The Ford GT40: The Car Built to Beat Ferrari at Le Mans

Almost no racing car has ever been built for so narrow a purpose. The Ford GT40 existed to beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and it was born of a grudge. It succeeded four years running, from 1966 through 1969, and it did so in two entirely different ways: first with the brute force of a seven-litre works car, and then, after the rulebook turned against the big engines, with a five-year-old privateer machine that won the race twice on the very same chassis.

This is the story of that car, told from Dearborn's side. Its companion, the history of Ferrari's endurance cars, ends with the marque's last Le Mans win in 1965 and its long defeat that followed. This is the other half of that war — and, as with the Ferrari pieces, it is best followed through the engines, because the GT40 won with two different Ford V8s across its four victories, and the change of engine is the change of the whole story.

The deal that failed (1963)

In 1963, Ford tried to buy Ferrari. Henry Ford II wanted a foothold in international motorsport, and Enzo Ferrari, short of the capital his racing habit demanded, was willing to talk. After months of negotiation the deal was all but signed — the lawyers had arrived at Maranello — when Enzo read a clause that would have given Ford control over his racing budget and, in particular, would have barred him from racing at Indianapolis against Ford. He would not surrender command of his own team, and he walked away.

Henry Ford II, humiliated, ordered his company to build a car that would beat Ferrari at the race Ferrari owned. Ford approached the small British constructors, and settled on Lola, whose mid-engined Mk6 already used a Ford V8. Around Eric Broadley's design, and under the former Aston Martin team manager John Wyer, Ford established Ford Advanced Vehicles at Slough, in England, and built a low, wide coupe that stood just forty inches tall. That height gave it its name.

False starts: the 289 cars (1964–1965)

The early GT40 was powered by the 289-cubic-inch (4.7-litre) Windsor V8, the small-block from Ford's saloons, breathing through Weber carburetors and making around 350 to 390 horsepower. It was fast and it was beautiful, and at first it did not finish: all three cars retired from Le Mans in 1964. To make the car eligible for the GT and sports-car classes, Ford built a short homologation run of the Mk I — around fifty examples in 1965 — a step that looked routine at the time but would prove decisive years later, because it kept the Mk I a legal homologated sports car long after the works cars were gone. Losing patience with the racing effort, Ford handed the competition program to Carroll Shelby for 1965, and Shelby's team gave the car its first victory at the Daytona 2000 kilometres that February. But Le Mans, in June, went as before: the GT40s failed, and Ferrari took its sixth straight win. The car worked; it simply was not yet strong enough to last twenty-four hours against Ferrari. Ford's answer to that was more displacement.

The big block: the Mk II and 1966

For 1966 Ford fitted the GT40 with the 427-cubic-inch (7.0-litre) FE big-block, the engine from its full-size cars and stock-car racers, producing something on the order of 485 horsepower. The car became the Mk II, and at Le Mans in 1966 it overwhelmed everything, finishing one-two-three — the first Le Mans win for an American manufacturer, and the first American victory in a major European race since 1921.

The finish, however, is remembered for controversy rather than dominance. Ford wanted a photographed formation finish, and arranged for its leading cars to cross the line together. Ken Miles, who had led much of the race with Denny Hulme and had already won Daytona and Sebring that year, slowed to let the sister car of Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon draw alongside. The officials then ruled that McLaren and Amon had won, because they had started farther back on the grid and had therefore covered slightly more distance over the twenty-four hours. Miles was denied the win, and with it the unprecedented sweep of all three American endurance classics in a single season. He was killed two months later, testing Ford's next car. It is the human wound at the center of the whole saga, and the reason the story has outlived the results.

All-American: the Mk IV and 1967

The car Miles had been testing was the J-car, an experiment with a honeycomb-aluminum chassis, and it was reworked after his death into the 1967 Mk IV. This was a wholly American machine — a chassis designed and built in the United States, carrying the same 427 big-block, now nearer 500 horsepower — and it was driven at Le Mans by two Americans, Dan Gurney and A. J. Foyt. They won. It remains the only Le Mans victory achieved by a car developed and built entirely in the United States and driven by an all-American crew, and it is the race at which Gurney, on the podium, first shook and sprayed a bottle of champagne over everyone within reach, founding a tradition that has never stopped.

The rules change (1968)

The seven-litre cars had made Le Mans frightening. Ford's prototypes were passing 210 miles per hour on a circuit not built for it, and for 1968 the governing body cut prototype engines to 3.0 litres, which outlawed the Mk II and Mk IV at a stroke — and, at the same stroke, banned Ferrari's four-litre P4. Ford, having proved its point, withdrew its factory team. But the rules left a door open: sports cars built in sufficient numbers could still run with engines up to 5.0 litres, and the humble Mk I, thanks to that 1965 homologation run, qualified. The obsolete car was suddenly legal again, and the man who would exploit the fact was John Wyer, back with the program he had begun, now running under Gulf Oil's blue and orange.

The Mirage and the lightweight GT40

Wyer had not simply kept the old cars in a shed. For 1967 his team had built a lighter, sleeker derivative of the GT40 called the Mirage M1 — a standard Mk I chassis reworked with a squared-off front, a trimmer cabin, and bodywork that combined fiberglass with carbon-fiber reinforcement, an early use of the material in racing. The Mirage won the 1000 kilometres of Spa in 1967. When the 1968 rules ended the prototype era, Wyer folded that work back into the GT40: the lightweight construction of the Mirage was carried onto the Mk I cars he prepared for the sports-car class, one of which was even a rebuilt Mirage chassis. Into these he fitted the 302-cubic-inch (5.0-litre) Windsor V8 — a longer-stroke relative of the original 289 — topped with special alloy Gurney-Weslake cylinder heads and fed by Weber 48 IDA carburetors, good for about 425 horsepower. It was less powerful than the 427 monsters, but lighter, and, crucially, durable.

The privateer years: 1075 wins twice (1968–1969)

What followed is the least-known and, in some ways, the most remarkable chapter of the GT40's career. In 1968 — a race postponed to September by that year's political unrest in France — the Gulf GT40 of Pedro Rodríguez and Lucien Bianchi won Le Mans, the third Ford win in a row but the first for the original Mk I design, against newer and lighter three-litre prototypes that could not last the distance. The winning car carried the chassis number 1075.

In 1969 the same car, 1075, won again, in one of the closest finishes the race has ever seen. Jacky Ickx and Jackie Oliver brought it home ahead of the Porsche 908 of Hans Herrmann and Gérard Larrousse by a margin of a few seconds after twenty-four hours of racing. The 1969 race is also remembered for Ickx's quiet protest at the start: appalled by the danger of the traditional Le Mans running start, in which drivers sprinted across the track and pulled away before fastening their belts, he walked to his car, strapped in properly, and set off last. On the opening lap the privateer John Woolfe, who had run in the old way, was killed in a crash while not yet belted — a tragedy that ended the running start for good and vindicated Ickx entirely. He then drove through the field and won.

Chassis 1075 had done something no car had done before: it won Le Mans outright twice, on the same chassis, in consecutive years, and it remains one of only three cars ever to win the race more than once with a single chassis. That a "leftover" Mk I, a design Ford itself had set aside, should be the one to achieve it — and that most people who know the GT40's four wins have never heard of the back-to-back triumphs of 1968 and 1969 — is the quiet epilogue to the loud story of 1966 and 1967.

Afterlife

Roughly 105 GT40s were built between 1964 and 1969, and they are now among the most valued cars in existence: an original Gulf lightweight sold for eleven million dollars in 2012, and the race-winning chassis are effectively priceless. That desirability has produced a long line of continuation cars — Safir Engineering acquired the GT40 trademark and built further "Mk V" examples in the years after production ended, and licensed builders such as Superformance construct new GT40s to this day, alongside a thriving world of replicas. Ford itself returned to the shape twice, with the retro Ford GT of 2005 and the carbon-fiber Ford GT of the 2010s; the latter won its class at Le Mans in 2016, fifty years to the season after the 1966 triumph, closing the circle with deliberate symmetry.

The grudge that built a legend

Ford is said to have spent around nine million dollars on the GT40 program — roughly half what it would have cost to buy Ferrari in the first place — purely to win one race, and then it won that race four times. The car did it as three different machines: the seven-litre Mk II of 1966 and the American-built Mk IV of 1967, both built to bludgeon, and the light, durable, five-litre Mk I of 1968 and 1969, which won by lasting. Both halves grew from the same act of pique in a Maranello conference room in 1963.

Read alongside the Ferrari endurance history, the GT40's story completes a rivalry that changed the sport: Ferrari's six straight wins, ended by Ford's revenge, followed by the quiet, overlooked coda of a single obsolete chassis winning twice against the future. And at the heart of it remains Ken Miles, the driver who was denied the win he had earned in 1966 and did not live to race again — the reminder that the grandest engineering grudge in motorsport history was, in the end, carried by people.

Sources and further reading

• Wikipedia. Ford GT40; Ford GT40 Mk.I; 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1969 24 Hours of Le Mans; Henry Ford II; Mirage (race car). https://en.wikipedia.org/
• gt40.net. Chassis records, including GT40 P/1075. http://gt40.net/
• Ford Corporate. The Ford GT40: origins and the Le Mans Committee. https://corporate.ford.com/
• Conceptcarz and Supercars.net. Ford GT40 chassis P/1075 and the Gulf lightweights. https://www.conceptcarz.com/

Specification note. Figures are representative rather than exhaustive. The GT40 was raced in many detail specifications, and outputs varied by year, tune, and engine. Horsepower figures are period gross ratings. The 289, 302, and 427 designations are cubic-inch displacements (roughly 4.7, 5.0, and 7.0 litres); the 255 was an early alloy prototype engine. The Mk III was a road-going version and did not race. Chassis P/1075 was the first car to win Le Mans twice on the same chassis and is one of only three to have done so.