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Daytona ’67
4 years ago
Ford humiliated Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966, but the Scuderia would fight back
I think there is a perception that Ford blew the doors off the Scuderia’s sports car team at Le Mans in 1966 and never looked back. And as Ford won four Le Mans in a row and Ferrari hasn’t won one since, it’s understandable to think that way. In fact the very next time the works Ford and Ferrari teams went up against each other, it was the boot of Italy that kicked the backside of America. And by the end of the season, it was Ferrari that had claimed the World Sportscar Championship.
But as the trucks rolled into the Daytona paddocks in early February 1967, Ford top brass would have been forgiven for wondering why Ferrari had bothered turning up. For while Ford had no fewer than six MkII GT40s, all with vast 7-litre engines and split between its favoured Shelby American and Holman & Moody race teams, Scuderia Ferrari had brought just two cars, both of which looked almost exactly the same as those that had fallen by the wayside at Le Mans the year before, quite unable to stay the pace of the thundering Fords. Indeed one of them had been in that race and failed long before half distance.
Nor could Ferrari claim it had the superior driver line up. Sure, with Lorenzo Bandini and Chris Amon in one car and Mike Parkes and Ludovico Scarfiotti in the other it had four current F1 drivers, one of whom – Bandini – had actually won a Grand Prix. But Ford brought double Indy 500 winner AJ Foyt in one car, sharing with triple Grand Prix winner Dan Gurney. Denny Hulme was in one car and would be F1 World Champion before the year was out, Mario Andretti – future Indy 500 and F1 champion – in another, Bruce McLaren in a third. Mark Donohue and Peter Revson, perhaps the ultimate all-American dreamteam, shared another car, and so on. On home territory, it looked like it was going to be easy. A walkover were this a sport not quite so fickle as motor racing.
"Ferrari was a whole lot more prepared for Daytona in 1967, to the extent that as early as the back end of 1966, the team had a P4 pounding around the banking, testing, testing and testing"
But there were four things the Americans either didn’t know or, if they did, perhaps did not fully appreciate. First, Enzo had not taken kindly to the drubbing he’d received in France the year before. The GT40s had come in 1964 and ’65 but on both occasions Ferraris had triumphed, but in the latter instance only by the skin of its teeth and by a private car. In ’66 the Scuderia had been simply overwhelmed.
Which led directly to the second point. While the 1967 P4 did indeed look startlingly similar to the 1966 P3, it really wasn’t at all. It was an essentially new car. It had a new chassis on a shorter wheelbase, and a new, stiffer, stronger 4-litre V12 motor with three valves per cylinder and fuel injection in place of the P3’s two valve set up with carbs. It raised power from 420bhp to 450bhp which, with a dry weight of under 800kg, compared favourably to the far heavier MkII Fords with their 500bhp, 7-litre engines. It had a redesigned gearbox, revised suspension, bigger wheels and fatter tyres.
"The humiliation of Le Mans had been avenged. No wonder the media started referring to Ferrari’s newest model by that name: Ferrari itself never called the 365 GTB/4 the ‘Daytona’ but that’s what it’s been known as ever since"
The two cars Ferrari entered were the first true P4 and that 1966 P3 brought up to P4 specification, hence its P3/4 nomenclature. And then there were the privateer cars, in the form of two 412Ps which, despite their completely different names, were essentially P4s equipped with P3 engines. If the factory cars failed, perhaps one of the customers might come to the rescue, as had happened at Le Mans in 1965.
The third point, which related to the first, is that Ferrari was a whole lot more prepared for Daytona in 1967, to the extent that as early as the back end of 1966, the team had a P4 pounding around the banking, testing, testing and testing. And finally Ferrari had a new team manager, Franco Lini replacing Eugenio Dragoni. And Lini was a very cool customer indeed.
The #24 Ferrari eventually won by three clear laps
And so the stage was set. Practice started on the Tuesday before the weekend race, and the consternation at Ford when the Ferraris were seen to be consistently faster can only be imagined. Annoyingly the P3s had not been at Daytona the previous year so it is not possible to see how much faster was the P4 over a lap than its predecessor, but at Le Mans the gap was around five seconds, perhaps more accurately described as a void.
Somewhat sweaty at the prospect of being beaten to pole by the cars it had so easily overcome in France the previous summer, Ford set up Gurney’s car for maximum attack and told Dan to go and do his thing. Which was enough, but only just: half a second covered the first four places on the grid with the Gurney Ford on pole, Jim Hall’s amazing Chaparral 2F second but not expected to last, the not-yet legendary Pedro Rodriguez third in the North American Racing Team’s customer 412P with the first of the works Ferraris, qualified by Amon, in fourth while the other lay sixth behind Andretti’s Ford.
At the start it was former World Champion Phil Hill who led away at great pace while all the big Fords swept past the Ferraris in furious pursuit. This was Lini’s doing: if the Fords wanted to stress themselves in the early stages of the race chasing an incredibly innovative but mechanically fragile Chaparral, that suited him just fine. His drivers had a set pace and they stuck to it. For a while the order was Chaparral followed by six Fords followed by four Ferraris. It was not to last.
At first it was bad luck that dented the Ford assault, Andretti suffering a puncture. But then McLaren’s head gasket blew. Smelling weakness, Lini urged his Ferraris onward. But it wasn’t the Ford engines that did for them. In János Wimpffen’s magisterial Time and Two Seats he puts it thus: ‘One after another, after another, after another the Ford’s staggered in with failed gearboxes. The output shafts between third and fourth gear would last only a few hours and then the entire gearbox would need to be replaced.’ The first changes took half an hour, the last less than 15 minutes but it didn’t really matter either way: sooner or later Ford would simply run out of gearboxes and that would be that. And it was.
Ironically for Ford, the only factory GT40 to even finish the race was the first to have failed. When McLaren’s gasket blew, he’d got it back to the pits and rather than simply retire the car they filled it up with water and sent it back out again and continued to do so for the rest of the race. It finished seventh overall, some 73 laps behind the winner.
Which was a Ferrari, the old P3/4 (car #23) of Bandini and Amon no less. Three laps down having been inconvenienced by a brake issue the new P4 (#24) came home second with the private Rodriguez 412P (#26) in third, 26 laps further back. First car home behind the Ferraris was not even a 7-litre Ford, but a 2-litre Porsche 910 driven by Hans Herrmann and Jo Siffert. As Wimpffen puts it: ‘The two factory P4s (sic) won as endurance races should be won – never was a hood raised on either car.’ A further cry from Le Mans ’66, when not one of three Ferrari P3s saw the finish, would be hard to imagine.
Of course Ford would have the last laugh that year, the drivers of its all-new MkIV reaching the top step of the Le Mans podium, albeit flanked on both sides by Ferrari P4 pilots, but as the three Ferraris formation flew across the line at Daytona, all that was still to come. In that moment the humiliation of Le Mans had been avenged. No wonder the media started referring to Ferrari’s newest model by that name: Ferrari itself never called the 365 GTB/4 the ‘Daytona’ but that’s what it’s been known as ever since, and given the race after which it was informally named, you can see why.
