Ferrari in Endurance Racing, 1949–1973: The Cars and Engines of the Sports-Car Years

Sports-car racing is where Ferrari began, and where, for the better part of two decades, it was the most dominant force in the world. Enzo Ferrari built and sold road cars to pay for going racing, and in the 1950s and 1960s the racing that mattered most, commercially and emotionally, was endurance racing: the Mille Miglia, the Targa Florio, Sebring, and above all the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In that arena Ferrari won Le Mans nine times, including six years in a row, and took thirteen world sports-car championships.

This is a history of the works endurance cars from Ferrari's first Le Mans win in 1949 to the factory's withdrawal from sports-car racing after 1973, told, as its companion history of the Grand Prix cars was told, through the engines — because many of these were the very same engines. The Colombo and Lampredi V12s, the Dino V6, and finally the flat-12 all served in both arenas, and the sports-racers were often where a new Ferrari engine or layout appeared first.

Unlike the Formula One program, which ran unbroken until Enzo's death in 1988, the works endurance effort had a definite end. After the 1973 season Ferrari left sports-car racing to concentrate everything on Formula One, and it did not return as a factory prototype entrant for decades. So this story closes in 1973, at a real turning point rather than an arbitrary one. Its central antagonist, the Ford GT40, gets its own telling next; here the war with Ford is seen from Maranello's side.

The beginning: Colombo's V12 and the first Le Mans (1949–1953)

Ferrari went endurance racing almost as soon as it existed. The car was the 166 MM — MM for Mille Miglia, the great Italian road race it was built to win — and its engine was the 2.0-litre version of Gioacchino Colombo's V12, the compact, free-revving unit that founded the marque. In 1949, the first year Le Mans was run after the war, Luigi Chinetti drove a 166 MM to Ferrari's first victory in the 24 Hours, sharing the car with the British aristocrat Lord Selsdon — though "sharing" understates it, as Chinetti drove all but around an hour of the twenty-four himself. It was the beginning of a relationship with Le Mans that would define the marque.

When the World Sportscar Championship was inaugurated in 1953, Ferrari won it, the first of many. The pattern that would hold for twenty years was already visible: a light, powerful, and above all durable engine, in a car built to survive as much as to sprint.

The Lampredi big cars and the four-cylinders (1953–1957)

Alongside Colombo's small V12, Ferrari deployed the larger engines of Aurelio Lampredi. The big naturally aspirated Lampredi V12, grown to nearly 5.0 litres in the 375 Plus, gave Ferrari its second Le Mans win in 1954, with José Froilán González and Maurice Trintignant. Lampredi also designed a family of four-cylinder engines — torquey, robust, and cheaper to run — that powered the 500 Mondial, 750 Monza, and 860 Monza sports-racers of the mid-1950s. On the strength of this varied fleet, Ferrari took the world sports-car title in 1954, 1956, and 1957, contending through the decade with Jaguar, Aston Martin, Maserati, and the briefly dominant Mercedes-Benz.

The Testa Rossa (1957–1961)

For 1958 the rules capped sports-prototype engines at 3.0 litres, and Ferrari answered with one of its most celebrated cars, the 250 Testa Rossa. Its name — "red head" — came from the red-crackle finish on its cam covers, and its heart was the 3.0-litre Colombo V12, fed by six twin-choke Weber carburetors and producing around 300 horsepower. The Testa Rossa won Le Mans in 1958, 1960, and 1961, and carried Ferrari to the world sports-car championship in all three of those years. The early cars, with their scalloped "pontoon-fender" bodywork, are among the most valuable automobiles ever built.

The GTO and the front-engined peak (1962–1964)

The same 3.0-litre Colombo V12 powered the car that has become the most coveted of all, the 250 GTO. Built to contest the GT category, the GTO was the final and finest evolution of Ferrari's front-engined line, and it won the International Championship for GT Manufacturers in 1962, 1963, and 1964, along with back-to-back victories in the punishing Tour de France Automobile. By the time it appeared, however, the front-engined layout it perfected was already obsolete for outright racing. The engine was moving to the back.

The mid-engined revolution: the P cars (1961–1965)

Ferrari, so reluctant to put the engine behind the driver in Formula One, made the change in sports-car racing with less resistance and to greater early effect. The move began with the small Dino V6 sports-racers — the 246 SP, which won the Targa Florio in 1961 and 1962 as the first mid-engined Ferrari to win a major race. In 1963 came the 250 P, designed under Mauro Forghieri: the first Ferrari sports car to carry a V12 behind the driver, its engine the familiar 3.0-litre Colombo unit from the Testa Rossa. It won Le Mans at its first attempt.

The formula was quickly enlarged. The 275 P, with a 3.3-litre V12, won Le Mans in 1964. And in 1965 a 3.3-litre 250 LM — entered not by the factory but by Luigi Chinetti's North American Racing Team, and driven by Jochen Rindt and Masten Gregory — won the 24 Hours. It was Ferrari's ninth Le Mans victory, and its sixth in a row. It was also, though no one knew it at the time, its last for fifty-eight years.

The Ford war (1963–1967)

In 1963, Ford came close to buying Ferrari outright. The deal collapsed at the last moment, reportedly when Enzo grasped that it would leave him without control of his own racing program, and Henry Ford II resolved to beat Ferrari at the race it owned. The result was the Ford GT40, and a rivalry that became the defining sports-car story of the decade.

Ferrari held the upper hand at first, winning Le Mans in 1964 and 1965 while Ford struggled with reliability. Then, in 1966, Ford arrived with its 7.0-litre cars sorted and overwhelmed Maranello, taking a crushing one-two-three at Le Mans and ending Ferrari's streak. Ferrari's reply came at the start of 1967 and was pointed: at the Daytona 24 Hours, its new 4.0-litre 330 P4 — a four-cam, Lucas-injected V12 of some 450 horsepower — scored a one-two-three of its own, a deliberate riposte to Ford's Le Mans finish the year before. The two marques then fought one of the greatest races in Le Mans history in June 1967, which Ford won with its Mk IV. Ferrari took the world sports-car championship that season, but Le Mans, the prize that mattered most, stayed with Ford.

The 1968 rupture and the 512 (1968–1971)

The contest was ended not on the track but in the rulebook. For 1968 the governing body cut prototype engines to 3.0 litres, which outlawed both Ford's 7.0-litre cars and Ferrari's 4.0-litre P-series at a stroke. Ferrari, angered by the change, sat out sports-car racing in 1968 in protest. When it returned in force, the landscape had shifted: a 5.0-litre class for homologated sports cars had produced the formidable Porsche 917, and Ferrari built its own 5.0-litre answer, the 512 S, with a new V12 of around 550 horsepower. Through 1970 and 1971 the big Ferraris fought the 917 hard, but they never mastered it, and Le Mans stayed out of reach. The 512 is the great Ferrari endurance car that never won the race for which it was built.

The flat-12 finale: the 312 PB (1971–1973)

When the 5.0-litre cars were legislated out after 1971, the championship became a 3.0-litre prototype formula — the same displacement as Formula One — and Ferrari built a sports-racer around its Grand Prix engine. The 312 PB used a version of the 3.0-litre flat-12 from the contemporary F1 car, and in 1972 it was untouchable: the works team won every championship race it entered and took the world championship in dominant fashion. Tellingly, Ferrari chose not to enter Le Mans that year, doubting the highly-strung F1-derived engine could last twenty-four hours, and the great endurance classic went to Matra.

In 1973 Ferrari at last committed the 312 PB to Le Mans and to a full title defense, but Matra had caught up. The French cars won both the championship and the 24 Hours, and Ferrari finished the season beaten. It would be the works team's last.

The withdrawal (1973)

After 1973, Ferrari withdrew from sports-car racing. The reasoning was, by then, straightforward: the flat-12 was needed in Formula One, where a resurgence was building around Niki Lauda and the 312T that would win the 1975 championship, and Enzo chose to spend his finite resources on the Grand Prix program rather than fight Matra, Alfa Romeo, and Porsche across two fronts. The works prototype effort that had begun with Chinetti at Le Mans in 1949 simply stopped. Ferrari would enter its road-based GT cars in endurance events, and privateers would keep the prancing horse on sports-car grids, but the factory that had won Le Mans nine times was, as a prototype constructor, gone.

The record, and the engines behind it

Ferrari also won the World Sportscar Championship — contested under several names and formats across these years, including separate GT and prototype categories in the mid-1960s — thirteen times in Enzo's era: in 1953, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, and 1972.

The engine, again

The endurance story rhymes with the Grand Prix one, and not only because the two shared engines. Here too the through-line is Enzo's conviction that a racing car is built around its engine: the Colombo V12 that began the marque won Le Mans across sixteen years and four displacements; the Dino V6 and the P-series V12s carried the mid-engine revolution; and the flat-12 that would soon dominate Formula One made one last, dominant sports-car season before the factory walked away. The sports-racers even led the Grand Prix cars at times, taking the engine behind the driver two years before Ferrari did so in F1.

The two histories also end very differently, and the difference is instructive. Formula One was Enzo's for life; endurance racing he could set down, and in 1973 he did, because a man with finite resources cannot chase every prize at once. What he left behind was a record that still stands among the greatest in the sport: nine Le Mans wins, six of them consecutive, thirteen world titles, and a run of cars — the Testa Rossa, the 250 GTO, the P4 — that are now among the most valuable objects the industry has ever produced. And he left behind a rivalry, with Ford, that was only half his story. The other half, told from Dearborn, is the subject of the next article.

Sources and further reading

• Wikipedia. Scuderia Ferrari; Ferrari 250; Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa; Ferrari 250 GTO; Ferrari P; Ferrari 330 P4; Ferrari 512; Ferrari 312 PB; List of 24 Hours of Le Mans winners. https://en.wikipedia.org/
• 24h-lemans.com. Ferrari at Le Mans, 1949–1965 (winning drivers). https://www.24h-lemans.com/
• Ferrari. Official model histories (330 P4, and others). https://www.ferrari.com/
• Britannica. Winners of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. https://www.britannica.com/sports/automobile-racing

Specification note. Figures are representative rather than exhaustive. Ferrari fielded a large number of closely related sports-racers, often several in a single season, and outputs varied by year, tune, and specification. Horsepower figures are period gross ratings. The World Sportscar Championship changed its name and structure repeatedly over these years, at times awarding separate titles for grand touring and prototype categories; the thirteen championships listed are the seasons in which Ferrari took the premier manufacturers' title in its category. Car and engine pairings identify the machine most associated with each result.