Award-Winning Journalism: Jim Donnelly’s Deep Dive into the Ford GT40

We’re excited to share an incredible story from our member, Jim Donnelly, a two-time winner of the Ken W. Purdy Award for Short-Form Writing. Jim’s article, originally published in Tazio magazine’s Summer 2024 issue, delves deep into the early struggles of the Ford GT40 project and the pivotal role played by engineer Roy Lunn in rescuing the iconic car.

Not only does this piece shed light on the challenges Ford faced during the GT40’s development, but it also highlights Jim's exceptional storytelling ability. His article was recently honored with the 2025 Ken W. Purdy Award by the International Motor Press Association, making this recognition even more meaningful.

As a proud member of the Society of Professional Motorsports Journalists, Jim continues to set the standard for excellence in motorsports journalism. We’re honored to celebrate Jim’s achievement and his ongoing contribution to the field.

Read his award-winning article to learn more about the history behind one of racing’s most legendary cars.

Congratulations again, Jim! Your dedication to the craft continues to inspire the motorsports journalism community.

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The Ford GT40: A long gestation before Le Mans victory

By Jim Donnelly

Tazio magazine’s Summer 2024 issue

When it happened in 1966, the soil seismically shifted under the collective feet of the world of racing

sports cars. An American manufacturer that built cars by the millions had just vanquished Ferrari, the

Italian pureblood, in the sport’s most historic and prestigious race. The sweep of Le Mans by Ford

forcibly ended Maranello’s yearslong domination of the 24 Hours. Thanks in very large part to Ford,

Ferrari would not enjoy another outright Le Mans victory until the 499P hypercar captured 2023’s

running of the fabled marathon.

By sweeping the three top spots in Hollywood fashion with their fleet of Mark IIs, Ford, frankly, made it

look easy. That first impression is highly deceptive, however, because before Ford could win Le Mans, it

had to take a clean sheet of drafting paper and create the concept for a totally new endurance racer, the

sort of project the Dearborn leviathan had never attempted, at least since Ford’s brace of hot-rodded

Indy cars ignominiously fell out of the 1935 Indianapolis 500 with frozen steering.

Following that debacle, Ford had studiously avoided big-time racing until the early 1960s. That was

when Ford, in the personage of its mercurial chairman, Henry Ford II, got tired of watching (loosely)

factory-supported cars from General Motors winning racers and capturing what then existed of the new

American performance marketplace. The all-out global effort to dominate international racing, under

Ford II’s edict, would eventually spell victory in everything from the Indianapolis 500 to NASCAR stock

cars to eventually, the development of the Cosworth DFV V-8 that commanded Formula 1 for a

generation.

But Henry II and his then-ally as Ford president, Lee Iacocca, wanted more checkers for their collection.

The key target was Le Mans, where numerous auto manufacturers had done combat since its founding

in 1923. Most racing enthusiasts know the story about how Enzo Ferrari haughtily rebuffed Ford’s

efforts to buy his company, which led directly to what was arguably a strongly spite-driven

determination to beat Ferrari silly on its home turf. But first, Ford needed a car.

This is the story of the difficult birth of that car, the GT40, which marks its 60 th birthday this year.

Indirectly, it grew first out of Ford’s study of a ( it was not actually a Mustang concept car. It was a

concept mid-engine lightweight sports car that they named Mustang 1, before there was ever a

production Mustang) Mustang concept car and moreover, the effort to transform the groundbreaking

Lola Mk6 into a true Ford long-distance sports car. It wasn’t easy, it involved daunting technical

obstacles, and it was very publicly backed by Ford’s top leadership. The GT40 project, though, stemmed

directly from the efforts of a transplanted Englishman who’s frequently been overlooked in the Le Mans

story and amid its larger-than-life Ford personages. To people who really understand the story, Roy C.

Lunn is its unheralded linchpin, the guy who supervised the development of both the GT40, its Mark II

successor that vacuumed up Le Mans in 1966, and the Mark IV, which did it again the following year.

As U.S. journalist and historian Martyn L. Schorr put it, Ford would likely never have won Le Mans

without Lunn’s copious engineering and management chops.

“The bottom line is that if not for Lunn, there wouldn’t have had a Mk II, Ford wouldn’t have won Le

Mans, and it wouldn’t have won Daytona and Sebring either,” Schorr declared. “It was Lunn who did it,

unlike people like Carroll Shelby and (Chevrolet Corvette godfather Zora Arkus-) Duntov, Lunn didn’t go

out and look for credit. He didn’t care.”

For a guy who was so quiet about himself, Royston Charles Lunn had a rock-solid career in the auto

industry on two continents. Born in London in 1925, Lunn earned dual degrees in mechanical and

aeronautical engineering before joining AC Cars as a designer in 1946. A year later, he moved to Aston

Martin and was given responsibility for the DB2 program. Next, Lunn joined Jowett in the U.K. as chief

designer. Amid all this, Lunn also won the 1952 RAC Rally in Britain as a driver.

The following year, Lunn joined Ford of Britain and after helping to create the Anglia 105E sedan with its

oddly sloped rear window, which became a star in English saloon racing. Next, Lunn established a new

Advanced Vehicles Center with Ford in Slough, Britain, where concept work began on Ford’s proposal for

a front-drive economy car, the Cardinal. That brought Lunn into closer contact with his bosses in

Dearborn. Lunn came stateside in 1962 and achieved his U.S. citizenship.

It was then that Iacocca came up with the idea of a heavily Europe-inspired idea for a sports car concept.

Lunn led a team of Ford engineers that developed the mid-engine prototype, which became known as

the Mustang I of 1962. While relegated to the car-show circuit in the U.S., the Mustang I was a fully

operable car that gave Ford, and Lunn, experience with trying this relatively new way of laying out

vehicles. And it was assembled by Kar-Kraft, a specialty Detroit vendor that handled small-volume

development contracts, mainly for Ford. ( Kar-Kraft was not involved in the Mustang 1. Don’t believe it

was even called Kar-Kraft until later. It was a Ford internal project. Ford designed the body and Lunn

supplied the molds to Troutman and Barnes. Troutman and Barnes created the Mustang I tubular

steel space frame and stressed aluminum body with a full-length belly pan, per specifications supplied

by Ford Styling and Roy Lunn)

Lunn had had no direct experience with Ford racing when Iacocca came calling. Now ensconced in

Dearborn, and placed in charge of Ford’s Advanced Vehicles team. Iacocca immediately dispatched

Lunn, along with Shelby (I don’t believe that Shelby was involved at that time. Team that went to Italy

was all Ford people.) and Ford product planner Hal Sperlich, to France where they watched Ferrari

stomp the field yet again at Le Mans. Ford considered both Cooper and Lotus as possible engineering

allies before settling on Lola founder Eric Broadley, who had just created his Lola Mk6 coupe (also called

the Lola GT). It was uncommonly low at 42 inches, had a sophisticated monocoque chassis, and was

designed from the start to use Ford’s mid-mounted 260-cu.in. V-8 for power. Best of all, the Lola was

phenomenally light. Besides signing Broadley to a one-year development contract, Ford also acquired

the services of John Wyer, the general manager of Aston Martin, who had overseen Shelby’s co-driver

victory at Le Mans in 1959.

The effort that led to the GT40 had three legs now: Lunn would assist Broadley in developing a race car

based on the Lola monocoque and profile. It would give Lunn the chance to expand his design talents

from the Mustang I project. Wyer would be in overall charge of Ford racing in Europe, plus the looming

prospect of building GT40 street vehicles. Shelby (was involved later) would be the front man for the

GT40 project, further massaging the cars and racing them, with an improbably long supply chain

stretching from Slough to Los Angeles. Shelby (actually Lunn requested that Remington be involved)

sent his chief engineer, Phil Remington, to England for assistance. The target was getting a Ford ready to race Le Mans in 1964.

The first GT (prototypes), as it was originally known, was largely a Broadley car with Ford-developed

chassis improvements grafted in. The car underwent teething problems in its earliest tests, including

fuel-injection (didn’t have fuel injection) woes. Still, construction on the first Ford prototype was

underway by late fall 1963. See below. The Ford GT had its public debut after being flown from the U.K.

to appear in front of Gotham Ford in Manhattan in early 1964. The GT40 name, reflecting the car’s roof

height, came shortly. The first GT, chassis #101 did not have a public debut, was not displayed at the

dealership or outside it and the Essex House hotel. The car was inside a blocked off section of the

dealership service department for a press conference with Lunn & Wyer. That evening it was inside a

private salon in the Essex House hotel for an event with some press, magazine and newspaper

publishers, business friends of Ford, and some dealers. It too was private. After that it was shipped

back to UK for testing.

Initial testing found the GT40 to be nearly unmanageable at speed because of rear-end lift. With a new

spoiler, the GT40 made its competitive debut at the Nurburgring in 1964. During the race, the Ferraris

squirted away while Ford teammates Phil Hill and Bruce McLaren fell out with suspension failure. Ford

brought a trio of cars to Le Mans that year against a brace of four works Ferraris. With a boatload of

executives looking on, the GT40 led the first lap and stayed out front in the hands of Richie Ginther. The

Jo Schlesser-Richard Attwood car soon burned up after a fuel leak, and Ginther’s Colotti gearbox failed.

During the night, the same fate befell McLaren. The best-placed Ford turned out to be a Shelby Cobra

that finished fourth overall. The Fords’ other stop that year was at Reims, where transaxle failures

recurred, along with a blown engine for Hill-McLaren.

As Schorr assessed it, “They didn’t do very well. Wyer was managing the team along with Lunn. Lunn

and Wyer got along except in one area: Lunn believed in testing, while Wyer believed in racing. And

Wyer’s opinion of testing, was, ‘We’ll do our testing while we’re racing.’ That never works.”

Ford realized as much, and brought GT40 development back stateside after Broadley’s contract ended,

along with another debacle at the Nassau, Bahamas, races in late 1964. With Ford II’s lieutenant Leo

Beebe put in charge of Ford Advanced Vehicles, Lunn led the effort to learn how to make the GT40 a

winner. The first issues addressed were the powertrain, as the now-enlarged 289s struggled against the

new quad-cam Ferrari V-12s. Ford engineer Bill Innes proposed an entirely new V-12 Ford powerplant

(which would later come to pass when Dan Gurney allied himself with design genius Harry Weslake).

Lunn, however, advocated for a bullet that was already in Ford’s gun. It was the massive, 427-cu.in.

“side oiler” V-8 that was already in use in NASCAR and drag racing. The engine’s 650-pound weight led

indirectly to another problem: With the GT40 already capable of around 200 MPH on the Mulsanne

straight even with the 289, braking was clearly going to become an issue. That fell to Lunn to solve, too.

As the 1965 season neared, Lunn led a team that worked on stiffening the (Suggest you leave out Lola-

derived) GT40 center monocoque to better absorb that 427’s massive torque. After getting drubbed at

Nassau where two cars’ front suspensions collapsed, Ford made the first operational change to the

program by leaving Wyer in charge of the street cars and putting Shelby atop all GT40 racing. The GT40

went to wider tires on aluminum (later magnesium) wheels, and the cars went into a California wind

tunnel operated by a subsidiary of Ford’s Philco Division to reduce drag from the first inefficient network

of side scoops.

For the 289 cars, Shelby was given the responsibility of adding reliability to the Colotti gearboxes, since

ZF lacked an off-the-shelf substitute that could be quickly swapped in. Back in Dearborn, Lunn took the

next step readying a specific transaxle for the 427. ****Built by Kar-Kraft to Lunn’s specifications, the

new transaxle utilized the four-speed gears Ford used in NASCAR, with an entirely new casing. At the

1965 Daytona Continental, being run at 2,000 kilometers for the final time, the GT40s (with 289s) hung

on for first and third overall, split by a Cobra, as Ferrari struggled with its Dunlop tires. Jim Hall’s

innovative Chaparral took a rain-sodden Sebring, as Hill and Ginther suffered another suspension failure.

**** Suggest you bring in use of consultant Weismann who helped Lunn’s team design and engineer

the new transaxle. It was not all Lunn or his team’s specifications. That’s important. It was built by

Kar-Kraft and the first two units were installed on the first two mark IIs that ran Le Mans in 1965)

Testing at Le Mans commenced immediately. Ford experimented with both 289 and stroked 325

engines, but Ferrari still led the speed charts before winning again at Monza, and then again at the Targa

Florio, as one GT40 finally got a ZF gearbox. The first 427 prototype was then finished and tested

positively. With the right spoilers, the new GT40 was incredibly fast on Ford’s huge test oval. The

clincher came when Ken Miles, a Ford lead driver, flatly said he wanted to drive the 427 at Le Mans that

year.

Circumstances, specifically Ford’s impending victory at Indianapolis in 1965, dictated that Dearborn’s

focus veered away from Le Mans even as the 1965 running loomed. This time, two of the 427s made the

trip to the Sarthe, along with two 325-cu.in. GT40s and two more with 289s. With a mixture of works

and privateer entries, Ford nonetheless notched the notched the quickest times in practice, with Hill’s

427 a full five seconds better than Ferrari. During the race, the Fords led early, with McLaren lowering

the track record. But the two lead 427s both fell out with transaxle-related issues. The front-line Fords

were all DNFs, as a privateer Ferrari won the race.

Beebe was undeterred, and flatly predicted a Ford win in 1966. With Lunn in operational command, a

major structural realignment of the GT40 effort took place. Wyer was largely out of the racing equation,

and Shelby was no longer the lead U.S. team. Instead, the Special Vehicles group created a three-team

structure that had Shelby sharing its role with Holman Moody, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based

home of Ford’s powerful NASCAR operation; and with Alan Mann Racing in the U.K., long a Ford

stalwart, also prepared to run GT40s.

The GT40 moniker was about to undergo a change as Lunn directed engineers Homer Perry and Al Dowd

with tactical command on the first assault of 1966, the now-24-hour run at Daytona. By September

1964, Ford had a heavily revised GT40 that immediately became known as the Mark II, with a shorter,

more aerodynamic nose. Continued pre-Daytona testing identified the gearbox and brakes as lingering

trouble spots. Beebe and Lunn knew that the Mark II was fast enough compared to Ferrari’s P2s that if

the cars stayed together, they would win Daytona.

At Daytona, during the race, the transaxle behaved without issues. As to the brakes, Ford had

abandoned its long-serving Girling disc setup, with solid rotors, in favor of much larger, ventilated rotors

produced by longtime Ford domestic brake supplier Kelsey-Hayes. Shelby entered three cars, along with

two by Holman Moody. Miles grabbed the lead for Shelby on the first lap and was never headed,

winning with Indianapolis veteran Lloyd Ruby by eight laps over Dan Gurney and Jerry Grant in a second

Shelby car. Transaxle problems at Ferrari foretold the next victory of 1965, again by Miles and Ruby., at

Sebring.

The Mark II’s copious weight did lead to jitters as the historic Le Mans effort drew closer. The Kar-Kraft

crew had already proven that the 427 would run for 48 hours without failure, despite averaging around

500 horsepower. The previous year, Ford had instrumented a GT40 at Le Mans, which allowed engineers

to calculate how much kinetic energy was needed to slow the car under the very heavy braking required

at Le Mans on each lap, especially at Mulsanne.

A mapped diagram of the track was passed from Special Vehicles to Kelsey-Hayes, which developed

another new set of Mark II brakes, this time with three-quarter-inch ventilated rotors that could

successfully slow the car despite its gobs of horsepower and 400 pounds of additional weight. Using a

gross vehicle weight of 2,860 pounds for the Mark II, the engineers figured that the brakes had to dispel

nearly 12.6 million foot-pounds of energy, every lap. In the Ford rout of 1966, Lunn’s decision to

upgrade the brakes and transaxle produced the sweetest fruit imaginable.

It was Lunn’s finest hour to that point, even though he wasn’t the most prominently present Ford

executive during the victory celebration. He’s quietly at the end of the group in an official victory photo.

Lunn passed away in 2017, and was enshrined in the Detroit-based Automotive Hall of Fame, following

some impressive second acts (In 2016, prior to him passing away.)

Lunn joined American Motors Corp. in 1971, where he designed the all-wheel-drive AMC Eagle wagon

and sedan. He was named chief engineer of Jeep, where he headed the development of the 1980s Jeep

Cherokee, one of AMC’s most commercially successful vehicles. When AMC later had an alliance with

Renault, Lunn created and built a new range of affordable race cars, the Sport Renault. Hundreds were

built and still race today, ironically now with Ford power. Later in life, Lunn became interested in

building environmentally sound vehicles, and received a letter of thanks from U.S. President Barack

Obama for his research efforts. In the midst of all this, Lunn took time to drive for Jeep in the Paris-

Dakar rally, the event’s first entry by a major U.S. automaker.

Schorr has spent the past several years researching a definitive biography of Lunn and his works. While

Lunn may have been a reticent individual, his accomplishments, especially with Ford at Le Mans, will

always speak authoritatively, he said.

“Everybody got credit for (the GT40 and Mark II) thing except for the people who actually did it,” Schorr

said. “Lunn is truly the unsung hero of the Le Mans program, because the Mark IV was totally his car and

done at Kar-Kraft. He made the Mark II and the Mark IV into winners. And yet there are almost no

pictures of Lunn at Le Mans, but a million pictures of Shelby.”