Ford Flat Out

Racing was one of the big foundation stones under the Ford Motor Company: The publicity that sprang from Barney Oldfield's campaigning in Henry Ford's "999," a rough but fast dirt-track car, was the prime mover that sent the company rocketing off on the way to being the colossus it is today. Ford had tried twice: Two companies had been shot from under him; in 1902, he began to put together the third and last one.

Ford was above everything a mechanic, but he was a driver, too, and in 1900 he ran a car of his own building on a track in Detroit, and beat the great Alexander Winton with it. Barney Oldfield, then a bicycle and motorcycle racer, saw him do it but wasn't much impressed. Two years later Oldfield's motorcycle racing partner, Tom Cooper, made a deal to help Ford build a pair of race cars, and brought Oldfield in as a mechanic. When they let Oldfield take one of the cars around a track, mostly to keep him quiet, he gave it the fastest ride it had had. He was quicker than either of the car's two assigned chauffeurs, and there was general agreement that when he'd learned to drive an automobile, he might be really fast. Oldfield raced for the first time on October 25, 1902, and won going away. A month later Henry Ford began to organize his company with money that race publicity had largely brought in; now, 62 years later. Ford is again a big name on the circuits.

"We are in racing to stay," Benson Ford says. and while conceivably the company might have second thoughts about staying, should winning come hard, it certainly is in. Ford is running for blood on the stock-car circuit (Ford drivers were 1-2 in NASCAR competition at this writing), Ford engines power Carroll Shelby's AC-bodied Cobras--winners of 18 national race events and the U.S. manufacturer's championship in 1963--and they ran seven Indianapolis cars this year. More audacious still. Ford shipped a trio of gran turismo cars, not just engines but the whole steaming package, off to Europe to essay the 1000-kilometer Nürburgring and the 24-hour Le Mans races. Win or lose, however, the Ford GT is one of the most exciting motorcars since World War II clanked off the scene. It represents hard effort, long thought by brilliant minds, and a lot of computerizing in the great iron brain machines as well; it's radical in concept, has the beauty of the ideally functional device, and will be well driven (by Phil Hill, Dan Gurney, Bruce McLaren, Roy Salvadori, Jo Schlesser, Dick Attwood) wherever it goes. If honest effort counts, the car deserves to succeed.

"The Ford GT will do 200 miles an hour and looks it. It has a 21st Century air, is five fingers higher than a yardstick to the rooftop, shark-nosed in front, weirdly vented in back, cross-engined and fat-wheeled. Technically it's not a race car, It's a gran turismo car, or, as the British say, a "fast touring" car. In theory one should be able to fit into it a girl, luggage for two for two weeks, a picnic basket full of truffled pâté and blanc de blancs and head for the hills. In fact, all it would take would be the girl, and she wouldn't take its rough ride, noise, heat and smell. Yet there's hope: Enzo Ferrari, whose GT cars have been the standards of the world for the past 15 years, makes perfectly tractable touring cars, wonders to transport two people at 165 miles an hour from here to there, together with everything they need to sustain civilized life. If the Ford GT works out, there may be something like that in our future.

The new, wild Ford is an Anglo-American device. Its remotest ancestor is probably a GT Lola that was the rage of the Racing Car Show in London at the beginning of 1963. This Lola was very low, indeed, and wickedly fast-looking. The man who'd designed it, Eric Broadley, was much complimented, and cited in some quarters as one of what the British call "the coming-men"--people on the way up.

The experimental idea car, Mustang I, the Ford GT's paternal grandfather, so to speak, was designed by Roy Lunn, born a Briton, an American citizen now, who worked with AC, Aston Martin and Jowett, is in charge of future and far-out Ford projects: Manager, Advanced Concepts Department. Lunn brought Broadley into the picture as a consultant on a yearlong contract. The Ford GT was put together on Broadley's home grounds in Slough, England. A third Englishman looming large in the project is John Wyer, European Manager, Special Vehicles Activity, Ford Division, Ford Motor Company. This means that Mr. Wyer is in charge of Ford's European competition activity.

Wyer understands perfectly well the two virtues of racing: There's nothing like it for making publicity, and little like it for hurrying along the technological development of a car. The well-known General Motors position--"The test track is the place for testing and development"--has a lot going for it, but in Wyer's view test-track work works, but not fast enough.

"The great thing about racing," Wyer says, "is that it puts pressure on the engineers. You can do this in other ways, but never so quickly."

It's true that race pressure is fierce. The actual stake may be nothing much; first prize may be a silver cup a foot high and a thousand dollars, but once a major company has committed itself to an entry, the race seems to increase in importance 10,000 times. To a company that is really earnest about racing, no effort is too great, no detail too minute. Mercedes-Benz, always serious about its racing, once flew a single specialist mechanic from Germany to England to solder a leaking radiator. When he'd finished, they flew him home again. There was nothing else that required his attention. Ford may not go quite that far into the bag of tricks, but some of the design features of the GT car show an exemplary concern with minutiae. Much about the automobile is startlingly new. The other Ford-powered road-racing car, the Cobra, is conservative in contrast; it is reminiscent of the fast road cars of the classic period in everything but power: Few motorcars ever put on the road have the Cobra's brute force. And few have ever offered so much performance for so little money: 0 to 100 miles an hour, for example, in 14 seconds for $6000! People who want to go like that are not upset by tight-fitting driving space or a cloth top that may not keep out quite all the rain. The Ford GT planners took things down to points much finer than that.

Take the matter of the driver's seat. There was a time when whole race cars were built with less care and planning than has gone into the Ford GT seat. Designers seemed to take the view that the driver was going to be sitting there at his ease, and if he could reach all the controls, and see the road, right, he'd been amply provided for. This attitude has produced some startling cases of discomfort. If a driver has to shift 2500 times during a race, as he does at Monaco, the shape and size of the gearshift knob becomes a matter of some significance, the difference between a sore hand or a blistered one. Some cars get so hot that their drivers expect to lose five or six pounds in every race. A famous photograph shows the late Harry Schell leaning hungrily out of his car on a slow corner while a friend aims a full bucket of cold water at his head. That was an open car, a single-seat Grand Prix race car, and even so, capable of producing cockpit temperatures around 150 degrees. In closed cars, gran turismo cars, it can get really hot. And such matters as a little lump on the side of the seat, or a projection that bumps the left knee every time the clutch is floored, are trifles that are mere nuisances for the first 50 miles, and real horrors after the first 500.

Ford is having none of that. The seats in the three GT cars that make up the Ford team are of course set up for the individual drivers, and since gran turismo races are very long, usually requiring two drivers to a car, the drivers are matched not only for ability and temperament, but for hip size. The seats are not adjustable; they are fixed, they are integral with the body and contribute to its strength. (Also, they can't come unglued during a race. It's hard to put back an untracked seat while doing 160 miles an hour in a pouring rain at midnight.) In harmony with the new mode, the Ford GT allows for driver leg length and preference by setting up the steering wheel and pedals as adjustable.

The upholstery is patterned in nickel-size depressed dots. They're not decorative: Air taken out of a high-pressure area at the front of the car is ducted to the seats and blasted through each dot. This air flow will relieve, if it doesn't completely remove, one of the big sources of driver distraction and annoyance: plain perspiration. An even more ingenious use of air: An inflatable pillow is built into the lower part of each seat back. When the driver's back muscles begin to cramp in one position, he can alter his posture by pumping a little air into the cushion, or by bleeding some off with a push-button control.

When 120 miles an hour was a very high speed, a driver might have afforded minor distractions, but this year, at Le Mans, the fastest cars could touch 200 miles an hour down the Mulsanne straight, running on what is, after all, a two-lane road, no race track. At that rate, three-and-a-third miles a minute, a driver who involuntarily winces because his elbow has just hit a sharp-edged window-winder, conceivably can lose the car for good then and there. Carroll Shelby has on the Cobra staff a knowledgeable, experienced, and very hardy English driver, Ken Miles, who is responsible for, among other things, something called "Driver Environment" in the Cobras. It's a term with which Roy Lunn is also very much concerned.

The Ford GT is a mid-engined car, that's to say, with the engine in front of the back wheels. This design puts the source of 350 horsepower a very few inches behind the driver's head. Everyone wears earplugs, of course, but even so, the noise is shocking and the vibration worse. The engine is a slightly detuned example of the 1963 Indianapolis model, a Fairlane in basic configuration. Many of the other components in the car are foreign. Some of them the GT shares with the Ferrari, the car to beat.

"One must remember, however," John Wyer says, "that Enzo Ferrari has forty years of experience, a great facility, and many cars. We've had a horribly short time, we're a new project, and obviously it would be presumptuous of us to think of blasting him off straightaway."

The GT came down to the wire under such a punishing finish that Lee Iacocca, the ranking nonfamily Ford executive, did not actually see the car, when it came to New York early in April, until after the press had seen it. It had been flown from Europe for that purpose, and was immediately flown back. It ran for the first time on a circuit at Le Mans during the April 18-19 practice period. Two cars were on hand and both crashed, one at 60 miles an hour, the other at 120. The faster crash was in a deluge of rain, apparently because the tires, which were "dry," not rain tires, (concluded on page 130)Ford Flat out(continued from page 58) aquaplaned. This is a phenomenon discovered only recently in which a heavy water film on the road forms itself into a wedge of water under the tire and lifts it completely off the surface, voiding the steering. Under optimum conditions it can happen at speeds as low as 55 miles an hour. Before the crashes, however, it was known that the Ford GT had an aerodynamic flaw: The rear end was lifting at very high speed. When the original design was being smoothed down into final form, 76 wind-tunnel tests were run at the University of Maryland, and a radical tendency for the front end to come off the ground at rates over 150 mph was demonstrated. Technicians corrected this with a spoiler lip in front. The rear-end lift didn't show up until the car was on the circuit. A spoiler was then added to the rear deck.

That was practice running. The first competition the GT had was at the Nürburgring in Germany on May 31. The 'Ring is a tough circuit: 14.2 miles to the lap, rising and falling 3000 feet, carrying 174 bends and corners. It is very hard on cars and it's perhaps the most effective of all the world's circuits in sorting out drivers, who may find sunshine on one side of it and pouring rain on the other.

With Phil Hill driving, the single Ford GT car entered at the Nürburgring last May bettered the old lap record in posting the second-fastest qualifying time. Hill lay second in the early stages of the race, then dropped back to fourth when gearbox trouble forced him to hold the car in fourth gear. He turned the GT over to Bruce McLaren after 12 laps. It went out of the race on the 15th lap with a broken bolt in the rear suspension, and the Ferrari team came on to sweep the day. It is an often-told story in automobile racing: for want of a nail ... But the sturdiness and reliability of the Ford engine, brand-new to racing, has been surprising and heartening. An Offenhauser won at Indianapolis, but Rodger Ward's Ford-engined car was second, and none of the Fords put out of the race had mechanical failure. Jimmy Clark, the present champion of the world, had what looked like a tight grip on the lead when a disintegrating tire broke up his rear suspension. Dan Gurney was called in to avoid what happened to Clark, and Bobby Marshman, who had also led the race for a time, ruptured an oil line when he was momentarily forced off the circuit. In every case, the engine, which is, after all, at the heart of the matter, was in perfect order. It's a safe prediction: If Fords continue to go motor racing, they'll do some winning, and probably a lot of winning.