Ford v Ferrari was a million dollar contest which Ford would win

Posted in America, Cars, Historical articles, History, Sport on Tuesday, 25 February 2014

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This edited article about motor racing first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 567 published on 25 November 1972.

 Le Mans 1967,  picture, image, illustration

The Le Mans 24 hour race in 1967 in which three Fords crashed, by Graham Coton

Executives sitting around a big table in the board room of the Ford Motor Company in America shuffled the folders of reports and statements before them.

Charles H. Patterson, Executive Vice President, had listened carefully while his executives had given their usual buoyant reports on the company’s progress.

Then he stood up.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “We all know we are in business to sell automobiles, not to win races. But that chequered flag is more exciting than a sales report.”

If anybody needed to have the message spelt out, it was that Fords were going into international motor racing in a big way.

As Patterson said, “Nothing does more to sell a vehicle than respect and enthusiasm for it, and we believe that nothing generates enthusiasm for a car faster than winning in flat-out competition.”

Fords do not believe in thinking small. If they were going into motor racing, they were going to start at the top. They had the dollars to buy the best racing concern in the business, and the best at that time was a specialist firm in Italy employing only 450 people to turn out craftsman-made sports cars and Grand Prix cars that had scored an incredible number of wins.

Its name was Ferrari – and Ford wanted to buy Ferrari. Ferrari’s “No” to the big, multi-million dollar American concern was the signal for the start of a mighty battle on the racing tracks between Ferrari and Ford, that was to take Ford three years and the expenditure of several million dollars to win.

The tally of racing wins in sports car events between 1964 and 1967 – the years of the big battle – gives ten to Ferrari and seven to Ford, with Fords’ wins coming towards the end of the period.

Great though these contests were, one man who did not see them was Enzo Ferrari himself. He stayed away because he could not bear to see one of his cars damaged in a crash.

Each of them had been lovingly created in his factory, and the sight of them being overdriven or risked in the fight for speed made him wince.

An engine which had taken 36 hours to assemble, twelve hours to run in and up to half an hour to road test was like a baby to him.

Probably this feeling had been born in him soon after the First World War, when he stepped into the motor industry in the back streets of Turin in Italy.

In those days, cars were scarce. Everybody who could afford one, wanted one. But the motor manufacturers refused to recognise the market trends. They steadfastly turned out a proportion of vans for tradesmen, and far too few cars for private customers.

The back street dealers bought as many vans as they could get their hands on, stripped the bodies off them and sold the chassis to coach-builders who put beautiful bodies on them for sale to people who wanted to discard their horses and carriages and follow the new trend of driving about in a motor car.

One of the men engaged in this transformation was Ferrari, then twenty. Nobody could have guessed then that he was destined to reach the summit of his profession as the world’s greatest manufacturer of racing cars noted for their incredibly high performances.

But it was not to be an overnight success. It took Ferrari forty years of brilliance to reach this peak . . . forty years in which he changed himself from a mechanic without capital to the boss of a concern which made the fastest cars in the world.

His big break had come while he was working for Alfa Romeo, who set up a racing division called Scuderia Ferrari with a talented designer named Vittorio Jano. Between them, Ferrari and Jano turned out cars which were startling winners in both sports car and Grand Prix racing, a record which Ferrari kept up when he eventually had his own factory and employed other designers.

Sometimes, he entered six or eight cars in the major sports car races, running if necessary in two different countries on the same day.

This was the man whose brains and organisation Ford wanted to buy, and who decided to say “No” and fight the giant from across the Atlantic.

Instead, Ford bought their brains and know-how elsewhere, and put their cars on the international racing tracks with varying success.

Sometimes, sheer weight of numbers carried them through to victory, as in the 1967 Le Mans 24 hour race, for which they entered seven cars. Ferrari countered this with an equal number, and a battle for prestige began.

Both sides suffered. Soon after two Ferraris had retired with engine failure, three Fords crashed.

However, Ford came home the winners with another car which finished the race pursued by two red Ferraris.

This was Fords’ second win at Le Mans. They had finally beaten Ferrari’s string of nine wins (six of which were in succession) and vindicated the decision of their management to pull out all the stops to prove that their cars were winners on the world’s racing tracks.

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