You Better Win: The History of Ford Racing

Bob Tasca Sr. could rebuild an engine down to the last bolt, but if you asked what he did, he’d tell you he was a car salesman. In the early ’60s, his Rhode Island Ford dealership started building race cars, putting its own drivers in them, and beating the Chevys at the drag strip. Then he sold those same cars to the kids who watched them win. That’s where “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” comes from.
James Pumphrey, Vin Anatra and Zach Redpath tell the story of how one dealer pushed Ford into building drag cars anyone could buy, from the factory-built Thunderbolt to the King of the Road project that became the Cobra Jet. Three generations later, the Tasca name is still racing Fords in NHRA, and it’s still winning.

Ford races in more series around the globe than any other automaker, and some of its best stories never made it to America. James, Vin and Zach head to Australia, Germany and England for three of them. At Bathurst, a spectator's rock knocks Dick Johnson out of the lead, and Australian fans, with Ford Australia matching every dollar, put him back on track. In Germany, Michael Kranefuss takes Ford's Capri into battle with BMW and goes on to shape Ford Racing for decades. And in England, Malcolm Wilson and M-Sport lure Colin McRae with a secret test and build the Focus WRC into a winner, ending Ford's long wait for a World Rally manufacturers' title.

Long before the Raptor changed truck culture, a soft-spoken California race car builder named Bill Stroppe fell in love with the Ford Bronco. James, Vin and Zach trace how a publicity stunt grew into the Baja 1000, and how Stroppe and Indy 500 winner Parnelli Jones turned a napkin sketch into Big Oly, the winged Bronco that smashed the Baja record by more than an hour. From there it's six decades of Ford using the desert as its lab, from the Rough Riders to today's Raptor and Ford's push to win Dakar.

When Enzo Ferrari walked away from a deal to sell his company to Ford, Henry Ford II set out to beat him at the race Ferrari owned: the 24 Hours of Le Mans. James, Vin and Zach dig into how Carroll Shelby, Ken Miles and a crew of unsung engineers turned the GT40 into a world-beater, and how Ford went from humbling defeats to a historic 1-2-3 finish in 1966. Along the way they compare the real story to the hit film Ford v Ferrari, pore over Miles' original test logbooks in the Ford Archives, and hold the internal note that gave this series its name.

Before NASCAR had a name, Ford V8s were already tearing up the sand at Daytona Beach. James, Vin and Zach trace Ford's stock car story from the flathead V8 and Bill France's first races to the Wood Brothers inventing the modern pit stop, the 427 wars, and Richard Petty walking across the street to drive a Ford. Then come Jack Roush's self-funded leap into Cup racing and Penske joining the Blue Oval, all the way up to Joey Logano's championships in the Mustang.