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  In 1966, every driver who got behind the wheel expected, in some part of himself, to die. That was the most basic initial emotional obstacle that Miles and McLaren and all the other GT40 racers had to overcome. Soldiers in combat have to deal with something close to that. In 2016, every driver who got behind the wheel expected that his brilliantly designed and engineered car would save his life if the worst that could happen did take place.

  Both states of mind freed the drivers to race. But in 1966, if you won Le Mans, your celebration on the podium meant that you toasted your survival. You drank not just to victory but to life. In 2016, if Ford’s drivers were the first GTE Pro competitors to take the checkered flag, they would toast a simpler victory. The stakes might not seem as high, but they’d still have driven very, very fast.

  Henry Ford (left) only ran one race in his life, but he won it,

  defeating Alexander Winton. It was 1901, and there wasn’t yet

  a Ford Motor Company.

  Ford won the race because his

  less powerful car was more reliable than Winton’s,

  which failed before the ten-lap race ended.

  Henry Ford II could have lived a life of leisure. Instead, he took control of the Ford Motor Company and by the early 1960s, he set his sights on beating Ferrari.

  Ford’s early GT40s tasted defeat at Le Mans. Here’s a GT40 Mark I

  passing under the famous Dunlop Bridge in 1964.

  By the 1965 Le Mans campaign,

  former winner Carroll Shelby had

  taken over Ford’s effort.

  A huge new 7.0-liter V-8 engine would propel the GT40 Mark IIs

  to victory at Le Mans in 1966. Handling was sacrificed for raw speed.

  The GT40 got its name because it was so low: just forty inches tall.

  The GT40 wins at Daytona in 1966, beginning the assault on

  Le Mans that would come later in the year.

  Dan Gurney was one of the Ford drivers who would pilot the GT40

  around the demanding Circuit de la Sarthe in 1966.

  The dangerous “Le Mans” start. The drivers had to run to their cars,

  start them, and quickly get up to speed. Buckling in was a waste of precious time.

  Chris Amon and Bruce McLaren were the 1966 Ford drivers

  who immortalized McLaren’s phrase “Go like hell!”

  The legendary finish at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans.

  The 1966 finish was controversial. Ford wanted a tie for the two GT40s driven by

  Ken Miles and Denny Hulme and Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon. But McLaren

  and Amon had started farther back, so race officials decided that they had

  covered the greater distance and should get a win. Miles was incensed.

  Enzo Ferrari built his legend from auto racing. He sold road cars so that

  he could build race cars—and Le Mans was his playground in the 1960s.

  Carroll Shelby alongside a pair

  of his race cars. Shelby and

  his band of hot-rodders guided

  Ford to victory in 1966.

  Another Le Mans win for Ford followed in 1967, and the company headquarters

  in Dearborn was illuminated accordingly.

  Prior to the new GT in 2015, Ford created a supercar in 2005 that bore the famous name.

  The Ford GT’s designer, Moray Callum.

  The 2005 GT, being sculpted as a

  clay model by Ford’s designers.

  Alan Mulally wasn’t a “car guy” when he became Ford’s CEO in 2006,

  but the former Boeing executive saved the automaker from bailout and bankruptcy.

  Alan Mulally joins Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report

  to talk about the Mustang in 2013.

  Current Ford CEO

  Mark Fields alongside the new GT supercar.

  When the new GT was unveiled at the 2015 North American International Auto Show

  in Detroit, jaws dropped throughout the car world.

  From left to right: Bill Ford, executive chairman, Ford Motor Company;

  Mark Fields, president and chief executive officer; Joe Hinrichs,

  executive vice president and president, The Americas; Raj Nair, group

  vice president and chief technical officer, Global Product Development.

  Dave Pericak was put in charge of Ford Performance and the GT

  Le Mans campaign after reinventing the all-important Mustang.

  He would endure the highest highs and the lowest lows.

  Racing team owner Chip Ganassi brought decades of experience to

  Ford’s return to big-time endurance racing. Could he live up to

  Carroll Shelby’s legacy?

  The GT was first shown in blue, but later began to make the rounds of

  the auto show circuit in other colors, including a breathtaking white in 2016.

  Bill Ford and his new baby. He inherited his family’s racing legacy, established

  at Le Mans in the 1960s by Henry Ford II. But Bill Ford also had to steer Ford

  through the financial crisis, as CEO and later as chairman.

  Ford created a small, snap-together model of the GT. I have one in my home.

  The racing version of the GT was built by Multimatic in Canada and had to

  be rapidly tested on the track before it could make its racing debut in early 2016.

  The buzz around the new GT race car prompted

  LEGO to create a special version.

  Ford’s racing simulator was the centerpiece of the carmaker’s Performance

  Technical Center in North Carolina. Drivers were able to take virtual

  practice laps around the Le Mans course.

  Rain hampered the start of the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans, but the bad weather disappeared after about an hour and conditions remained good for the rest of the race.

  Giancarlo Fisichella proved that when it came to race-car driving for Ferrari,

  he was willing to bleed red.

  Ferraris ran in several racing classes at the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans.

  The Scuderia Corsa number 62 car won the GTE-Am class.

  Both AF Corse Ferraris failed to finish in the GTE-Pro class, but the number 82

  Risi Competizione 488 GTE captured second after a spectacular duel with Ford.

  The team that can make the fewest pit stops—to refuel, change tires,

  or make repairs—will often win Le Mans.

  Fifty years to the day after Ford’s 1-2-3 1966 win, Ford’s GT racers went 1-3-4.

  Once again, it had been Ford versus Ferrari. But in 2016, Ferrari fought to the end.

  Four GTs in total took the Circuit de la Sarthe in France for the 24 Hours of

  Le Mans: two from North America, and two from Europe.

  Ford crosses the finish line first at the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans.

  It was one of the greatest days in Ford’s history when

  the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans trophy came back to Dearborn

  for a celebration with Ford’s employees.

  Back in Dearborn, Ford celebrated with style.

  The GT’s drivers won races before and after Le Mans.

  PART III

  WE’RE GOING TO

  WIN FROM THE LEAD

  Chapter 9

  The Tesla Factor

  On a balmy March evening in Los Angeles, just three months before the most advanced Ford race car ever built would take to the Circuit de la Sarthe in France, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk took to a stage at his electric-car start-up’s design center, just a few miles south of Hollywood and the American cinematic dream factory.

  Musk was there to pull the cover off a dream that had nothing to do with movie magic. Instead, he sauntered onstage dressed entirely in black and, after some awkward jokes, made a few comments about the impending catastrophe of global warmi
ng—one of the multi-billionaire’s overriding personal preoccupations and the reason he bought into Tesla in 2004 after making $180 million when eBay acquired PayPal, the electronic payments service he had cofounded. He then proceeded to preside over the rollout of Tesla’s much-anticipated Model 3, a mass-market electric vehicle that would sell for $35,000 when it hit Tesla’s showrooms in 2017.

  Tesla was already selling a pair of game-changing cars: the Model S sedan, which in its most advanced configuration, equipped with the “Ludicrous” acceleration mode, could scorch a zero-to-sixty run in less than three seconds, outrunning supercars from Ferrari and Lamborghini; and the Model X SUV, with its exotic, up-swinging “falcon wing” doors and “bioweapon defense mode” air-filtration system. But these long-range electric vehicles (EVs) sold for $100,000 and up, to a well-heeled elite, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists and titans of finance.

  That certainly created useful cash flow for Tesla (if not profits), but it didn’t suit Musk’s grand vision, which was to accelerate humanity’s transition from the era of fossil fuels—an era that had filled the atmosphere with carbon, disrupting weather patterns and making the planet hotter. In early December 2015, Musk gave a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, in connection with the United Nations Climate Summit, in which he called governments’ reluctance to tax the generation of atmospheric carbon the “dumbest science experiment in history” and “madness.” He went on to call for a global carbon tax, as he had done several times before.

  No chief executive of a traditional automaker would even consider giving a speech like the one Musk delivered, although several have raised the suggestion that car companies—as producers of a technology that alongside burning coal to generate electricity contributes much of the carbon in the atmosphere—should be part of the sweeping solution.

  The multi-trillion-dollar global auto industry has found itself smack at the center of what can’t be responsibly characterized anymore as a debate. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the majority of car executives aren’t global-warming deniers, there are more than a billion vehicles on the roads worldwide, and automakers continue to build millions of new cars and trucks every year. If they stop, or attempt to radically convert to manufacturing vast fleets of Tesla-like vehicles, they’ll rapidly go bankrupt.

  They are, however, not stupid. Gasoline is simply the most convenient fuel for their products currently. Almost without exception, the world’s car companies are trying to move themselves in a Teslaesque direction, if haltingly and on a rather small scale at the moment.

  Musk bought into Tesla, eventually displacing cofounder ­Martin Eberhard in an unpleasant management coup, specifically to attack what he considers to be the biggest problem facing humanity. But he didn’t want to be boring. He reasoned that a sexy, fast electric car—such as the original Roadster Tesla soon produced—would shake EVs free of their “glorified golf cart” stigma and convince both buyers and investors to fund the demise of the internal-­combustion engine.

  Tesla began selling stock to the public in 2010, at seventeen dollars per share. A few years later, the Model S was launched; Motor Trend would name it Car of the Year in 2013. Tesla had endured numerous near-death experiences prior to the IPO, including an episode in 2008 that brought the company just weeks from bankruptcy. But once the Model S started selling, the accolades began rolling in—the luxurious EV, with its brisk acceleration, sharply minimalist looks, and huge central dashboard touchscreen, was a hit with the automotive media. The stock went, as they say on Wall Street, parabolic; in 2014, it would flirt with $300 per share, ensuring early investors a return of around 1,200 percent.

  The financials would pitch and yaw wildly over the next two years, as investors tried to figure out when, if ever, the carmaker would make money and whether its innovations, including an astonishing self-driving autopilot feature, would completely disrupt an auto industry that had been selling largely gas-burning cars, and lots of them, for over a century.

  But on that early evening in March, Musk was a conquering hero, a South Africa–born heir apparent to Henry Ford and the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. Musk’s other company, SpaceX, was taking care of another scope of his vision, the effort to make humans a “multi-planetary” species with a colony on Mars, the planet to which Musk said he would retire.

  It is easy to understand why Musk, then forty-four, was a model for Robert Downey Jr.’s character Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies. He did cars. He did rockets. He even did solar energy in his role as the chairman of SolarCity, a company started by his cousins. (And acquired by Tesla in 2016 for $2.1 billion.) He was the superstar entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. Musk attacked huge problems head-on, like a technologist of old. And he was aware of just how quixotic his ambitions were. Starting a car company, he would say, is idiotic, and an electric-car company is idiocy squared.

  What got Detroit’s attention that night wasn’t the Model 3 itself; the car had been much discussed for several years, and everyone knew what to expect in a smaller, less expensive Tesla. Rather, the star of the show was the preorder counter, displayed behind a bright red Model 3 on a huge screen on the stage.

  Analysts had expected something like 150,000 Model 3s to be reserved, each with a $1,000 refundable deposit. By the time I took a photo of the counter at the event, it had crossed 174,000. In a month, 373,000 reservations would be logged, creating the potential for $13 billion to flow into Tesla’s needy coffers, assuming a relatively conservative average price of $35,000 for each sale. Who knows how many of those reservations will ultimately turn into sales? Even if only a quarter or a half of them do, it is still an impressive number and a testament to the potential demand.

  “So, do you want to see the car?” Musk winkingly asked, before giving three preproduction versions of the car the stage.

  A better question—and one that he would ask as the preorders surged—was, “How many of these cars can we actually build?”

  The traditional auto industry is secretly obsessed with Tesla. Not since Preston Tucker, an innovator of the 1950s whose quixotic life was chronicled in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 film Tucker: The Man and His Dream, had anyone so thoroughly captivated the iconic world of the American automobile. The CEOs of major auto companies tend to be either hard-charging, sharp-elbowed “car guys” or technocratic bean counters. Occasionally a major change agent such as Alan Mulally will come along, but many chief executives got to the big chair after decades of loyal service.

  When Mark Fields got the CEO job at Ford, he freely admitted that the company had bought a Tesla Model S, taken it apart, and put it back together again. He later said the company would do likewise with the Model X SUV.

  But even by the secretive standards of Tesla fascination, the Model 3 preorder palooza was earth-shattering. From Dearborn to Toyota City, the automakers just couldn’t believe it. The astounding number of deposits showed the intense desire to join the club that the brand represented. The only meaningful comparison to draw was with Apple. In the auto industry, you could say that Ferrari held a similar mystique, but Ferrari didn’t have the ambition to dethrone the gas-burning engine or sell half a million cars a year. Tesla did, and it was sort of appalling to mainstream auto executives.

  Traditional automakers work desperately hard to capture and retain customers, spending billions to convince them to stick with certain brands and to advance through vehicle hierarchies, from inexpensive mass-market cars to pricey luxury rides. What was astonishing about Tesla’s Model 3 launch was that hundreds of thousands of buyers were happy to give Tesla an open-ended, no-interest cash loan, with no meaningful guarantee beyond Musk’s word that the cars would arrive on time. Musk’s promises had a poor track record. Both the Model S and the Model X had suffered from production delays and early quality-control problems. In fact, Musk admitted that Tesla had been guilty of “hubris” in designing and engineering the Model X, which had many complicated f
eatures that slowed the assembly line. The doors had to be completely redesigned at the eleventh hour. The second-row seats turned out to be so complicated that Tesla would eventually take the supplier off the job and engineer this component itself.

  Later, quality-control glitches would appear. The entire Model S fleet was voluntarily recalled in December 2015 because a seat-belt assembly could fail. The initial production run of the Model X, several thousand vehicles, would also be recalled, because third-row seats could pitch forward in a crash. Much earlier, there had been battery fires with the Model S, and Tesla had been compelled to design a shielding system for the bottom of the car to prevent punctures of the battery pack. Tesla’s advanced electronics and software, while game changing in many respects, were buggy in the way that Silicon Valley code typically is (the ritual is to release the software and fix it later). In an annual dependability survey by J. D. Power and Associates conducted in 2016, Tesla owners reported so many problems that Tesla finished in the bottom five, undercutting the narrative that its vehicles were redefining the ownership experience with rapid software updates.