Set of 5 really rare colour photos from the 1966 Le Mans 24 Hours race test weekend of Ford GT40 cars in action.
TOP ROW - CAR #11 at speed leading a Ferrari 250GT0 #64 at Indianapolis curve and alone at the Esses in the rain. This number was used by the Essex Wire team GT40 chassis 1038 in testing in the race it's drivers (Peter Revson and Skip Scott) ran # 59. The GTO is the de Cortanze/Larrousse car (chassis 5095) which did not acutally make the race as a reserve.
MIDDLE ROW - CAR #16 on the left is the Alan Mann entry (chassis AMGT-1) of Frank Gardner/John Whitmore/Robert Johnson/Tom Payne which was another reserve that did not race. The car on the right doesn't have a visible number but the registration plate reads 'LBH 416C' or 'LBL 414C' if the former it's the Ford France entry of Guy Ligier and Bob Grossman (chassis 1007) which was #15 and retired at 205 laps with igniion trouble.
LOWER ROW- Appears to be the Shelby entered #2 which was actually # 6T at the race itself and had the following bewlidering number of A-Grade world class drivers! Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, Lucian Bianchi, Chris Amon, Bruce McLaren, Ken Miles, Ronnie Bucknum and Frank Gardner all drove it in practice or testing and it was a training car so didn't even race!~In all cases I am open to correction as the cars running in this pre-event test were often driven by different drivers and ran with different colour schemes and numbers to those used in the race itself a month and a half later.
7x5 inch (178x127mm)
