Quote:
Originally Posted by sammyg2
It's a great story, it is fun to watch and follow, with great heroics and great cars.
But I have a problem when people say that ford beat Ferrari. They didn't. They hired someone to beat Ferrari on their behalf.
And there's nothing wrong with that as long as we don't re-write history to make it something it wasn't.
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True and I agree on that to some degree....but....
Sure you can go buy a new race prepped 488 at the Ferrari dealer in 2017. But in the 1960's were they selling their race cars at the local dealership? I honestly don't know the answer to that.
The film does talk about how Enzo was building sedans and GT cars for the public in the 1960's to fund his racing program, and had a partnership with Fiat to make this possible.
Ford appears to have designed the first GT40 with their own in house engineers, which was a good start but loaded with problems as evidenced by their initial troubles. As you know it was not until the brought in Carroll Shelby that they were able to tune the GT40 to win.
At the same time it was not until Enzo fired all his senior engineers and promoted a 22 year old rookie to the head of his race engineering division that they could be competitive again with Ford.
I think to say that Ferrari was competing and winning/dominating with "off the shelf" cars while Ford was building the space shuttle to beat Ferrari is a bit of an oversimplification. Both sides were surely custom engineering unique race-only stuff to compete with each other in the endurance racing equivalent of a space race. Same thing that goes on in racing today.