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Matt Damon will portray Carroll Shelby in a new movie which is set to focus on the sportscar battles between Ferrari and Ford in the 1960s, while Christian Bale is to portray GT40 test driver Ken Miles.

Ferrari won Le Mans every year from 1960 to 1965, but Henry Ford II, furious at being spurned by Enzo Ferrari when he thought he had a deal to buy the Italian sportscar firm, was triggered into commissioning a car to beat the scarlet machines on track. That car was eventually dubbed the GT40, and went on to win score nine wins in the endurance classics –Daytona in '65 and '66, Sebring in '66, '67 and '69, and Le Mans from '66 through '69. Ferrari never won Le Mans outright after its legendary '65 victory with Jochen Rindt and Masten Gregory in the 250LM.


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Looking forward, thanks for sharing :thumbs up.

If you can't wait to know more about the epic war, click here. Prime Video has a fantastic documentary on Ford vs Ferrari.

Agree! I saw this documentary sometime ago and it was fantastic to watch Ford trying every move to out do Ferrari and they do it finally! It is a shame that Ford is not present in any motorsport activity as a works team now.

If this stunning poster is anything to go by, November 15 can't come soon enough for the release of the highly anticipated 'Ford v. Ferrari' film epic.

Starring Matt Damon as the intrepid and no-nonsense Carroll Shelby and Christian Bale as sports-car great Ken Miles, the film recounts Ford's endeavor with the GT40 to challenge and defeat Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966.

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.

https://youtu.be/Vo96qDiGUiI

Trailer of the Epic clash revealed!

Link to the trailer of the movie

Disappointed by the trailer. By the looks of it, the story is portrayed as two brave underdog Americans who go to Europe to take on the unbeatable Ferrari with nothing more than a can-do attitude, a pair of bootstraps and a dream. A typical Hollywood movie recipe.
Meanwhile it's surprising how everyone forgets Ford after 5 years of failing finally beat Ferrari at Le Mans while spending over 10 times the budget and hiring from every parts of the globe and on top of that forgetting how Ferrari did a 1-2-3 at Daytona the same year, in their home country.
That's right Ferrari went to Ford's home turf where Ford's been racing from ages and took a clear 1-2-3 finish!! Ferrari was a very small racing team to achieve that.

Meanwhile it was Enzo Ferrari's plot playing second fiddle with Ford... he wanted to seem like Ferrari was sold to Ford, in truth he just wanted FIAT to jack up their offer, which worked.

Looking good, looking good :thumbs up. That's a great star cast & a promising trailer. Hope the story-telling skills & direction are as good as the iconic "Rush" movie. If anyone wants a background on this epic battle, YouTube has a lot of documentaries - link. It's what gave birth to the Ford GT40.

Calendar marked :D.

That does look deliciously good! And as GTO said, i hope it's good or better than Rush :)

I love that car and can't wait to see it in the big screen, Hollywood style!

The Amazon Prime (or NatGeo) 1hour episode was way better than this trailer.

The greatest car war - GT Vs Ferrari!

Surprisingly Lee Iacocca's autobiography has no mention of this; surprised how he forgot to trumpet his achievements on this aspect!

Really looking forward to this. Cast couldn't be better. Calendar is marked for sure :thumbs up

Ahh, a good car movie after a long time ! I am a sucker for true stories. Unless one has a 'proper' audio-video setup at home, these movies are best experienced in theaters !

Just told my wife: Ready or not, we are going :D

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