The race and the result
The Le Mans 24 Hours of 1967 was run on 10 and 11 June at the Circuit de la Sarthe in western France. Ford won with a GT40 Mark IV driven by two Americans, Dan Gurney and A. J. Foyt. It was Ford’s second consecutive overall victory at the race, following the 1966 win by Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon.
The car covered a distance of more than 5,200 kilometres, which was a record for the event at the time and one that stood for many years. Ferrari’s 330 P4 cars finished second and third, with Mike Parkes and Ludovico Scarfiotti in the leading one, several laps behind the winners. The margin is often given as about four laps, though the exact figure varies in the sources.
Why Ford was there
The commonly told background is that Ford came to Le Mans after a failed attempt in the early 1960s to buy Ferrari, and that the company then decided to beat Enzo Ferrari on the track. The story is widely repeated, though the details of the negotiations are disputed, and what is certain is that Ford committed large sums of money and engineering to the project from 1964 onward.
The first GT40s, based on a British design, struggled with reliability. By 1966 the company’s cars were far more competitive, and the one-two-three finish at that year’s race made a strong statement. For 1967 the aim was to repeat the success, and Ferrari, stung by defeat, brought its best cars.
The Mark IV
The Mark IV was a different car from the earlier GT40s. It was built in the United States rather than Britain, used a 7.0-litre Ford V8 and had a new body shape, with a strengthened chassis that drew on Ford’s experience with its earlier prototype. Its appearance was lower and sleeker than the first GT40s.
It was also large and heavy. Drivers sat in a cabin with limited headroom, and Gurney, who was tall, famously needed a bulge in the roof panel to fit his helmet. Roof bulges of this kind are often called Gurney bubbles, a name that has stayed in motor-racing vocabulary, though accounts differ on which car it was first applied to.
The Mark IV was a prototype built for racing, not a road car, and the engine’s size had consequences. Rules for 1968 limited the capacity of prototypes, which meant the car had no future in that form. Ford’s last big-engine Le Mans winner thus became a one-year car.
Gurney and Foyt
Gurney was a leading road-racing driver, a former Grand Prix winner and an experienced Le Mans competitor. Foyt, by contrast, was best known for oval racing in the American single-seater series and had already won the Indianapolis 500, which he would win again in 1967. The pairing combined two quite different racing cultures.
According to the usual account, the team rotated drivers carefully and kept the car at a fast but sustainable pace instead of running it flat out for the full 24 hours. In a 24-hour race that approach usually pays off, because cars that are pushed hardest are often the ones that break. The Mark IV finished without major trouble, which was not true of every car in the field.
The podium
The result is also remembered for a moment after the finish. On the podium Gurney is reported to have sprayed champagne over the crowd and his team, instead of drinking it. This is regularly described as one of the first instances of the champagne spray that has since become standard at motor-racing victory ceremonies. Accounts give differing details of what prompted it, so it is safer to describe it as a famous early example than as a documented invention.
Foyt’s double
Foyt’s win at Le Mans came only days after he won the Indianapolis 500 at the end of May. Two major endurance victories in such a short period, on two continents and in two different kinds of car, remains a striking record. The Indianapolis race that year also featured the STP turbine car, which is covered elsewhere on this site.
What came after
The Mark IV did not race at Le Mans again. In 1968, with the larger prototypes restricted, the older Mark I GT40, run by a British team, won the race, and it won again in 1969. That gave Ford four straight overall victories from 1966 to 1969. Ford then withdrew its factory effort.
The rivalry between Ford and Ferrari has been told many times since, including in film. Those retellings tend to compress the timeline, merge personalities and create dramatic encounters that the record does not support, so it is worth separating the dramatised version from the plain facts: two works teams, a huge budget on the Ford side, and a race that Ford won in 1966 and 1967 with different cars and crews.
How it fits the year
In the summer of 1967 motor racing was a fast-moving mix of American money and European tradition. The Formula One season was running through the same months, and car culture more broadly was shifting, with the pony car boom putting performance-styled models in showrooms. Le Mans served as a showcase for the idea that racing success could help sell cars.
The race itself, though, reaches readers best as a human story. Two men from very different backgrounds shared a car for twenty-four hours, and a company that had been beaten in 1964 and 1965 finished 1967 with a second straight victory.