Ford had around 700 guests at this weekend’s FIA World Endurance Championship 24 Hours of Le Mans in Le Mans, France, including many of its top execs, underscoring the high level of importance it has put around the event. The Michigan-based automaker announced at last year’s event that it would return to this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans with Chip Ganassi Racing for the first time since it won the event in ’66.
DOUBLING DOWN ON MOTORSPORTS: For Ford, entering Le Mans was one part of what has effectively been a doubling down in the motorsports realm in the past year or so, with another major deal being the poaching of Stewart-Haas Racing in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series. SHR announced earlier this year in a shocking move that it would switch to the Blue Oval from longtime partner Chevrolet after this season. In a phone interview with THE DAILY from Le Mans, Pericak said the increased levels of funding that Ford is pumping into the sport is about “doing racing right.” Pericak said the increased spending was designed to ensure Ford from a motorsports perspective was “not one foot in, one foot out,” since many of the benefits a manufacturer can see from the sport only come when it has shown it can win.
EYEING ANOTHER CROWN JEWEL: The weekend for CGR is an important one because it marks a year’s worth of work putting together the return to Le Mans. A win would give Ganassi another title. On top of being there to support the team, Ganassi Racing President Steve Lauletta is using this weekend as an opportunity to show a select group of current team sponsors that Le Mans can be "another example of kind of our big-event platform where now you can come to the 24 Hours of Daytona, Daytona 500, Indy 500 -- but also Le Mans with customers and employees and the likes." Ganassi Racing is not looking for primary sponsors on the car in WEC and IMSA because Ford is taking that branding. But Lauletta noted, "There's definitely a lot of (sponsors) who are talking about it; we have a few coming this weekend so they can test it out personally so they can see the build of the event."
