Yes it was mostly true.
Source: I attended a ford GT symposium last year at Fred Phillips collection where he had special guests including Safir Engineering.
They talked and spilled stories. So good.
The 217-218 on the back straight was true too.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age."
-H.P. Lovecraft