Getting the Tire Tracks on Paper
The author A. J. Baime at the Monticello Motor Club.
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A. J. Baime’s new book, “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans,” is set in the 1960s but evokes a world that now seems vanished and fantastical. General Motors and Ford, far from bankrupt, are two of the mightiest companies in the world.
Gas is as plentiful as water, and almost as cheap. Nobody buys a car because of its fuel efficiency or its safety features. All that matters is how fast it goes. Race drivers are heroic figures who appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek almost as often as they turn up in emergency rooms or the morgue. When Ralph Nader starts complaining about the Corvair, G.M. hires private detectives to dig up dirt on his private life.
The centerpiece of the story is the quest by Henry Ford II, or the Deuce, as he was known, to end Ferrari’s string of victories at Le Mans, the 24-hour road race that at the time was probably the world’s most dangerous sporting event. He was convinced that Ford’s racing success would translate into sales back home in the showroom, but he was also locked in a personal rivalry with the imperious Enzo Ferrari, head of the Italian car company. It took Ford three tries and countless millions, but he finally prevailed when a Ford GT40 Mk II, driven by Bruce McLaren, won at Le Mans in 1966.
In many ways, though, the feud persists. There are still car enthusiasts who prefer the elegance and nimbleness of the Ferrari, and those who swear by the muscle and straight-ahead speed of the Ford GT. Mr. Baime, an executive editor at Playboy, where he oversees the automotive coverage, is partial to Ferraris, and recently borrowed a bright red $300,000 599 GTB Fiorano and drove it to the Monticello Motor Club, a private track in the Catskills.
The car is so valuable that Ferrari also sent a guy to the track whose job it was, apparently, just to stand around and worry. In case you were wondering, it gets about 11 miles per gallon driving around the neighborhood, and less than that out on the track.
The Monticello Motor Club is a sort of country club for people who own high-performance cars and want to do more with them than collect speeding tickets on the Merritt Parkway. They can take racing lessons, book time on the 4.1-mile track or lounge around, in their driving shoes and racing suits, on sofas designed to resemble sports car upholstery.
On any afternoon the parking lot is apt to be full of very expensive machinery with long-winded names: Ferrari 360 Stradales and F430 Scuderias, Porsche 911 GT3’s, Lotus Exige S 260’s, Beemer M3 GTR’s, Audi R8’s. If you arrive in your dinged-up, 10-year-old commuter heap, you probably want to park it over on the side and out of the way.
On the other hand, you might feel less guilty about having postponed the muffler job you so badly need. Your engine, which used to sound loud and embarrassing, now seems sweet and throaty, and, feeling turbocharged, you may even be emboldened to take the wheel of the Ferrari yourself when the guy from the company isn’t looking.
William McMichael, the president of the club and its managing member, is a Ferrari man, and owns several. Ari Straus, one of his partners in the club, prefers the Ford GT and backed one out of a garage to show off its long, low lines, its rumbling power plant.
“It’s a real car,” he said. “It’s a man’s car, an American car. And it’s a rocket ship on the straightaway.” Its weakness is cornering, he admitted, and the GT actually makes less sense than the Ferrari on a track like Monticello, which has 22 turns, and where the longest straight stretch is only three-quarters of a mile. To fly around the club’s track, Mr. Straus also owns a bone-rattling Lotus in which you strap yourself inside like a jet pilot.
Mr. Baime’s personal ride is a four-cylinder Subaru station wagon in need of a wash, but he has hung around tracks enough to become a competent race driver. At Monticello he went out first with an instructor, but then took the wheel himself and, flicking the paddle shifter, easily booted the Ferrari up to 135 or so, well below the car’s capability but fast enough to create G force in the cockpit and terrify a passenger.
The trick, he explained, was not so much spinning the wheel or stomping on the accelerator as finding that straight line that connected the apex of one turn to another. If you’re good enough, according to Mr. Straus, you can steer mostly with the gas pedal, which straightens the car out as you accelerate and ducks it into a turn if you let up.
On the other hand, if you’re used to a commuter heap, you’re apt to find steering merely with the wheel challenge enough; even at 90, the turns at Monticello come on you as suddenly as those in a video game.
Car racing is a lot safer than it used to be, Mr. Baime said, sitting in one of the club’s lounge areas, and that may explain why it has lost some of its glamour.
“I think it was the danger of motor sport that made it so fascinating,” he said. “That it could be so violent was part of the appeal.”
He added that it was the driver Jackie Stewart who began to change things. “At the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix he was in an accident and was pinned beneath the car while fuel leaked on him. He retired in 1972 or 1973, at the peak of his fame, and he was the first one to say: ‘Excuse me. We have a problem here.’ ”
As he researched the book, Mr. Baime went on to say, he was struck by how practically everyone he read about seemed larger than life.
“It wasn’t just Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari who were great characters, there were all these others,” he said, and he began to list them: Carroll Shelby, builder of the legendary Cobra, who directed Ford’s winning Le Mans campaign; the drivers Mario Andretti, Phil Hill and Ken Miles, whose death in 1966, while testing-driving Ford’s experimental J-Car, gives the story its tragic end.
Mr. Baime began “Go Like Hell” four years ago, when he had little inkling of what would happen to the American automobile industry. “I saw the book as an action-adventure story and also as a cultural history, about the fascination of speed in the 1960s. But it’s also a business story about a company that is going to try to survive at the very dawn of globalization.”
He picked up a copy and read the end of the second-to-last chapter: “ ‘We don’t want to buy Ferrari anymore,’ Henry II told one reporter before leaving France. ‘Now we fear most of all the Japanese.’ ”
“If you think about it,” Mr. Baime said, “ this is the first chapter in a very long story. It’s still a story about a struggle for the technology of the future. The difference is that now they’re going to have to reinvent the wheel.”
Copyright New York Times Corp. 2009 All rights reserved
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