Alan Mann began his motorsport career running Ford Zephyrs and Anglias in British saloon car races in 1962 under the entrant name Andrews Garage. By 1963, he had moved into a more formal operation — Alan Andrews Racing — preparing a Ford Cortina GT for Henry Taylor in both racing and rallying. That year, Mann entered a Cortina in the Marlboro 12-hour race in the United States, where Taylor and co-driver Jimmy Blumer finished second overall. The performance attracted the attention of John Holman of Holman and Moody, Ford's leading racing team in the US, and brought Alan Mann Racing to the attention of Ford's factory motorsport programme.
For the 1964 season, Alan Mann Racing was formally constituted as a Ford factory team. The scope of the programme was remarkable in its range: the team competed in events as varied as the Monte Carlo Rally, the Tour de France Automobile, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
In 1964, the team's Ford Mustang driven by Peter Procter and Andrew Cowan won the Touring Division of the Tour de France Automobile. The following year, Mann's team contributed to Shelby's victory in the Over 2000cc division of the International Championship for GT Manufacturers, with Cobra entries shared across several entrants including Alan Mann Racing. In 1965, Sir John Whitmore took the European Touring Car Challenge in an Alan Mann Racing-entered Ford Cortina Lotus.
For Ford's landmark effort to win Le Mans outright in 1966, Alan Mann Racing took on a significant engineering role: the team developed a lightweight version of the GT40, featuring an alloy body and other modifications to reduce mass. Five such cars were ordered but only two were completed before Ford abandoned the project in favour of the heavier but more powerful MKII GT40. Mann entered two 7-litre MKII cars at Le Mans that year; one led in the early stages before both retired.
The team continued to field cars across multiple disciplines through 1967 and 1968. Frank Gardner won back-to-back British Saloon Car Championships with Alan Mann Racing — in 1967 driving a Ford Falcon Sprint, and in 1968 in a Ford Cortina Lotus and Ford Escort Twin Cam. Through the team's history, some of the most celebrated drivers of the era raced under its banner, among them Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, Sir John Whitmore, and Frank Gardner.
Among the most unusual chapters in the team's history was its involvement in film and television production. Alan Mann Racing built the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang vehicles for the 1968 film of the same name. The company also contributed work to the James Bond film Goldfinger and to pre-production for Steve McQueen's racing films, including the aborted Day of the Champion and Le Mans.
In 1969, the team built three futuristic-looking cars for director Gerry Anderson, based on Ford Zephyr mechanicals with aluminium gullwing-door bodyshells, for the film Doppelgänger. These vehicles were later repainted and reused in Anderson's UFO television series (1970). The cars were infamously unreliable and underfinished; one was later owned by DJ Dave Lee Travis.
The Ford F3L sports-racing prototype was also designed and raced by Alan Mann Racing, representing the team's ambitions in long-distance endurance competition beyond the standard production-based categories.
Alan Mann Racing ceased active competition in 1969. In 2004, Alan Mann resurrected the team for historic motorsport, entering events including the Silverstone Classic, the Goodwood Festival of Speed, and the Goodwood Revival. The team became a regular presence on the Masters Historic Racing Pre-1966 Touring Cars series, running the original red and gold Fords that had made the name famous four decades earlier.
The team's significance lay both in its competition record and its role as the bridge between Ford's American racing machine and the European circuits. Through the 1960s, no other team better represented the ambition of Ford's total performance philosophy on the world stage.