Racing with Ford

My involve­ent wi­th Fo­rd goes ba­ck a long way and in­c­ludes some of their most interesting racing projects. Before I did the cars for Le Mans, Ford was big enough to allow me to build two lightweight GT40s to see if we should run 4.7- or 7-liter engines at Le Mans. I built the two lightweight ones with slightly lighter bodies from Abbey Panels and we cha­ng­ed the front and rear suspension around and they were quite a lot quicker. I went to Sebring in 1966 as the entrant of those two cars, one for Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart, and the other for John Whit­more and Frank Gardner. In fact, Graham was on pole position through most of the practice and then Dan Gurney got all brave and took pole away, which was embarrassing because we had the 4.7s and they had a 7-liter engine.

Unfortunately, we had problems with bloody awful disc brakes which used to go all bell shaped—at least the ones they gave us did—and so after four hours they were so distorted that they were touching the calipers on both sides, and our two cars retired within four laps of each other. Up until then they were running well, and I would still have preferred the reliable 289 engine which we used, instead of the 7-liter which you can only run at Le Mans. The 289 was a much better engine and if they had put more effort into that rather than the 7-liter, they would have done better as it was a much better car.