The Sebring winner that didn’t survive

You may think that a car that won the Sebring 12 Hours, played a role in Mclaren’s early Can-am history and featured in a nationwide press campaign in the United States would be resting serenely in a museum or a private collection somewhere. There was, however, to be no happy retirement for this illustrious Ford GT40.

Chassis GT/110 was destroyed at the end of its useful life.

Ford GT/110 was one of a small batch of GT40 roadsters built and, most likely, the only one built in aluminium rather than steel. It started life as a Group 7 contender, assembled by Mclaren in the UK, and raced as the Ford X-1 with a seven-litre V8 in 1965.

It wasn’t successful in a handful of outings in the category that would spawn Can-am the following year, even with the talents of Chris Amon behind the wheel. That explains the nickname ‘Big Ed’, a reference to Ford’s disastrous Edsel sub-brand of the 1950s.

The car was handed over to Shelby American, given a Ford MKII nose and tail, and entered at Sebring for Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby. They won the race, though only after team-mates

Dan Gurney and Ken Grant broke their engine on the final lap.

Autolite, Ford’s supplier of spark plugs, celebrated the success in the press, but GT/110 wasn’t feted like the champion she was on her return to Shelby American headquarters at LAX airport in Los Angeles. Instead, the car was stripped and the chassis shuffled into a corner.

“The chassis wasn’t as strong as a steel car,” remembers Charlie Agapiou, one of Shelby’s crew chiefs. “After Sebring, the aluminium was cracking out in so many places. It was repairable, but no-one saw the point. We were never going to run it at the Le Mans 24 Hours.”

There are any number of tales surrounding the fate that befell this famous car. The most grizzly ones have been made up, reckons Agapiou.

He dismisses the idea that the car sat around in the Shelby workshops until 1970 when US customs finally caught up with it. This story suggests that a car imported from the UK on a temporary carnet was destroyed to avoid duties having to be paid. It has even been suggested that, after being destroyed once, it had to be tackwelded back together, so the process could take place in the presence of the man from the revenue.

“That’s not true,” says Agapiou. “It was cut up and put in the dumpster pretty quickly, possibly even before we went to Le Mans that year. The thing actually became a bit of joke; I remember someone deliberately driving into it with a forklift truck at one point.

“The other one I’ve heard is that the chassis was cut up into tiny pieces and dumped in a nature reserve up out at Playa del Rey. That isn’t true either.”

“It was nicknamed ‘Big Ed’, referring to the disastrous Edsel”