The Ford GT40: How Detroit Beat Ferrari at Le Mans

A rejected buyout started the whole thing

In early 1963, Ford was close to buying Ferrari outright. Enzo Ferrari needed capital to keep his road car and racing operations afloat, and Ford's negotiators had a deal on the table that would have handed Ford the Ferrari name, the factory, and its Formula 1 and sports car programs. At the last moment, Enzo Ferrari walked away, unwilling to give up control of the racing division. Henry Ford II reportedly took the collapse personally. Within weeks he ordered Ford's engineers to build a car capable of beating Ferrari at Le Mans, the race that had defined Ferrari's reputation for a decade.

Building a car with no Le Mans experience at all

Ford had no sports prototype program to draw on, so it bought one. The company acquired the rights to a small British chassis built by Lola Cars, brought in its designer Eric Broadley, and set up a skunkworks operation in Slough, England, under Ford engineer Roy Lunn. The result was the GT40, named for its height of just 40 inches at the roofline. The first cars raced in 1964 and were fast in a straight line but fragile everywhere else, retiring from Le Mans, the Nürburgring, and other major races with suspension and gearbox failures. Ford brought in Carroll Shelby's team in 1965 to sort out the reliability problems that the factory program hadn't been able to fix on its own.

1966: the win that ended in a photo finish nobody wanted

By 1966, the GT40 Mk II carried a 7-litre NASCAR-derived V8 and had the durability to match its speed. At Le Mans that June, Ford GT40s finished first, second, and third, ending Ferrari's six-year winning streak at the race. But the finish itself became one of motorsport's most debated moments. Ford wanted a coordinated photo finish across the top three cars and asked leading driver Ken Miles to slow down so his GT40 would cross the line alongside two teammates. Because of how the cars had been staggered at the start, the car credited with the win went to Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon, who had started further back on the grid and therefore covered more distance. Miles, who many felt had earned the win outright, finished second.

The driver who never got his win

Ken Miles never got another shot at Le Mans. Two months after that race, he was killed testing a prototype of the next-generation GT40, the open-top J-car that would become the Mk IV, at Ford's test track in Kingman, Arizona. He had already won the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring that same season, and had come within a Ford-orchestrated photo finish of sweeping all three of endurance racing's biggest races in a single year. The Mk IV he was testing went on to win Le Mans the following year.

Four straight years, and an all-American win

The GT40 kept winning after 1966. In 1967, the Mk IV, designed and built entirely in the United States, took the overall win at Le Mans with American drivers Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt behind the wheel, the first Le Mans victory for a car built and driven entirely by Americans. Ford stepped back from factory involvement after that, but customer-run GT40s, by then a proven and increasingly affordable prototype, kept winning: the 1968 and 1969 races both went to the same Mk I chassis, entered by John Wyer's team, giving the GT40 four consecutive Le Mans victories from 1966 to 1969. The 1969 win was decided by roughly 120 metres after 24 hours and nearly 5,000 kilometres of racing, one of the closest finishes in the event's history.

Built the way the real one was

The GT40 program is a reminder that beating a rival isn't usually about one brilliant idea, it's about fixing the same failure points over and over until the car stops breaking before the finish line. That is the same instinct behind every set in our Cars collection: models built to reward the details that actually mattered on the real car, not just the ones that look good from across the room.