Driving to Le Mans in a racing legend because Jeremy Clarkson was too tall
In 1995 Ford unveiled the GT90 concept, a bubble-era V12 quad-turbo sports car to revive the Ford GT legend. And, while it never made it to production, several very good things happened as a result. In 2005 The Ford GT was reborn, and then again in 2017.
But more importantly, for me at least, I got to drive both road-going and pukka race versions of the original. At Le Mans.
And it was largely (literally) down to Jeremy Clarkson. He simply couldn’t fit in a GT40, so I was drafted in at the last minute to write about the GT40 for Top Gear magazine, while Clarkson would take on the GT90.
I was not the only one surprised by this turn of events. Arriving at a small hotel near Neufchatel in a grubby RS2000 with equally grubby photographer Philip Lee Harvey, the man entrusted with GT40 MkIII no 107 was not keen to hand over the keys. It was the last ever GT40 road car to be produced and valued at around half a million quid.
With reassurances of hefty BBC insurance, he opened the back of a trailer and rolled the GT40 slowly out, gravel crunching beneath its balloon-like tyres. Everybody knows that the GT40 got its name from its 40-inch height, but until you come face to face, or rather waist-to-roof with one you just can’t conceive of how low this car is.
I clambered over the wide sill, careful not to snag anything on the gearlever mounted in the box section immediately to the right of the steering wheel. Adjusting the seat so that I could reach the pedals, I found myself incredibly close to the steering wheel, while my knees brushed the steering column and my head touched the roof. Despite its aspirations as a road car, there’s no mistaking the fact that this machine was not built around the driver.
The standard-fit sequential gearbox had been replaced by an H-pattern five-speed ZF ‘box, so at least that was vaguely familiar in an otherwise alien driving environment. A turn of the key primed the fuel pump before 289 cubic inches of American V8 exploded into life behind my head.
For the first few miles, trundling through Neufchatel in the dawn light (photographers do like to get up early) I was terrified. Terrified of the width of the thing, the height and the value. But as the miles ticked by my confidence grew. The driving position is almost central, making it easier to see past (and sometimes below) traffic ahead, so overtaking was easier than in any other right-hand-drive car. The V8 was so torquey, and the car so light, that even with ‘only’ 310bhp the GT40 would rocket down the road with the slightest push of the accelerator.
On one section of autoroute I saw 160mph on the speedo and the GT40 felt alive. The steering lightened up and became more feelsome, the brakes worked better with some heat in them – and the pathetic air vent actually drew some air into the cabin.
I arrived at Le Mans with 150 miles under my belt, thinking life simply could not get any better. And then the next day it did. In the form of a GT40 MkI race car.
Prettier than the compromised-for-the-road MkIII thanks to a purity of purpose, the race car idled lumpily in the pit lane, fuelled by four Webers to the road car’s single Holley carb.
Other differences? A wafer thin race seat, four-point harness and sequential crash gearbox. And, as I quickly discovered, no servo on the brakes. But, just like the road car, the faster I dared to go the more rewarding the GT40 was. Attempts to shift gears smoothly were met with derision, only a hard pull on the lever would engage the next gear. Only the heaviest stab of the brakes would provide significant slowing. Even the steering, though lighter at speed, needed a positive heave for the car to change direction. But get it all right and the GT40 was amazing.
Amazing and exhausting. I simply can’t imagine how physically demanding this car would be to race for hours at a time.
As I head off to the cinema to watch Matt Damon and Christian Bale in Le Mans ‘66, I will be pinching myself at the memory of those incredible 24 hours with the GT40.