Go like hell
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Are you perhaps as obsessed with Le Mans as we are? Do you occasionally perform a Le Mans start when you get into your Honda in the morning? Have you, like us, memorized the Circuit de la Sarthe and, perhaps, dream that when you hit the narrow straightaway on Sunset Boulevard that it’s the Mulsanne Straight and that the tight right hand turn before it turns into Bel-Air is really the village of Mulsanne? Is Sky Blue and Orange your favorite livery color combo?
Well, A.J. Baime does, and he wrote a fascinating look at Le Mans in its most glorious days, the 1960s, when the competition between Ford and Ferrari was at its fiercest. Baime’s book, ‘Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle For Speed and Glory at Le Mans,’ was released this week and provides an in-depth look at both the personal and business reasons that Ford decided to take on Ferrari. The highlight of the book is the day-by-day account of that fateful June weekend in 1966 when the 7.0L V8-powered Ford GT40 was, for one moment, the greatest car on Earth.
Baime, who did dozens of interviews with the likes of Carroll Shelby, Lee Iacocca, Phil Hill, Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, Piero Ferrari (son of Enzo Ferrari), plus assorted engineers, mechanics, PR men and executives from the time, gives all the insider gossip and technical gobbledygook a gearhead could dream of, yet still manages to retain a page-turning narrative for the layperson.
What makes Baime’s book so damn scintillating is that he achieved his original goal to “…successfully [write] a book about cars and racing that can be easily enjoyed by someone who doesn’t know a thing about cars and racing.”
With Le Mans set for this upcoming weekend, Baime’s book may be the perfect history lesson about a time in auto racing when the drivers were fat, the tires were skinny and Ford really could take on the Ferrari and Porsches of the world.
For more information go to Baime’s site or, for a full interview with Baime, click here.
-- Jon Alain Guzik
Jon Alain Guzik is editor in chief at Driverside.com