By the early 1960s, Ford Motor Company, built to bring automobile transportation to the masses, was falling behind. Henry Ford II, who had taken the reins of his grandfather’s company with little business experience to speak of, knew he had to do something to shake things up. Baby boomers were taking to the road in droves, looking for speed not safety, style not comfort. Meanwhile, Enzo Ferrari, whose cars epitomized style, lorded over the European racing scene. He crafted beautiful sports cars, “science fiction on wheels,” but was also called “an Assassin” because so many drivers perished while racing them.
Go Like Hell tells the remarkable story of how Henry Ford II, with the help of a young visionary named Lee Iacocca and a former racing champion turned car builder, Carroll Shelby, concocted a scheme to reinvent Ford Motor company. They would enter the high-stakes world of European car racing, where an adventurous few threw safety and sanity to the wind. They would design, build, and race a car that could beat Ferrari at his own game at the most prestigious and brutal race in the world-the 24 Hours of Le Mans-something no American car had ever done.
Go Like Hell transports readers to a risk-filled glorious time in this brilliant portrait of a rivalry between two industrialists, the cars they built, and the “pilots” who would drive them to victory, or doom.
Bio
A.J. Baime is an executive editor at Playboy magazine, where he oversees the automotive and various feature sections. Born and raised in New Jersey, he attended the University of New Hampshire and later received a Masters degree in literature from New York University, where he studied in the Biography Seminar under Pulitzer Prize winning author Kenneth Silverman.
In 1998, he lied his way into a writing gig at a fledgling magazine few had heard of at the time called Maxim. In the pages of Maxim over the next five years, he profiled Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis, wrote about biker gang wars and Hitler’s secret plot to blow up New York. He also wrote articles for The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, and the Village Voice. His book on the history of liquor, Big Shots: The Men Behind the Booze (New American Library), was published in 2003. After a stop at Boston magazine, where he served as executive editor on a team that won a silver medal for general excellence at the 2003 City and Regional Magazine Awards, Baime started at Playboy, where he finally got to focus on one of his lifelong passions: cars.
In his spare time, Baime likes to drive really expensive, beautifully engineered automobiles at breakneck speeds on racetracks. He also shakes a fine martini, though not when he’s driving. He adores his wife Michelle and two little kids, Clayton and Audrey, more than life itself. His next book–a secret project that takes place in Hollywood in the 1960s–is already under way.
Reviews
“All I can say is: Wow! Go Like Hell drops you right smack in the middle an intense and ferocious battle between Ford and Ferrari as they struggle mightily for race car supremacy in the 1960’s, a drama played out on a little track in France known as Le Mans. Baime’s exceptional voice puts the reader into minds of the drivers, designers, and executives who formed the Golden Age of racing; his fantastic descriptions allow the reader to feel the pounding of the cylinders as the race cars rocket down the straights and through the esses of the circuit. If you like cars–nay, if you have ever seen a car–you must read this book!”
-Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain
“One of sports’ greatest–and, until now, overlooked–grudge matches finally gets the treatment it deserves in A.J. Baime’s comprehensive, dramatic and always entertaining book that’s sure to appeal to racing buffs, gearheads, and anyone who enjoys a good underdog story.”
- Mark Bechtel, Sports Illustrated writer and author of He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back
“Light up a Lucky Strike. Pour yourself a good stiff drink. Settle into the not-so-long-ago early 1960s at LeMans when speed equaled sex and more speed equaled more sex, when hydrocarbons were burned without guilt, when knights errant in exotic automobiles crashed and often died for corporate glory. ‘Go Like Hell’ is a wonder, chuck-a-block with great heroes and villains, a pedal-to-the metal account of greed and gumption, a chronicle of obsession and vain glory. Don’t worry about that seat belt. Just go for the ride.”
- Leigh Montville, author of The Big Bam, Ted Williams and At the Altar of Speed
“Go Like Hell is an epic. Ambitions, lives, fortunes, friendships, and a place in history–all are on the line in this tale of Ford versus Ferrari. A.J. Baime marvelously carries the reader into the pits and onto the race tracks, but more important, he reveals the people behind the machines.”
-Neal Bascomb, author of The Perfect Mile and Hunting Eichmann
“Mix sport, death and big business, the biggest. Throw in portraits that are vivid and recurring of Enzo Ferrari and Henry Ford II, who owned the machines and who would pay any price to win, whether in money or lives; and the drivers Carroll Shelby, John Surtees, Phill Hill, Masten Gregory and others, men obsessed with speed and fast cars while trying not to get killed. Build your story around what was then the most famous race in the world. Go Like Hell is a very hard book to put down. Sharp and suspenseful from beginning to end.”
- Robert Daley, author of The Cruel Sport and Year of the Dragon
