i had heard rumblings of this film being made, and was quite excited that the story would be told, as in 2016 i had the great adventure of going to Le Mans to record in full surround sound for a documentary and virtual reality component on behalf of Ford Motor Company, when they brought back the incredible Ford GT to Le Mans.  i witnessed and captured the sounds of the Ford GTs (and competing Ferraris) as they won the GTE class, exactly 50 years after their storybook victory at Le Mans in 1966!  it was thrilling to say the least, and while there, i heard some accounts of the 1966 victory from Edsel Ford II.   someday i’ll do a proper write-up on this here site, of that documentary work we did at Le Mans… 

Cut to 2018:  i was in Key West doing some recording during the production of Mr. Soderbergh’s  The Laundromat  when the phone rang - it was the gang at 20th Century Fox post-production.  Could i join Jay Wilkinson and my good pal John Fasal to record a vintage Ferrari next week?  …it’s gonna be in Florida…  Hey! i’m already here/there!  trouble was, i had a music session in L.A. in a couple days, and the flight was booked to get me back and then i had flights to Alabama later that week for a long-planned car SFX recording of…  a prototype Kia.  not the most exciting subject, perhaps, but it had been in the works for some time, with the fine folks at Barking Owl and Kia, so i did not want to derail that plan.  

but how could i possibly pass up a gig on what was then titled  Le Mans 66 ?   especially when it involves some of the top talent in film sound today, who i have always enjoyed working with?  being a freelance sound engineer and musician with no children, i had one resource i could pretty easily turn to:  sleep deprivation.  having banked some sleep hours in New Orleans in between Laundromat locations by not going home to L.A. for a few days, i was reasonably ready to suspend any notions of sleep schedules or time zones.

here’s where i tip my hat to post-production coordinators (Aaron Downing and Matthew Wells at Fox), producers (Ashley Benton of Barking Owl),  and studio travel agents (god bless each and every one of you)…  we worked it out over late night conference calls from my hotel room, several time zones away… Netflix would fly me home, then Fox would fly me to Jacksonville, and Barking Owl would fly me back home from Atlanta, the closest workable airport from West Point, Alabama, where we planned the Kia session.  and between those two gigs i had 10 hours to travel three states AND get a wee bit of sleep.  

Having that plan worked out, and wrapping up The Laundromat, i flew home, hung out with Lady Julia, who i had been missing an awful lot that season (for a guy who records for post-production, i seem to get around a lot…), and had a real nice couple of music sessions among friends, very grounding.  but back to LAX the next morning to meet John and Jay.  when we landed, i got my own rental car, as i would continue on after our Ferrari session to capture the awesome prototype Kia.  that i would be in a big hurry to leave the vintage Ferrari for a new Kia seemed preposterous!   as luck would have it, my rental was a Kia Soul.  it’s always nice to show up to a car commercial gig driving their brand.  but that was a few days away, still…

We met vintage Ferrari owner Steve Bush after a pretty long drive south from the airport.  we quickly got the impression that Steve was the kind of guy who can do… well, whatever he pleases, or puts his mind to.   AND be a warm and friendly guy at the same time.  he even located and arranged a real nice (and quiet!) race track in remote Florida that turned out to be excellent for recording.   the next morning we headed out there… a little tricky to find, GPS and Google were not cutting it!

Steve rolled the classic red 1959 Testa Rossa out of his trailer, and we all took quite a pause at the sight.  John and i, over the decades, have recorded countless hundreds of very interesting cars, including many other Ferraris…  but, wow!   it was so beautiful and classic, it was hard to imagine running wires all over it for microphones.   but Steve was a really good sport, and John and i have very carefully wired many valuable classics in the past (Jay Leno’s 1931 Duesenberg comes to mind)…

we spent an entire day rigging up the onboard microphones!   anyone who has seen us do this, might understand.  sometimes we can do a good job of it in an hour.  but with a car this precious, and with such a unique voice, we were not going to do it in a hurry!

there were indeed some challenges to the rigging - check out those intakes, for one.   that’s one barrel of carburetion for each of the twelve cylinders.  it was quite a thrill to get intimate with the components of this car as we worked.   

in bringing this very rare 250 TR back to roadability, Steve found an original 1961 Ferrari Tipo 128 engine and restored it.  this is a true Ferrari racing engine from the period.  while it is not quite the same engine used at Le Mans in 1966, it is a very similar design, and when Supervising Sound Editor Don Sylvester auditioned it while on holiday back in Atlanta, he found it very exciting.

Sure enough, Don just won the Oscar for Sound Editing on this film… many of us in the Hollywood film sound design community could see this coming!

* i have more to add soon - but i have to get back to work!