The REAL Story of the Twisted “Ford v. Ferrari” Finish at Le Mans in 1966

• Writer David Phipps of Competition Press & Autoweek likened the Ford effort at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans to a “steamroller at work.”

• He also noted the “confusion at the finish when the two remaining Shelby American cars crossed the line almost side by side.”

• The Ford Mk II entries dominated the race, in part due to the mistakes of Enzo Ferrari, who entered just three Ferrari P3 chassis, none of which finished.

In the 100 years of the Le Mans 24 hour, being celebrated with this year’s centenary, no race had a more controversial finish than the first win by Ford in 1966.

What really happened?

David Phipps of Competition Press & Autoweek, Brock Yates of Car and Driver, and Road & Track’s Henry Manney were all veterans of knee-deep-in-the-pits race coverage. To a man, these three observed that Ken Miles got the short end of the stick by Ford’s “formation finish,” a photo opportunity for publicity.

But was there something more nefarious resulting from a personality clash between Miles and Ford executive Leo Beebe as portrayed in Ford v Ferrari by Hollywood?

The winning assault of the Ford camp was “as classically executed as a von Clausewitz campaign,” according to Yates, citing the Prussian military man. But the final hour “left the race blighted with mysterious anti-climax and corporate confusion.”

Phipps likened the Ford effort to a “steamroller at work” and noted the “confusion at the finish when the two remaining Shelby American cars crossed the line almost side by side.”

The Ford GT40 Mk II entries dominated the race, in part due to the mistakes of Enzo Ferrari, who entered just three Ferrari P3 chassis, none of which finished. His team manager, Eugenio Dragoni, compounded the dearth of entries versus a phalanx of eight Mk IIs by not using a “hare” strategy of pushing the pace with one car and allowing the other two P3s to lag for the sake of endurance.

And finally, both Ferrari and Dragoni participated in intramural politics during which John Surtees, Ferrari’s number one driver in F1, was told to give way to reserve driver Ludovico Scarfiotti. As things turned out, Scarfiotti would crash his P3 and Surtees would leave Ferrari’s F1 team in favor of Cooper.

With no threat from Ferrari after the retirement of the P3s, four of the eight Mk IIs entered were running like a train at the front of the field at the end of the 18th hour when the leading car of Dan Gurney and Jerry Grant retired due to a radiator hose that came unclamped.

With six grueling hours to go, the Shelby American Fords of Miles/Denny Hulme and Bruce McLaren/Chris Amon ran a relatively close first and second. The Mk II entered by Holman-Moody of Ronnie Bucknum and Dick Hutcherson was a distant third.

Road & Track’s Manney reported that the rivalry among drivers would result in an occasional “Nelsonian blind eye” turned toward any directives regarding lap times, referring to famed British Admiral Nelson’s loss of sight in one eye. According to on-the-scene reports, several of the Ford drivers had been engaged in one-upping each other’s lap times, including Gurney, Miles, McLaren, Bucknum, and Graham Hill.

Once the Gurney/Grant car went to the sidelines, all the drivers were told to stick to lap times of 4 minutes, which was about 20 seconds slower than the pace the Mk IIs could turn in race trim. (As predicted, their 7.0-liter V8s had enabled the Fords to comfortably outpace the Ferraris on the Mulsanne straight while still sticking with the P3s in the twisty portions of the eight-mile circuit.)