*This article will contain spoilers for the upcoming movie “Ford v Ferrari”*
Upon catching up to TSL 219 Bill talked about the promise the future of the 1960’s had to offer; Jetpacks, cars that looked like spaceships, and spaceships going to moon was only just the beginning. This is a dream that I have only heard about and romanticized as one looks at history because I’m only 22. However, upon looking back the assumption that none of these things came to be isn’t entirely true. The cars that look like spaceships may not have been available to the average man on the street but they did exist, and they went at speeds that were groundbreaking for their time. The cars that raced were in a class called prototypes. They had to be street legal, have 2 seats, and carry a spare tire. They were meant to envision of the sports car of tomorrow. The time was 1966 and the place was Le Mans, France.
In 1961 the Ford Motor Company began work on a concept car called the Mustang I. This was to show off all the cutting edge car technology that Ford had developed, the ultimate cream of the crop for Ford’s design team. This car would soon go to war. No, not a shooting war, and not a war against the communists, but a war of attrition, skill, and speed against Italy’s Ferrari. The GT40 sat at 40 inches tall, was a mid engine with vents in the nose and was meant to go fast, like 220mph fast with a big American V8.
A business deal gone bad between Ford and Ferrari is what set it off and Henry Ford II wanted revenge for being played by Enzo Ferrari. Ferrari only wanted to sell in order to fall back in favor with the Italian people after his public image had fallen into disgrace. Ford redesigned the Mustang I into the GT40, prepping it for the 1964 24 hours of Le Mans, which Ferrari had been winning since 1960. Le Mans at the time was the most prestigious motor race in the world and Ford’s cars… failed with the longest running of the 3 cars only being in the race for 13 hours.
In TSL 219 Bill also talked about innovation coming from guys having fun and not from big, overbearing, regulatory companies. The fun came to Ford in 1965 by a man named Carroll Shelby. He ran a small race team out of Venice, California building cars that could beat the corvette, the cobra, powered by Ford.
He took and redesigned the GT40 into the GT40X
making it more competitive and winning races however it did not win Le Mans that year. Ford and Shelby would try one more year or cancel the project. Shelby redesigned the car again into the Mk II. Ford would go on to win Le Mans that year in a spectacular 1-2-3 finish. 
Ford would go back and win in ’67 with private GT40’s winning in ’68 and ’69. Only Ford and Ferrari won in the 1960’s.
In 2016 Ford came back with a new GT and went on to win Le Mans on the 50 year anniversary of the original ’66 win. 2019 will be the last year of that project and that race will happen on June 15-16 broadcast on Motor Trend with Ford bringing heritage paint schemes to try and do it one last time.
The GT40 was not the only space ship car to rocket out of the decade, Ferrari had their 330P series
and Porsche with their 906
.
The dream of what the future could be was alive and well on the race track with designers reaching into the future, drivers risking their lives, and fans who came to watch a dream of what the future had in store unfold before their eyes.
This dream is what is being portrayed in the new Movie Ford v Ferrari. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYgDtY2AMY