The dark side of ‘Ford v Ferrari’
Carroll Shelby was a notorious womaniser and later filed many lawsuits against Ford
Ford v Ferrari follows British racing driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), and hot-rodder Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) as they build a special race car to help the Ford Motor Company beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966 and 1967.
They strike an oddcouple pair: Miles is a wiry, eccentric Brit; Shelby is a square-jawed, cowboy-hat-wearing Texan. Neither much like the corporate pressure exerted by Ford chief Lee Iacocca and his marketing goons. And there you have the necessary tension for a movie.
It’s a beautifully shot film that will be enjoyable for modern car buyers and enthusiasts alike. But what I saw is a devastating picture of the lack of diversity that permeated the industry in the 1960s.
If automakers want any hope of relevance in the next decades as they face the most radical changes and challenges they’ve experienced in 150-odd years of automotive history, they would be wise to contemplate it closely.
Because Ford v Ferrari shows a generation best left dead and gone.
Picture this: During all 152 minutes of the film, men dominate the screen 98 per cent of the time, by my unofficial count. They are in the executive suites at Ford and Ferrari, in the workshops and garages in Venice, on the track out at Willow Springs Raceway.
No fraction of the storyline is devoted to parsing the thoughts and feelings of any female who appears, even peripherally, on screen. Instead, Caitriona Balfe, who plays Miles’ wife, Mollie, is presented as the doting mother: She smiles mildly and nods her head indulgently as her husband struggles to gain traction in the race world. She clucks like a schoolmarm when Miles and Shelby come to blows on her front lawn — then brings them each a soda pop.
This is a film celebrating those nostalgic golden days when white men ruled. The central message of Ford v Ferrari — that the answer to the question “Who are you?” is what really matters in life — is delivered in the beginning, middle, and end of the film by Shelby.
The biggest problem with that is Shelby. The man who was responsible for turning the Ford Mustang into the epitome of American muscle and embodied everything the red-blooded American male of the era was supposed to hold supreme.
Some of it is admirable: A former chicken farmer from Texas who pulled himself up by his own proverbial bootstraps, Shelby wore overalls when he raced and built his own cars with Ford-tough V8 engines. He beat the Europeans at their own game at Le Mans.
WOMANISER, SIX MARRIAGES
Most of it was not: Shelby was a notorious womaniser who blew through six marriages and was heading toward divorce from his seventh when he died. He spoke to everyone with language so blue it was legendary; ask any car journalist or professional driver who knew him, and they’ve got plenty of descriptive words to describe the way he treated anyone within earshot. Many of those words are unprintable here.
For fun, he shot lions, elephants, and rhinoceroses on animal hunts in Africa. He filed so many lawsuitsagainst Ford, against local car builders, against online forums, and, ironically, against the company that later would supply all of the Cobras for the film — that he became more known and reported on for that in his later years than for any feats of automotive genius.
In fact, after his blast of success with the AC Cobras in the 1960s and his hot-rod take on the Ford Mustang, Shelby didn’t have a single real hit. Instead, there were claims he falsely represented many of the cars he sold. He left Ford for Chrysler, where he helped develop some specialedition Dodges. Ford fans brought up to adore him as a brand hero shouldn’t have been so surprised he left; this was not an individual known for loyalty to anyone or anything other than himself.
It gets worse: One of his former personal assistants, Angelica Smith, sued Shelby for sexual harassment in 2011. The suit included information about an alleged rape that happened at Shelby’s home by one of his employees, and that she was fired, partly in retaliation, after she reported it. (Shelby called the allegations “wild and fantastical” at the time; he died less than a year later.) But that particular anecdote has been washed almost entirely clean by the same boys-club car culture that idolises Steve McQueen, a decent actor who died conveniently early and had a habit of hitting his wives.
“Who are you?” is rich, coming from Shelby. We know what kind of man he was: The type we all are better off for no longer holding the keys to any automotive kingdom.