Jonathan M. Gitlin
Ford mechanics and engineers prep the car for the six-hour race ahead.
The cockpit of the Ford GT. Rest assured the production car will look a lot more accommodating.
The only car that was able to challenge the Fords at
Le Mans was the Ferrari 488 of Risi Competitzione. The car arrived at
Watkins Glen direct from Le Mans, giving the team just two days to
change the engine and swap in shorter gear ratios before practice for
the Sahlen's Six Hours at the Glen got underway.Elle Cayabyab Gitlin
The Ford team's attention to detail extended to these custom dollies,
which are used to move the car in the pits if necessary.
Mark Rushbrook, Motorsports Engineering Manager at Ford Performance.
Although the Ford GT is based on a road car, from behind it's much more
reminiscent of the faster Prototype racing cars, with an enormous rear
diffuser and a lot of attention paid to shaping the flow of air around
the car.
Just as it was 50 years ago, the
battle for sports car supremacy on the world's race tracks this year has
been between Ford and Ferrari. At this year's 24 Hours of Le Mans, the
two marques were head-and-shoulders ahead of their competition in the
hotly contested GTE-Pro class (for racing versions of cars that you or I
could buy). Ford emerged victorious,
but the end of the race was somewhat acrimonious, with protests and
counter-protests from both camps. We caught up with both teams at their
next match up—the Sahlen's Six Hours of the Glen at Watkins Glen in
upstate New York—both to check out their machinery and also to find the
hatchet well and truly buried.
Back in 1966, after Henry Ford's attempt to
buy the Italian car company was rebuffed, his company built the
legendary GT40, beating Ferrari's V12-powered cars at Le Mans and most
everywhere else. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of that match up,
Ford decided to build (and race) a new mid-engined supercar, the Ford
GT. The road-legal Ford GT won't actually appear until 2017, but Ford's
rivals all gave their permission for the Blue Oval to start racing the
car this year—the rules insist on a minimum of 500 production cars built
in order to be eligible to race.
Ford has been running a quartet of GTs on
track, a pair in the WeatherTech Sportscar Championship here in the US,
and another pair contesting the World Endurance Championship. The cars
aren't just racing for glory either; Ford Performance (the division of
the company responsible for the GT as well as the
Shelby GT350
and Focus RS) is using the experience to develop and improve the road
car ahead of production. We met with Mark Rushbrook, motorsports
engineering manager at Ford Performance, to find out more.
"Le Mans went really well," he told us. "The
goal was to go there and win the race." Just two weeks had elapsed since
the big showdown in France, which left little time to get ready for the
return to the States and the rest of the WeatherTech season. "There's
been no physical development of the car or testing [since Le Mans] but
we're constantly running our simulations and analytical tools,"
Rushbrook said. Ford took part in a test at the newly resurfaced Watkins
Glen track a few weeks previously, though. "So we looked at our test
data, ran some simulations to finalize our aero settings, our chassis
settings, everything with the engine and shift points [for the gearbox]
so there's been a lot of work in the last two weeks."
"There are two different downforce
configurations, and this is the high downforce configuration, which has
different dive planes to it and different wing angle settings, but we
still have the ability to tilt the wing up and down,"
Rushbrook continued. "We don't have as much downforce here as we would
for a track like Laguna Seca, but we do have more downforce than Le
Mans. We're planed out about halfway down on the rear wing. We looked
pretty good in practice [the Fords topped the time sheets] so the
testing paid off. Again, it's a new car, we've continued to learn, even
though we did a lot of development through the end of last year. Every
time we race it learn something new about the car, and we keep getting
better with it."
We asked Rushbrook whether he was surprised by
the GT's performance during qualifying at Le Mans, where the cars
suddenly started setting lap times that were 4-5 seconds faster than
they had been during testing and practice. In fact, the sudden gain of
speed by the Ford GTs and also the Ferrari 488s lead to much grumbling
from other competitors and fans that the so-called "balance of
performance" [where the organizers attempt to equalize the grid] had
gone awry, the result of some extreme sandbagging during the preceding
few months.
"Yes and no," he said. "Specifically in
qualifying, that was the first time the car went flat-out. In practice
we were working on race setup, so double-stinting the tires [running the
same set of tires for more than one run between pit stops], a full load
of fuel, and knowing we wanted the tires to go two stints. So in
qualifying that was the first time on that track that we had run a low
fuel load with brand new tires. Definitely we went faster than practice,
but it was a great back-and-forth with Ferrari on that first qualifying
session—there was a lot of adrenalin!"
Whether by design or happenstance, Ford and
the Risi Ferrari team (which came second at Le Mans) had been placed
right opposite each other in the Watkins Glen paddock. Now, endurance
racing is a sport with a lot more camaraderie than the cut-throat nature
of something like Formula 1, but we had to ask—what was the mood like
between the two rivals now?
"I'd say it's a very good relationship,"
Rushbrook explained. "I was over there talking to David Sims [Risi's
team manager] yesterday, we talked a lot after Le Mans, and we agreed
that we're competitors that are very respectful of each other, and that
just continued yesterday. We want to race each other on the track,
compete, and beat each other on the track, but we don't want to do that
off the track. We've got complete respect for those guys and I think
they do for us."
This was indeed confirmed by Sims, with whom
we also met to get his take. "Things are not bad at all," Sims told us.
"When we heard they were going to protest us, the start was, "if
[Ferrari] win, we're going to protest you..." OK. Then they did protest
us, for something the ACO [the organizers of Le Mans] weren't not going
to bring us in to fix. It wasn't the number plate, it was the leader
lights." (Sims is referring to the LED display that lets spectators know
what position each car is running in, which aren't required to be
working throughout the entire race, unlike the electroluminescent panels
showing each car's number.)
"So then Ferrari told us to protest Ford, and
it went on and on," he said. "I said to the Ganassi and Ford guys, 'If
you've never done this before, there isn't going be a winner in this. It
won't end at Le Mans.'" Sims explained that the ACO told the teams that
any post-race protests would be settled in the coming weeks in Paris,
until which time the finish of the race would remain in dispute. "And
nobody's going to win that one. So we started talking. I said the best
thing to is to be sensible because we work together, we know the guys,
and the team boys didn't want to protest, it was Ford Corporate. In the
end the best thing to do was shake hands. You withdraw your protest,
I'll withdraw mine, it's easy. The ACO were very happy with that—Ford
you win, Ferrari you get second place. It was no good coming away with
the protest still on, it would have been a taint of the whole race,"
Sims told us.
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