We recently visited the Black Hawk Automotive Museum which has to be on any car enthusiasts list of things to do. One of my all time favorite race cars is the Ford GT40 Mirage in the Gulf Oil livery. This is #10001 the first of the Gulf Oil cars. The description that follows is provided by the Black Hawk Museum.
The 1966 racing season saw a much-needed turnaround in Ford’s fortunes with domination by the GT40’s with top three finishes at the Daytona 24 Hours and Sebring 12 Hours, wins at Spa and the Nurburgring and, at the third attempt, a Ford grand slam at the Le Mans 24 Hours.
In 1966 Gulf Oil Company executive Grady Davis, a SCCA racer and a GT40 car owner, wanted to promote Gulf Oil by launching a motor race program. That year, the FIA introduced a revised “Appendix J” to the rules that covered minimum dimensions for the car and various components. This allowed one of the GT40’s chief designers to redraw the car with a slimmer roofline which reduced the frontal area. Gulf Oil wanted a car that looked a little different from the GT40 and used the narrower roofline design as the basis for the 67 season car. The car would be named Mirage, and just three would be built.
In Mirage’s first season it contested only five World Championship events. With drivers such as Jacky Ickx, Brian Redman, David Piper, Dickie Atwood and Jo Bonnier at the wheel, they would achieve a win at the championship race at Spa in their third race, and score a total of five wins overall during 1967.
Of the three original cars, 10001, 10002 and 10003, one was destroyed, one would be rebuilt into the new Gulf Team GT40 specs for the 1968 season, and the car on this page is the only surviving example.
The partnership that was Gulf Racing would last nine years, and perhaps become endurance racing’s most successful commercial partnership in the golden years of sports car racing. All of which started with the Mirage-Ford M #10001 – the very first race car to be liveried in the now famous powder blue and orange colors.
All I can add to this is, how cool would it have been to see a 1969 Ford Talladega or Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II compete on the Nascar tracks in 1969 in the Gulf Oil colors? I would love to see some ideas and concepts of what you think these cars might have looked like.
