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  “Earthshaking” is how the magazine described the probability that a new Ford GT production car would be announced at the 2015 Detroit auto show. “Say it with me now,” a scribe on the website Jalopnik wrote of the rumor: “Holy shitballs.”

  And then there it stood—a car that demanded a kind of reverent attention.

  The new GT, in a brilliant “liquid blue” (Ford’s new name for the color), rolled out onto a vast stage, over which a huge video screen flashed images of the new machine. Ford CEO Mark Fields presided over the reveal. “If you could use innovation to build the ultimate Ford performance vehicle,” he said, “what would it be?”

  He was then joined by Bill Ford for a few minutes of enticing banter.

  “So, Bill, you think we ought to build it?” Fields asked.

  “I think we should,” the Ford scion replied, clearly relishing the historic moment.

  “All right,” Fields said. “How about we build it . . . hmmm. . . . How about next year?”

  The crowd, as they say, went wild, because it knew exactly what that meant: a return to Le Mans.

  It was a triumph for Ford, and it was also an early signal that 2015 was going to be the best year the U.S. auto industry had ever seen, a defiant comeback from the financial crisis.

  When I saw the GT up close and in person at the New York auto show a few months later, I couldn’t stop looking at it. The new car had advanced the art of the mid-engine supercar. Callum’s swoopy, evocative design was defined by that pair of winglike flying buttresses at the car’s rear. It was brash and bold, yet elegant and seductive, in the way Ferraris are. Callum’s GT was beautiful, whereas the racing GT40s and the GTs of the mid-2000s were blunt. But the car was really more than beautiful. It was transcendent in its combination of the old and the new, in its blissful, enrapturing conjoining of the race car from the 1960s and state-of-the-art supercar from the twenty-first century. The reason it sent shock waves through the auto-enthusiast crowd and also blew away people who otherwise had little interest in cars was that it summarized, with a luminous visual presence, everything that a sports car was supposed to be. The GT looked sexy, technologically adventurous, very fast, very sleek, and very ready to race. Studying its lines and shapes was simultaneously relaxing—because everything was in the right place and in the right proportion—and thrilling. It was palpably dramatic, and it glowed from within. It was far from a big car, but it occupied physical space with an attitude of pure self-confidence. A lot of powerful, outlandish, expensive cars command attention, but the new GT was almost immediately respected. It didn’t have to ask to join the club. It was already in.

  The new GT established an entirely different tone in Detroit. The beast wasn’t a reincarnation; it was a reinvention. Wired magazine called it “spectacularly ludicrous.” “Holy mother of God,” Car and Driver exclaimed. “We were floored.” Mark Phelan of the Detroit Free Press wrote that it was “Stunningly gorgeous, remarkably advanced.” Pulitzer Prize–winning car critic Dan Neil was enthusiastic about its “shattering, future-shock shape” in the Wall Street Journal.

  The car was remarkable—and Ford had seized its moment. Who could know if it was now or never? By 2066, Le Mans could be the equivalent of a quaint nineteenth-century horse-jumping competition today. By 2066, we could be racing SpaceX Tesla hovercraft on the Mars colony. Or we could utter the words “auto racing” or “motorsport” and be greeted with blank stares from our robot overlords or our adult grandchildren, who consider car racing to be something that happened in an alarming percentage of early video games. The mid-twenty-first century’s idea of a supercar could be a fully tricked-out Google pod-mobile that drives itself, converses about the symphonies of Beethoven and the more complicated corners of prime number theory, writes a little poetry when it’s parked, and tops out at a bloodcurdling forty miles per hour.

  The GT ultimately earned its considerable accolades as it was sent out on the car-show circuit. Over the course of 2015, it appeared in different liveries. The original blue car shown in Detroit was joined by a slick, metallic silver version. A yellow GT then came online. By the time the Detroit auto show reconvened in 2016, a new bright white GT was tucked away on a mezzanine display alongside the rest of the newly formed Ford Performance lineup: a Mustang, a Fiesta, even a pickup truck (the Raptor, a high-performance take on the F-150). The more colors the GT came in, the more captivating it became.

  A few grouchy big-engine partisans took issue with the turbocharged V-6, even though 600 horsepower put the GT firmly in the same league as the newest Ferraris—and a cut above the stalwart 491-horsepower Corvettes that would be defending their 2015 Le Mans title.

  By the beginning of the 2016 IMSA season, the Ford GT buzz was incandescent. Without question, this was the most anticipated racing debut in decades, trumping Formula One, NASCAR, and the Indianapolis 500. Best of all, Le Mans would represent the culmination of an entire racing season. Fans both experienced and new would be aware of the GT’s performance, as it raced against its competition and sought to do something unprecedented: repeat history with a fresh new machine inspired by a fifty-year-old race car.

  So, the Mustang wasn’t transformed into a half-assed GTLM contestant. A clean-sheet design was green-lighted. There was no big risk that the cars wouldn’t sell—Ford could already count the money. No, the challenge would be where it properly belonged: on the tracks leading up to that single, twenty-four-hour episode of exquisite torture in the French countryside.

  Supercars are easy. Race cars are hard. The new GT had enjoyed a perfect birth. But it was now headed for its first major test.

  Chapter 4

  Disaster at Daytona

  For Ford, the lead-up to the Rolex 24 at Daytona in late January 2016 was a combination of pressure cooker and hype-a-palooza. Inside and outside the often-insular world of motorsports, everyone had become obsessed with the company’s attempt to repeat history with the captivating and exceptionally sexy GT. That created steady external pressure, matched and exceeded by the internal pressure Ford put on itself.

  Expectations seemed to outpace even what the carmaker had anticipated. Speculation about the company’s return to endurance racing had been a constant thrum prior to the GT’s reveal in Detroit in early 2015. After that, excitement picked up at a frantic pace, stoked by Ford as well as by fans and the media. Nobody was really calculating the odds, which said that a Le Mans win was a long shot after Ford’s decades away from factory-supported endurance racing. The history that Ford was trying to repeat was also being overlooked: Ford may have won in 1966 but only after a dismal showing in 1964 and 1965.

  Lurking behind all of this, of course, was the reality that Daytona would be the GT race car’s first true test. In June, Ford had released a short video officially announcing what many had suspected: the GT would return to Le Mans. The film was thrilling and a bit out there. The Le Mans–winning car from the 1960s watches a grainy newsreel of itself and its legendary victory, then magically morphs into the new number 66 GT race car, fires up its engine, and blasts through the streets of Paris. En route to Le Mans, about two hours southwest of the French capital, the new GT frightens a rearing stallion, a cavallino rampante—throwing an obvious gauntlet down for Ferrari.

  The imagery was exhilarating, the stuff of fanboy fantasies. But it also established a very high bar for Daytona.

  And Daytona, when you talk about the cars hitting the track, is no pool party. This massive racing facility, located about two thirds of the way up the Florida peninsula, between Orlando and Jacksonville, is America’s premier motorsports venue. It was the vision of Bill France, the patriarch of NASCAR, who dreamed of an epic venue for that unique creation of American racing, stock cars. Every February, it hosts the greatest NASCAR race of them all, the Daytona 500.

  Constructed in 1959, the NASCAR track is a gigantic two-and-a-half-mile tri-oval, whose banking enables cars to achieve viciously
high velocities. In qualifying, NASCAR competitors routinely top 200 miles per hour. The design of the banking allows physics to serve speed. As the cars slingshot around the turns, they are pressed down into the track rather than sliding off it.

  Endurance racing is a completely different game from NASCAR competition, but it’s also deeply wound into the Daytona DNA. Three major endurance races make up the so-called Triple Crown of this subset of motorsports, and Daytona is the only one besides Le Mans that goes for twenty-four hours (the third, Sebring, also in Florida, is a twelve-hour-long contest).

  In fact, Daytona and Le Mans are the only twenty-four-hour races on the combined schedule of the North American IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship (sponsored by a company that makes expensive custom floor mats for cars and trucks) and the FIA World Endurance Championship in Europe.

  Both Daytona and Le Mans run for a grueling full day, but they are distinguished by their courses. Le Mans is run over a combined road and racetrack course of eight and a half miles. Its most famous section, the fabled, terrifying Mulsanne Straight, is, at 3.7 miles, longer than the entire Daytona road course of 3.5 miles. It is why Le Mans is Le Mans. If you give a 600-horsepower GT car an uninterrupted expanse of nearly four miles to use as a drag strip, you are going to witness the type of velocity that freaks out most grown-ups. Put a 1,000-horsepower prototype car out there, and freaking out is no longer an option. The driver’s eyes must stare ahead with a combination of professional precision and defiance of death—and trust that the car won’t spin fatally out of control at some point.

  A Ford engineer who worked on the original GT40 cars that captured the one-two-three victory expressed flat astonishment the first time he drove a normal road car around Le Mans’s Circuit de la Sarthe, so named because it is located in the Sarthe département, which takes its name from the Sarthe River, a tributary of the Loire. He couldn’t image how drivers would have the fortitude to push a car to 200 miles per hour on what was to him a long, two-lane county road, lined on either side by trees.

  The Mulsanne isn’t as hairy as it once was. In 1990, a pair of chicanes, or crimps, were added to the infamous straightaway, which the rest of the year is a public road, to get the drivers on their brakes before they hit speeds of 250 miles per hour. Two drivers, Jean-Louis Lafosse and Jo Gartner, had died in crashes in the 1980s. Gartner’s car was shattered when it collided with a telephone pole. Lafosse’s car was destroyed when it suffered a mechanical breakdown on the track and slid from one side to the other, guardrail to guardrail. Two race marshals were injured, and Lafosse’s body was mutilated.

  Daytona provides, in many respects, the next best (or worst) thing, in the form of those huge, arcing banks on the tri-oval, as well as a back straight that’s broken by a quick, crisp bend known as the Bus Stop. It’s here that drivers will try to make their lap times, taking a racing line through the turns that’s as direct as possible.

  Imagine you’re required to attack this section of track over and over again, each time applying the sort of precise yet slightly imbalanced, edgy pressure that high-performance cars live for. Your machine, from tires to engine to gearbox, is at a limit. The once-glossy and colorful exterior is grimed with filth. You are sore and thirsty. You have stopped smelling anything but exhaust and racing fuel, and you can’t remember a time when the scream of an engine created to evoke the battle cry of an angry animal wasn’t filling your ears. It could be light. It could be dark. It could be raining. And still you must hit the Bus Stop and make your lap time, for an hour or more on each of your stints, until you hand the car over to one of your fellow drivers. Over the course of an entire day, by the clock, you and your codrivers could each be in the car for eight grueling hours, depending on the total duration of the race. “You’ve got to put down the laps,” is what the drivers say.

  In the back of your mind, you know that in endurance racing, deaths have come not because a driver pushed too hard, lost the grip and the car’s rear, and drove straight into a wall, to perish in a 200-mile-per-hour fireball. Deaths in endurance racing have rather come because the driver drifted for a millisecond, lost that critical focus on the next moment of life, the next 100 feet of track, the consciousness that existence for a driver is defined not by the past, and not by any future that can be considered, but by a sort of barely extended present. You have no yesterday and you have no tomorrow. You have the next five seconds of now.

  In endurance racing you know that, in this context, you also die because the car breaks. It’s as if the horse is shot out from under you. One moment, you are as melded with a machine as you can be, wrestling the engine and the gearbox, the endlessly oversteering tires, but trusting in the bond. You’re feeling good about life because this is, after all, what you’ve lived for since you slipped on a helmet for the first time and drove a go-cart, fast, at age ten. The next moment, part of your car explodes and shreds into bits of carbon fiber, alloy, and rubber, and you’re looking for a place to crash or trying to use pure instinct to avoid killing your fellow racers.

  Only once the initial trauma has subsided do you get to think about the imminent possibility of burning to death, assuming you’re still alive and haven’t lost an arm or a leg. Often, you can’t even crawl from the wreckage. You have to be pulled. Bleeding. Dazed. Thankful.

  Didier Theys, a Belgian who won Daytona twice, in 1998 and 2002, was the first real driver I ever met, and he acquainted me with the look I now associate with trained drivers—the gaze that out of habit is just slightly dislocated from the present, occupying instead a point in the future at the limit of vision. After all, at 140 miles per hour a driver is covering something like sixty-eight yards every second.

  They say time travel is impossible, but professional drivers do it for a living. The increments are tiny, however. But they’re repeated in a rhythm, like a pulse. This is what’s simultaneously numbing and exhilarating about motorsport. The track itself is a defined experience, and the “racing line” is discovered relatively early in a race and scored with black tread marks from the abused tires. As a driver, you know where to go. But because you’re going there so fast, you follow a simple rule: your hands on the steering wheel follow your eyes to the future.

  This is a fundamental principle imparted by professional driving instructors. It sounds easy, but in practice it’s extremely difficult. When driving, even on a track, we tend to manage a car in its current state. We feel the corner we’re taking, or we deal with the second-by-second pace of acceleration. What we really need to be doing is borrowing the car’s position from its future and creating a cognitive map, swiftly drawn, of the quickest trajectory to that position.

  I’ve come to believe this can’t really be taught, that drivers like Theys are born with an ability to process the present as contingent on a future that’s just at the precipice of now. Because this doesn’t drive them crazy, and they make a living from their talent, they can move through normal space and time. But when you look at the way they see, you can witness a kind of dislocation. Steve McQueen’s character, Michael Delaney, put it best in Le Mans, the 1971 film whose objective was to capture the reality of motorsport with an emphatic, exceptional realism: “Racing’s important to the men who do it well. When you’re racing, it’s life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.”

  When I met Theys he was retired, but this condition of waiting struck me as eternal. The air of anticipation was also permanent. He didn’t exactly live in the now. He lived in the now immediately after the now, beheld with his handsome blue, piercing eyes. He could describe that imminent now in practical detail, because he would have to drive through it at 200 miles per hour and do it in one piece—again, and again, and again.

  People like this are often just as quick with their humor as they are with their driving.

  “What was your favorite race?” I asked Theys, knowing that he had run in three Indianapolis 500s and had finished third at Le
Mans in 1999. The backdrop for this conversation was the raceway at Watkins Glen, in upstate New York, a big, fast track beloved by club racers and pros alike.

  “The ones you win!” he exclaimed.

  By its nature, Daytona is a study in contrasts, on two levels, when the Rolex 24 is being run.

  First is the transformation of NASCAR’s speed palace—and Daytona is surpassed only by Talladega, in Alabama, in velocity if not provenance—into a road course. NASCAR uses only the large track on the outside, the tri-oval, while the road race combines that with the winding course that sits on the infield. And it’s not just the racing layout that changes. For the weekend of the Rolex 24, this redneck Elysium just off one of Florida’s less fashionable stretches of beachfront attracts the moneyed, middle-aged aristocracy that favors endurance racing in America. (Things are far more egalitarian in Europe, as I would learn six months later at Le Mans.) The Daytona 500 features hulking stock cars, while the Rolex 24 showcases out-there prototypes and sleek GT cars. The only connecting threads in 2016 were the Corvette team, which included GT racers that share a corporate stable with the Chevys that run in the Daytona 500; and Ford, which had a similar NASCAR link. Otherwise, the Rolex 24 is Porsches, Audis, Aston Martins, and of course Ferraris.

  And the Ferrari presence is one that defines how different sports-car racing is from the snarling hoedown that is NASCAR.

  Other manufacturers and teams provide amenities for their fans and competitors during the Daytona marathon. But Ferrari has a raised red-and-white temple overlooking the track’s first turn, at the end of a patio section attached to the pits. Several thousand square feet of viewing platforms, enclosed and both heated and air-conditioned, are filled with Ferraristas for the duration of the race, most of them decked out in Ferrari-logo attire and attended to by a staff of waitresses and bartenders who are participating in their own marathon of hospitality. They’ll keep at it for the full twenty-four hours, even though all but the most die-hard supporters of Maranello, Italy’s most famous enterprise, will retire after nightfall to nearby hotels.