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Originally Posted by aravind.anand There already is an Amazon prime original content - 'Le Mans' about the feud between Ford and Ferrari during the glory days of Motorsport racing. That documentary was well made and quite interesting to watch too, and if you are really looking forward to the movie, this documentary can possibly be full of spoilers. |
I've not seen any previous documentary but had read about this "war" on a few occasions long ago. I hope I'll be able to watch this film sooner rather than later.
For anyone interested more broadly in the Ford vs. Ferrari question, I'd have to also recommend "Gumball Rally"... a kind of cult-film and real entertainment for true gearheads, I must've watched it a couple dozen times during my college days. The context is a (completely illegal / unsanctioned) cross-country road race from New York to L.A. - but of particular interest is the highlighted, very intense and sometimes rather funny contest in there between a 427 A/C Cobra and a Ferrari Daytona... and between their respective owners/drivers of rather colorful personalities! Real-life sounds were recorded in, which I must say in the case of these two cars represented something close to glorious. The early morning run through empty Manhattan streets, the shrill wail of the V-12 and menacing growl of that huge 7-liter V-8 resonating off the skyscrapers... well, you just have to see it (there's a little something in there for fans of Kawasaki 2-stroke triples, Jag E-type, Merc SL, etc, etc, too, btw)...
Anyway, it all brings me to what I think was one of the most fascinating aspects of the whole Ford vs. Ferrari LeMans thing... how it comes down to questions of defining "refinement" vs. "sophistication" and just basic approaches to taking engine performance and design forward. Ferraris have always been cutting-edge technologically, with boxer/V-12's, overhead cams and multivalve cylinder heads, etc, etc. I'd call that sophistication. Some of these designs were more reliable, some perhaps more temperamental, but while we often speak of "refinement" in terms of the smoothness or "feel" of an engine / drivetrain, another kind of refinement has to do with a powerplant's ability to make competitive levels of power consistently and reliably.
In the Cobras and GT-40's Ford was using pretty rudimentary OHV pushrod V-8 engines. You could argue that the GT program involved taking a fundamentally simple design and just working it nearer and nearer to perfection, or you could argue that it was a low-tech "brute force" approach to things, but in the end, it worked. It used to be that for streetable American V8's you had something really healthy if it was putting out one horsepower per cubic inch. The production Mustang "Boss 302" for example put out 302hp and was considered a very potent street car... and yet here you have the GT-40 with the same basic "302" tuned to 425hp - a couple hundred horsepower more than most bread-and-butter factory 302's would've been putting out - and yet still able to handle all that reliably enough for extreme endurance racing. it was a very unsophisticated engine that Ferrari / Porsche engineers must have laughed at it... the same basic unit that powered Grandma's Fairlane to the supermarket and church on Sundays... but it had been "refined" in its own way, sufficiently to put both those companies to shame in the end.
Similarly, even in very recent times, Chevrolet's Corvette persisted with the same basic pushrod V-8 they'd been using since 1955; all its more exotic competition was utilizing much sexier engine designs, but that venerable "small block" was refined and perfected and endlessly pumped-up over decades, and continued to provide truly world-class sportscar performance in what was essentially a much simpler, cheaper and easier to maintain package than the others. Very different approaches to things, both tracks worthy of respect, but to me there's really something special about these sorts of "transformations" of very humble, unassuming designs.
-Eric