself doesn't show. Ken Miles, driving the leading car with co-driver Denny Hulme, slowed in the race's final laps so that Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon's GT40 could draw level for the photograph Ford's management wanted; because McLaren and Amon had started from further back on the grid, the distance-covered tiebreak handed them the win instead. Miles would not get another chance to win Le Mans outright. On 17 August 1966, barely two months later, he was killed at Riverside International Raceway in California while testing the experimental Ford J-car, which was developed as a successor to the Mk II and was the direct forerunner of the Mk IV that would go on to win Le Mans in 1967. The J-car left the track at roughly 200 mph and rolled; the precise mechanical cause was never conclusively established, though a suspension failure has generally been treated as the likely trigger. Denny Hulme, his co-driver on the day of the famous non-win, went on to a highly decorated career of his own, winning the 1967 Formula One World Championship with Brabham the following year. He is the only New Zealander ever to do so.