Area man had front-row seat in Ford’s bid to outrace Ferrari
Area man had front-row seat in Ford’s bid to outrace Ferrari
QUEEN CITY, Texas — The upcoming “Ford v Ferrari” flick out in November appears to thrillingly dramatize Ford Motor Co.’s pursuit of auto racing glory by vanquishing Ferrari at the track.
But one local man lived what’s shown on the big screen as a mechanic for Shelby American, the high-performance auto company built by a man born in Leesburg, Texas, just west of Texarkana near Pittsburg.
Frank Lance, also a native Texan, worked for Shelby American for one year and one day in the mid1960s, he’ll tell you, and in so doing enjoyed an up-close look as legendary auto entrepreneur and designer Carroll Shelby helped Ford in the company’s quest to beat Ferrari at races like the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Ferrari, back in the early ’60s, was the inveterate Le Mans victor. At the same time, Henry Ford II sought to buy Ferrari, but the deal fell through, reportedly because Enzo Ferrari wanted to retain the Italian car company’s racing division.
Ultimately, Ford’s quest at Le Mans — something of a payback for the buyout ambitions fizzling — was successful, as the Ford GT40 built by Shelby brought Henry Ford II and company four straight victories at the 24-hour Le Mans race from 1966 to 1969. The GT40 became a legendary car, just like Shelby’s Cobras and Mustangs.
While Lance wasn’t part of those victorious Le Mans races, he was an important player leading up to them as the Ford team worked with Shelby to get the job done.
In the James Mangold-directed 20th Century Fox film, Matt Damon plays Shelby while Christian Bale is Ken Miles, the English-born driver who helped Shelby test and craft this winning car.
Lance has fond memories of both, and at his home he possesses a small library of books about Shelby, along with old auto racing photographs and other memorabilia that hang from his walls and park on his shelves. He saw Shelby race before he ever met and worked for the man.
“When I was in the Navy out in California and I went to the sports car races, I saw Carroll Shelby race in Torrey Pines in 1955. Then again I saw him race in Palm Springs in 1956,” Lance said.
When Lance left the Navy, he didn’t quite know what he’d do.
But he returned to Texas and worked on cars. At a sports car race, he saw Shelby in the next pit over and later started working for Carroll Shelby Sports Cars in Dallas, a dealership, he said.
This led to a five-year job as a mechanic for auto racer Jim Hall. “Racing sports cars and Formula One cars,” Lance said.
Lance recalls his first Formula One race at Riverside in 1960. An old photo captures the moment. “Back then, an individual could buy a Formula One car and race it,” Lance said. Hall, another great American race car driver, bought a Lotus 18 to start up in Formula One, he said, recalling intricate details about the engine. It was Lance’s job to swap engines before the Riverside race.
“He was actually running in fourth place in his first Formula One race,” Lance recalled. “That’s pretty neat.” Lance then worked on cars for a spell with John Mecom Jr.’s racing outfit in Houston, but he returned to Shelby in July of ‘64, joining Shelby American in Los Angeles.
“I worked there a year and a day, as it turned out,” Lance recalls. As such, he was part of Shelby’s project to build Ford a winner with the GT. In that year they found success at first, but not so with the biggest prize of all: Le Mans, the famous French endurance race, in ‘65.
“We didn’t even finish the race in ‘65, even after we won (races at) Daytona and Sebring. At Le Mans, all the cars broke — ‘66 is when they finally won Le Mans,” Lance said, calling Le Mans the biggest race of the year in Europe.
He said winning Le Mans, the thinking was, would help Ford sell more cars there and in England. Hence, Ford pursued buying Ferrari before he switched gears and worked with Shelby on this quest. What made Ferrari so good prior to Ford winning it? They were reliable — reliable but complex, Lance said.
“The deal fell through, and so Henry Ford II said, ‘Well, I’ll just beat his a**,’” Lance said. They’d build a car to beat Ferrari on the track.
The Shelby crew worked hard to make it work. Lance, as he turns the pages of a book about GT40s where he finds a photo of himself included (“That’s me right there,” he says), describes it thus, “We did a lot of testing and a lot of changes. We used the engine that they had developed for the Cobra because it proved successful, good horsepower.”
They put that engine in the Ford GT in place of another one. “You’ll see this in the movie. It shows a car like this doing a lot of testing with Ken Miles,” Lance said, adding, “We worked a lot of long hours.” They didn’t have much time.
They photographed the yarn tufts to watch the air flow around the chassis. They changed tires and modified the suspension. After all this work, they won Daytona in ‘65.
“Shelby American took six cars to Daytona Beach, and of the first seven finishers in the race six of them were Shelby cars,” Lance said.
“This was where the first success with Ford was in the FordFerrari wars, at Daytona with this car,” Lance said, recalling that during practice they added chin spoilers, which helped hold the nose down while banking at high speed. “Before the practice was over with, Ferrari had little chin spoilers on their cars,” he said.
The next race was Sebring, where the Ford and Shelby partnership fared well — second overall and first in class, Lance said. “At this point we’re leading in the word championship points.” He felt good about it, particularly because their cars finished the race.
In June at Le Mans, though, the team’s cars failed to finish, each one of them breaking down. “We had a really bad race at Le Mans in ‘65,” Lance recalled.
After that adventure, he returned to working on Mecom’s race cars, including his Indianapolis cars. His wife wanted to return to Texas. He worked for A.J. Foyt, too, who won the Indy 500 in ‘67, so Lance enjoyed Indy success as a mechanic for him and for Mecom.
After his career as a racing mechanic, Lance switched to industrial maintenance, which ultimately brought him here to the Texarkana area to work at International Paper. He retired in ‘97.
About those days working with famous racers like Miles and Bruce McLaren, Lance said, “Both of them were really great guys, good drivers.”
Does he miss those race car days? “I watch them on TV all the time,” he says. As he gazes at pictures on his walls, he can even tell you where drivers were situated in relation to the race track scene portrayed in the photograph snapped so many decades ago, and who won a race back in ‘59, for example.
He’s looking forward to seeing “Ford v Ferrari,” although he doesn’t believe Shelby and Miles would have had the fistfight that’s portrayed in the film’s trailers.
“In the trailer, it actually showed some of what we did here,” he said — such as those yarn tufts and computer work in a car. He thinks Christian Bale looks the part as Miles: skinny and wiry.
Of course, Ford ultimately put up the money to continue its endeavors to win at Le Mans after that disappointing ‘65 effort, but Lance wasn’t involved when they won it all in France. He was there, however, as a mechanic for Ford and Shelby’s first successes against Ferrari.
“At the beginning of the war,”
Lance said.
“We did a lot of testing and a lot of changes. We used the engine that they had developed for the Cobra because it proved successful, good horsepower.”
—Frank Lance