It may come as little surprise to discover that some heads of family-owned auto manufacturers have been known to have fairly substantial egos. As the story goes, in the early 1960s, Henry Ford II was putting the finishing touches on an acquisition of Ferrari when the founder of the company, Enzo Ferrari, decided rather unceremoniously to back out of the deal.
Understandably frustrated by the decision, Ford issued a blank check to his engineers and enlisted the help of motorsport luminary Caroll Shelby to assist the company in achieving a new goal – beating Ferrari at the most prestigious endurance racing event on the calendar, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Though they faced some initial struggles (they DNF’d on their first two outings at the event), the team would go on to meet that goal and surpass it by a fairly wide margin, as the GT40 would go on to win Le Mans four times in a row between 1966 and 1969, providing the first overall Le Mans victories for an American manufacturer.
With only a handful of original GT40s built, their value is nearly incalculable. We say “nearly” because the very car in this video, chassis P-1074, sold at auction in 2012 for a healthy $11,000,000. This car is also particularly notable for having been leased to Steve McQueen’s Solar Productions for work as a camera car in McQueen’s legendary racing film Le Mans. So it’s understandable that it doesn’t see a ton of track time these days.
But when the folks at Larry H. Miller Total Performance Museum and Miller Motorsports Park were approached to produce a video about how an underdog takes on the established “big dogs”, they brought out P-1074 to get some fresh air on the circuit, giving us a chance to see the legendary Gulf-liveried world beater dance around a race course once again.