As we near the momentous 100th Anniversary of the incomparable Le Mans 24-Hour road race, time-stamped memory etchings of this extraordinary event illuminate a history replete with epic duels, shocking surprises and sorrowful tragedies at 200+ mph during the long days and nights of this extraordinary event. Throughout the historical kaleidoscope of this event, one particular official result stands out as arguably the most controversial result in Le Mans 24-Hour History: the finish of the 1966 Le Mans in which not one, but three Ford GT40 Mk IIs defeated a then-dominant Ferrari. But the question of which Ford won lives to this day as an infamous argument.
Excerpted from UK Racing History
Author: David Greenhalgh
The story is a dramatic one, but stripped down to its barest essentials: an overwhelming Ford campaign in 1966 saw the Ferrari dominance fade away in an epic race that saw a cadre of Ford GT40s attack with army-like ferocity. When it became clear in the final hours that Ford would be the winner, Ford management instructed its drivers Ken Miles and Bruce McLaren not to race each other to the flag, but instead to cross the finish line line side-by-side in a show of Ford corporate glory. In effect, an orchestrated finish in unison.
Although obediently staged by the drivers, history records that the finish wasn’t a dead heat because the #1 Miles/Hulme car was two spots ahead of the #2 McLaren/Amon car on the grid, therefore car #2 had technically traveled further in the 24 hours, and was declared the winner. This disregards, of course, the claims of many credible Ford team and paddock sources that claimed the Miles/Hulme car was in fact one full lap ahead at race finish.
But the end of the 1966 race may well be the most mis-reported finish of a major race in the history of motor sport. Many journalists and authors who have tackled the subject since have differed in their portrayals of the intricacies of the situation.
A good number of sources assert that the “dead heat finish” went wrong because of the ACO’s eccentric decision that car 2 had traveled further. Some authors have gone so far as to say that the so-called “distance rule” relied upon by the French ACO simply never existed. There is understandably some doubt on that point, because when asked by Ford late in the race, the ACO initially said that a dead heat [orchestrated] finish was permissible, however later told Ford that the distance rule would disallow this. Were the ACO officials initially not familiar with their own regulations, or were they just making it up as they went along, or could they have been “influenced?”
As the race drew to a close (and despite the denial of Carroll Shelby in an interview as late as 2003), the Ford brass did know exactly what the ACO was going to do in the event of a dead heat. The responsibility for the side-by-side finish lay with Ford racing manager Leo Beebe; he knew that it would entail victory for McLaren/Amon. Beebe has always stood by his decision, while others, including Shelby himself, have rather unconvincingly wrung their hands saying, “if only I’d known…” The Miles/Hulme car was accurately documented as the definitive lead car in the final hours of the race.
But what did the two drivers [Ken Miles and Bruce McLaren] actually know? The most common assertion is that they knew nothing of the ACO “distance rule” which said that the cars’ starting grid distance-apart spots must be factored in to their respective distances apart at the finish line. But intriguingly, Ken Miles’ biographer Art Evans (who is one of the few people who discussed the race with Miles before Miles before he was killed during testing, eight weeks after Le Mans) claims that Miles did in fact know that the French distance rule existed.
The fact that Evans actually discussed the race with Miles suggests that if Miles knew about the distance rule, he must have known he had lost the race at the finish line — so why did he and Hulme start driving into victory lane, followed by Miles bitterly grumbling a few minutes later that he’d been screwed?
Indeed, there have been strong assertions by credible sources that Miles was actually one full lap ahead, but that the Ford corporate officials (led by Ford Competitions Director Leo Beebe) perversely persuaded the ACO during the race that there had been a mistake in scoring and Miles should be docked a lap. (If there were such an action, this quietly but effectively overrode the meticulous scoring by their very own Ford team paddock personnel. Shelby photographer and scribe Dave Friedman emphasizes this in his book, “Remembering the Shelby Years 1962-1969.” I corresponded with Friedman for another article I written on the 1966 race, and he was adamant on his point. Further, David Hodges, in the 1998 edition of “Ford GT40,” comments that in the 1990s there was a campaign in America to get the 1966 Le Mans results changed, for that very reason.
Then again, Friedman tells us that when Miles was told of the orchestrated finish, he disgustedly said “so ends my contribution to this motor race.” This writer assumes he would hardly have made that comment if he thought he was a lap ahead of McLaren. Indeed, it is significant that in the new book “Ford GT: How Ford silenced the critics, humbled Ferrari and won Le Mans,” the theory is only given very scant attention, even though Friedman is a co-author.
So, what happened as the cars crossed the finish line? One thing is absolutely certain: as they passed the man waving the checkered flag, McLaren was about a car-length ahead of Miles. A whole cottage industry has grown up as to how that came about: Henry Manney in the Road & Track report of the race asserted that Miles braked or backed off, a view later endorsed by Leo Levine in “Ford: The dust and the glory,” as well as Ronnie Spain in “GT40,” Pete Lyons in Autosport, Dave Friedman and Art Evans. This view also gained favor in Eoin Young’s “Bruce McLaren,” and was adopted by Chris Amon in an interview in Motor Sport in 2002.
But Carroll Shelby has said he doesn’t think that Miles backed off, and Denny Hulme thought that McLaren sped up at the very end. And in “Forza Amon!,” published in 2004, Chris Amon (contrary to his 2002 interview) said that McLaren, determined to win, made absolutely sure he was in front as they crossed the line, and that Miles was upset about it.
Miles is said to have commented to his mechanic, Charlie Agapiou, late in the race that, irrespective of any Ford decision about the finish he wasn’t going to finish second. But McLaren had made an almost identical comment, so perhaps the Kiwi did indeed speed up to beat Miles as they reached the line. But that view is not only in the minority, it doesn’t have the feel of common sense to it. The cars were going very, very slowly as they took the flag: if Miles thought that McLaren had dudded him, Miles could easily have accelerated back into the lead.
But consider yet another arguable variable: perhaps the man with the checkered flag wasn’t standing on the finish line and the race actually ended somewhere else? Indeed, perhaps the regulations said the race ended precisely at 4pm, not at the finish line at all, in which case we’ll never know which of the two Fords was ahead on the stroke of 4 o’clock, somewhere out on the circuit on that last lap.
But assuming for a minute that the race did end on pit straight, there is an interview on YouTube where Ronnie Spain mentions the view that the true finish line was at the start of the pits, not at the checkered flag, and that the cars were pretty much dead-heated as they crossed that first line. This theory (among others) also gets a solid airing from Preston Lerner in “Ford GT: How Ford silenced the critics, humbled Ferrari, and won Le Mans.”
But if that is right, why haven’t more authors emphasized the point? Film of the ’66 Le Mans finish confirms that the cars were almost exactly side-by-side as they approached the pits, before the gap between them widens as they reach the man with the flag, some distance further along. But even if they were side-by-side at some earlier line where the race actually ended, the French distance rule was always going to sink Miles.
And how ironic is it if the ACO deserves to be criticized, not for having the distance rule in the first place (a rule which actually has slight logic to it), but for being so idiotic as to have the man with the flag standing on a painted line some distance from the actual finish line. In a close finish, this was always going to be needlessly confusing for everyone involved, causing ridiculous technicality controversy.
But alternatively, if the finish was in fact at the checkered flag, why do so many authors (and some of the participants) speak of the race as a dead heat, when it plainly wasn’t? By this logic, if the checkered flag marked the finish line, then McLaren clearly won, and there was no need to have invoked the distance rule at all.
The more books and articles that one reads on the finish of the 1966 Le Mans race, the more one realizes that many of the key players have contradicted each other and sometimes themselves over the years, such that there is doubt as to a version of the event which can fit all known facts.
The true and complete story of the finish of the 1966 Le Mans event, it appears, may forever remain a mystery. If any journalist ever did the digging that needed to be done straight after the race, precisely finding a copy of the regulations and thus seeing if the “distance rule” existed, thus when and how the finish of this race was defined, he has kept very quiet about it for the past 56 years.
In the coming 100th year of the Le Mans 24-hour, there will be a blizzard of publicity and comment about the 1966 race. Ford will naturally seek to emphasize what a great triumph it was for the marque, as indeed it was. Then, as now, the manufacturer is more important than the driver at Le Mans; Leo Beebe, a good company man, operated by that rule.
Like hundreds of factory team managers in the history of the sport, Beebe elected to make a call as to which of his cars was going to win. For various reasons, he chose McLaren and Amon. The now-famous side-by-side finish was simply a flourish, a symbolic and defiant gesture to mark Ford’s first win in the Great Race. Beebe made that happen.
And so the victory stood proudly as Ford’s finest hour in the sport. And yet Leo Beebe could never have anticipated that so much attention would end up being diverted from Ford’s wonderful win. In the face of such an overwhelming corporate campaign, it was more than a little ironic that the very moment of the company’s triumph was marginalized by the actions of a determined Kiwi, an irascible expatriate Englishman, a corporate team principal protecting the interests of The Company and a few regulation details which weren’t even clear to those who administered them.
