“This is a victory meeting.” It wasn’t – far from it – and querying glances were exchanged. But Ford’s racing manager Leo Beebe didn’t blink: “Next year, we’re going to come back and win, and we might as well start right now.” ‘FoMoCo’ to the core, this former sports coach – baseball, basketball, football, track – and US Navy Phys Ed instructor didn’t mind dirty jobs. He’d locked the doors behind him on Ford’s Edsel embarrassment, for example. Yet motor sport had turned his stomach. Charged in April 1964 with winning the Daytona 500, Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans 24 Hours – no pressure! – his witnessing the grisly accidents of NASCAR ace Glenn ‘Fireball’ Roberts at Charlotte and Dave MacDonald and Eddie Sachs at Indy on consecutive May weekends caused him to question his role. He hadn’t anticipated its human cost and perhaps should have stayed in Brussels, selling cars and trucks.

Nobody had died at Le Mans 1965 – but Ford was mourning six retirements from six and having to suck up a sixth consecutive Ferrari victory. Relocating the programme’s powerbase from UK to US had led to a hurried introduction of a fast but unreliable car. Having created this 7-litre monster – almost 3000lb (ready to rumble) – Beebe was wondering if he should have let experienced John Wyer’s Ford Advanced Vehicles, created in Slough in autumn 1963, just get on with it. But Beebe had worked wonders elsewhere.

In 1964 Hemi-powered Plymouths finished 1-2-3 at Daytona; Team Lotus Powered by Ford collapsed at Indy; and the Ford GT, designed, built and based in England – but lumbered with a fragile Italian gearbox – instilled little optimism. So he cleared his desk of PR flimflam and created programme heads – Ray Geddes, a law graduate colleague of Carroll Shelby’s, got sports cars – and locked horns with the sport’s biggest names, with immediate effect: a Daytona 500 shortened by rain was won by Fred Lorenzen’s Holman & Moody-run Galaxie and a refocused Lotus scored a dominant victory at Indy.

So Beebe slept on it.

He went all in for Le Mans 1966. H&M and Alan Mann Racing of Byfleet were drafted to support incumbent Shelby American and between them they would prep, test and run no fewer than eight of those ‘monsters’.

“We were included to give the car longevity,” says Lee Holman, son of co-founder John. “We had 450 employees – far bigger than Shelby’s – and only one customer: Ford Motor Company. We could produce an entire car in our building and we applied that to the [Le Mans] car.”

This was racing gone corporate. Le Mans had never seen its like: 20 tons of spares and equipment, individual transporters, a 40ft mobile machine shop shipped from New York to Le Havre, and considerably more than 100 crew. Ford was ready at last to kick Enzo Ferrari where it would hurt most: due Sarthe.

Revenge was its trigger. When chief negotiator Donald Frey returned from Maranello in May 1963 with a flea in his ear and a signed autobiography in his suitcase, the combustible Henry Ford II lit up. Enzo had initiated takeover talks yet filibustered for days – interminable nights, actually – before walking. Jilted, Ford outlined its Plan B one week later: a Special Vehicles Department to conceptualise a high-performance sports-racer and liaise with outside agencies to oversee its build.

Having watched Ferraris fill the top six places at Le Mans, Ford representatives crossed to England to meet Colin Chapman, John Cooper and a shy former quantity surveyor. Lola’s Eric Broadley got the gig. Ford approved of his lack of ego and Mk6 GT: a low-line mid-engine coupé, powered by a Ford V8, that showed promise at Le Mans until its Colotti gearbox caused David Hobbs to crash after 13 hours. A one-year deal was signed on August 1 and Bruce McLaren was testing an updated ‘Ford’ by the month’s end.

Ten months later Richie Ginther took his courage in both hands and blew by three Ferraris along the Mulsanne Straight on the second lap. This fairy tale beginning had a sad end: two GTs retired because of gearbox problems and a third caught fire. Three more retirements followed a fortnight later at the Reims 12 Hours – Ford was too impatient to beat Ferrari – and another questionable scheduling decision, to contest November’s Nassau Speed Week against more agile rivals on a bumpy, stop-go circuit, led to a clutch of DNFs. This wouldn’t do, so Beebe handed the cars to Shelby American in LA, having empowered Special Vehicles to build its second iteration at Kar-Kraft’s ’skunk works’ in Dearborn.

Shelby nursed a deep dislike of Enzo. Though looking and sounding diametrically different, they were uncomfortably similar beneath that Stetson and behind those shades: ambitious, imbued with a whiff of snake oil, and capable of gathering, motivating and orchestrating talented colleagues to create mythic brands greater than the sum of their parts.

Ford ‘folding’ allowed the Texan chicken farmer to move from his cramped Venice speedshop to a pair of vast hangars adjoining LAX. His roster included legendary designer/draughtsman/engineer/fabricator Phil Remington and English expat Ken Miles, 46, an astute and fetishistically fit tester/racer whose big chance this was. But the team was reliant on relegated Wyer for spares and (less so) advice. These long lines of communication, divided by a common language, did not promote Beebe’s common purpose.

“Time was running out as the American arm mused how best to flex its muscle.”

Time was running short as the American arm mused how best to flex its muscle. The earliest GTs used the aluminium 4.2-litre Fairlane V8 developed for Lotus’s 1963 Indy campaign. With a plan to switch to its quad-cam update scuppered by delays and resultant shortage, Cobra’s cast-iron 4.7-litre was fitted instead. A tailor-made V12 was considered next, but once again Ford had to cut its cloth, albeit much wider this time: a 650lb 7-litre pushrod suited to NASCAR, but which, to European eyes, was at odds with a cutting-edge competition car.

Ray Lunn, another expat, formerly of AC, Aston Martin, Jowett and Ford of Britain, oversaw this MkII conversion as tech boss of Special Vehicles. Integral from the off, he’d fallen out with Broadley, who jumped ship, and exchanged barbs with Wyer before returning to America in November 1964. A skilled engineer and wily politician, he was a crucial FoMoCo cog.

The prototype wasn’t completed until mid-May and yet Miles – though he and Lloyd Ruby had won February’s 2000km Daytona Continental in Shelby’s revised MkI – insisted on it for Le Mans. Though buzzing after lapping the test oval at 201mph, Miles didn’t take such decisions lightly. He knew MkI better than any racing driver had known any racing car because of his pioneering onboard data-logging work with Ford’s aerospace outfit, Aeronutronic: pressures and temps measured inside ducts and rpm recorded by an oscillograph. He and Remington had busted guts on its aerodynamics, brakes, suspension, tyres and wheels. Miles’ endorsement, therefore, carried weight.

Two of the unsorted 460bhp four-speed machines were sent to France for Shelby American, and Phil Hill’s grabbed a dramatic pole position, five seconds faster than John Surtees’ works Ferrari. Ford’s race, however, was a disorganised disaster. Though MkII ran one-two initially, and set fastest lap, all six cars retired before the seventh hour.

Lunn reckoned the mistaken refitting of a scrapped gear in the rush to be ready had cost it victory, while an official report blamed a misaligned oil hole and incorrectly adjusted clutch. But the devil lay in the big picture: the admin hell of five teams running two models in two types – five coupés and a roadster – fitted with three sizes of V8. Stretched head bolts, a recurrent problem that might have been cured had not Ford become sidetracked, sidelined three MkIs.

The pace told on Ferrari, too – all its works cars were retired by 2am – but privateers in reliable machinery gave Enzo a 1-2-3. Beebe had plenty to chew on over breakfast the next day.

With Indy won, he could concentrate on the French enduro that had made Ferrari’s name in America. In a bid to reduce red tape and instil a tight-knit atmosphere atop a giant industrial pyramid, his Le Mans Committee allowed departmental heads – John Cowley from NASCAR had replaced Geddes – to join hands, or step on each others’ toes, every fortnight. Spurred by defeat, this distant race was suddenly up close and personal, even to the guys on the assembly line.

Testing recommenced in August and Miles and Hill managed just nine hours of running in four days at Daytona. A 24-hour test in December was interrupted by engine and brake failures. And only 18 hours could be completed at Sebring in mid-January before the gearbox quit. So the inaugural Daytona 24 Hours would be a plunge into the February dark, physically and metaphorically.

Ferrari stayed away and MkIIs finished 1-2-3-5. Yet not everyone was convinced by this sledgehammer. Wyer and Mann favoured the small-block route: better mpg and easier on tyres and brakes. Thus Sebring in March was billed as a showdown between Ford strategies, as well as against Ferrari. Mann built the lightest GT40s yet (2025lb) and put Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart in one; it qualified third and led the opening lap. But Ford of America won the (half) day. Though its victor – the lightweight X-1 roadster, one of two aluminium chassis built by Abbey Panels – was unsuitable for Le Mans because of draggy aerodynamics, bigger was now officially better.

“Engines let down our cars,” says Alan Mann Racing fabricator Jim Rose. “They were bloody awful. We only found out after the Le Mans test [in April] that we’d be running 7-litres. The next thing, six of us – plus my wife, who had friends up in the Valley – were on a plane to LA. All the teams worked together at Shelby’s for about six-seven weeks. You had the right tool in your hand and so you went down the line doing the same job, getting faster each time. We didn’t know which car was going where, so there was no favouritism. Of course, when we got ours home we rebuilt them the way we wanted to.”

And that ought to have been that. But Lunn, craving self-sufficiency, pushed hard for his J-Car to be considered. X-1 had been gathering data for this radical aluminium-honeycomb design, the programme’s first all-American, so that it might tackle the Test. Thus Ford arrived with two GT40s and two MkIIs, plus its latest interloper, and endured a terrible weekend. Pushing unadvisedly hard in the rain, 46-year-old Walt Hansgen crashed his MkII at 150mph. The following day, J-Car – crammed with recording instrumentation – lapped a second slower than Hill’s 1965 pole but two seconds faster than Miles, who slid his MkII into a sandbank.

Was it all turning Blue Oval-shaped?

Tests at the Kingman oval and Riverside – 24 hours in three blocks of eight – proved MkII marginally faster in top speed and considerably more prepared than J-Car. It had been an unnecessary distraction. Meanwhile, an engine-with-gearbox was completing simulated laps of Le Mans in a Dearborn test cell. It hit its 48-hour target in the last week of May and 12 of them – lighter by 40lb due to magnesium oil pan and aluminium heads and front cover – were assembled, tested and crated to LA.

“We weren’t allowed to touch them,” says Rose. “Not even take the rocker covers off. They’d detuned them. NASCAR ones had 515bhp, but they ran 480 at Le Mans. They tried twin carbs but it used more fuel.”

Holman: “The compression ratio was dropped and they were only turning about 6400rpm; at Daytona we were turning 7500-8000rpm.”

European observers noted how more organised and cogent this attack was. For instance, Remington and H&M had developed respectively a quick-change caliper and rotor to enable crucial brake swaps in just minutes. But that’s not to say there weren’t internal rivalries – drivers, managers, teams and tyres – in need of massaging. They weren’t nasty but they were potentially divisive.