Marred Victory

To hear all the competitors talk, there was practically no way that any of them could possibly win the biggest U.S. sports car race: last week's annual twelve-hour endurance test at Sebring, Fla. The Ford forces worried about the Sebring course itself. Though Ford's new, 475-h.p. Mark II prototypes looked like world beaters when they finished one-two-three in February's Daytona Continental, Sebring demands more than mere speed; it is a claw-shaped, 5.2-mile maze of airport run ways and interchanges that has 13 corners (including seven 90DEG turns, a hairpin and a double S) and 25 gear changes per lap. "Our cars are too heavy for this track," complained Ford's No. 1 driver, Ken Miles. "The Chaparrals have the advantage over us --they're lighter, and they should go the distance with less strain."

Downshift Slip. Naturally, everyone else worried about the Fords--and why not? There were 13 of them in the race.

"They have us in their hip pocket," said Texas Oilman Hap Sharp, complaining that Jiis two Chevrolet-powered Chaparrals were leaking oil and handling poorly on practice runs. Italy's Enzo Ferrari, whose high-whining, finely tuned cars had dominated Sebring for a decade, winning seven times in all, was so pessimistic about his chances of stopping Ford's "steamroller" this year that he bothered to enter only one prototype in the race. Of course, the new Ferrari 330 P3 was quite a car: developed specifically to compete with Ford, it harbors beneath its streamlined, electric-red shell a massive 12-cylinder fuel-injection engine that generated 420 h.p., powered the 3-ft.-high machine to a record average of 106.1 m.p.h. in a casual qualifying lap.

Despite its convolutions, or rather because of them (they prohibit extreme speeds), Sebring has never been considered a particularly dangerous course. Nobody had been killed there in seven years--until last week. On the fourth lap, Robert McLean, a Ford dealer from Vancouver, B.C., was gearing down for the hairpin when his Canadian-owned Ford GT 40 careened into a phone pole and burst into flames. McLean died in the fire, but worse was to come. On the 200th lap, Pennsylvania's Mario Andretti tried to downshift his non-factory Ferrari from fourth to third, slammed the lever into first instead. The Ferrari spun, slewed into a speeding Porsche, and drove it off the track into a group of spectators--killing four of them.

Miles & Minutes. The tragedies took the bloom off what otherwise would have been a glorious victory for Ford. One by one, the miles and minutes took their toll of Ford's main competitors: the two Chaparrals were both out of the race by the second hour, and the Ferrari 330 P3 retired to the pits on the 172nd lap with a frozen gearbox. Andretti's accident took care of the rest; he was running third behind two Fords at the time of the crash, and the Porsche was in fourth place. The finish was a parade--Ford, Ford, Ford, Ford. The only really disappointed man on the team was Driver Dan Gurney, who set the pace until the 228th lap, then blew his engine, pushed his car across the finish line and was disqualified from second place. The winners: Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby, who shared driving honors in the No. 1 Ford, covered a record 1,185.6 miles at a record speed of 98.63 m.p.h.

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