That's an interesting "spin" - portraying Ford as the plucky little guy battling against the entrenched might of the likes of Ferrari.
In reality, almost the opposite was the case - Ford basically gave the GT40 development team an effectively unlimited budget, and just one goal - to humiliate Enzo Ferrari, who had refused to sell his company to Henry Ford II. That's not in any way to belittle the achievements of the engineers and drivers; the car was successful practically out of the box, not after several years of iterative development, and the team of drivers chosen was world class. One of the nice things about living in the San Jose area is that we are close to Laguna Seca, where the Monterey Historic races are held. When the GT40 was the featured marque a few years ago, there were over 30 GT40s on track. While a few of them weren't fully authentic, most of them were - including the cars that dominated at Le Mans (some of which were paired with their original drivers). And the cars were being raced hard, too, not just paraded around the track. Similarly, when Porsches were featured, there were several 917s on the track (again a mixture of pedigreed race cars and parts-box ones), the genuine 935 whale tail, 956s, 963s, and all sorts of others. On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 02:14:17PM -0700, Joseph McAllister wrote: > Ahhh. The good old days. As an American I was so proud of these cars > racing with "the big guys" and sometimes beating there butts off. > > But since the mid-70s my heart has been with Porsche. So I must say I > get more joy out of a 917, any model. > > Long Tail version > http://www.comparestoreprices.co.uk/images/au/autoart-porsche-917-lemans-hippie-2nd-place-3-1970.jpg > > Short Tail version (917K) > http://www.lugnutsracing.com/files/917mcqueen1024x768.jpg > > On Jul 27, 2009, at 11:57 , Ken Waller wrote: > >> The MkIV GT shown here >> http://mypeoplepc.com/members/kwaller/offwallphoto/id2.html is not an >> original, but a well done replica by a group of private individuals. > > Joseph McAllister > Lots of gear, not much time > > http://gallery.me.com/jomac > http://web.me.com/jomac/show.me/Blog/Blog.html > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
