At this time, there's an opportunity lost in Hollywood's latest blockbuster Ford v Ferrari to at least credit a little-known Brit for creating the star car which made the story real.

For without Eric Broadley there would have been no Ford GT40 sports racing car, no Le Mans endurance motor race challenge to Ferrari, no premise for the film, and Christian Bale will forever be remembered as somewhat awkward Batman.

The facts which the screen writers deftly steer around in Ford v Ferrari, most probably to pander to US cinema audiences, is the fact that the GT40 was not really a Ford at all.

It was a British car, a Lola.

And it wasn't designed by Carroll Shelby (as much as the late Texan had a reputation as a likeable and well-respected feller).

Eric Broadley, the GT40's designer, was the founder, the chairman, the chief executive and the chief designer of Lola Cars.

Although trained as an architect, much like Christian Bale's character Ken Miles, Broadley was an enthusiastic amateur racer who just loved to tinker with cars. And he was exceptionally good at it.

His first hand-built race car, using cobbled-together parts from here and there and a Ford engine, was so successful that he had people clamouring to build more just like it.

His next car was even faster and "hairier", so much so that Broadley wasn't confident enough to find its limits. Others quickly did however, and a very successful race car construction company, Lola Cars, emerged, soaking up all of Broadley's modest savings.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was the Europeans - including clever Brits like Broadley - who were streets ahead of anything racing on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the UK, men like Australia's Sir Jack Brabham (and his co-conspirator Ron Tauranac), design genius Colin Chapman and engine builder Charles Cooper were at the cutting edge of British motor racing.

Long before wind tunnels, Broadley would go home from work at night, sketch the car he believed would work, and shape a clay model from it.

There's a scene in the movie (and it's in the trailer, too) in which Matt Damon's character, Carroll Shelby, presents to Ken Miles, played wonderfully by Christian Bale, the proposition of Ford taking on the hugely successful Ferrari at the world's most prestigious sports car race at Le Mans, in France.

Miles, tragically killed testing a race car, was a very talented, experienced racer and car builder; he knew what it took to win at the highest level.

When Miles asks how long Ford had given them to build the car, Shelby replies, most succinctly, "90 days".

Conveniently glossed over by Hollywood was that the car and its race program already existed.

The British Lola team had rushed its Ford V8-powered sports car, the Mark 6 GT, into the 1963 Le Mans 24-hour race. Preparations were so hurried that the team's second car didn't arrive in time to race.

Nonetheless, the sole Lola entry showed good pace until it crashed on lap 151.

Shelby, Miles and Ford knew they couldn't build a competitive race car from scratch. So they borrowed a good one and made it their own.

Broadley was brought on, in a 12-month contract, to work with Ford's engineers. With nearly an open cheque book from the Detroit company, his Lola sports car was re-branded and Shelby, together with Ford's engineers, then "went to war" against Ferrari, as the Henry Ford II tells Shelby in the film.

In reality, success took several years. Ford had a big-money crack at the 1964 French endurance race race but one car caught on fire while the other broke its gearbox.

However, the steep learning curve for Ford, a company with little or no knowledge of sports car racing, paid off in 1966, as the film reveals. And it was Ford's decision to switch to a big, loafing 7-litre V8 engine which gave the GT40 Mark II its power and reliability.