It isn’t often that one car completely dominates the conversation at a major international auto show. And it isn’t often that one car so completely symbolizes a company’s return from the brink of ruin. But that exact confluence happened in January 2015 in Detroit, at the North American International Auto Show, the biggest car show of them all.
The unveiling of Ford’s new GT supercar was the culmination of a year of tantalizing rumors, which had begun to take shape in the fall of 2014 and then built momentum. The speculation went something like this: with 2016 right around the corner, the Ford Motor Company was seriously contemplating a return to what practically everyone in racing considers the automaker’s moment of purest glory on the track, Le Mans in ’66.
Everyone did the math: 2016 minus 1966 was fifty years. Ford had been through a lot in that half century. The company had always experienced ups and downs, of course. Although Henry Ford had pioneered the automobile, created the industrial production line, and even paid his workers a wage that enabled them to buy the cars that they were building, the company had been edged aside by General Motors before World War II. GM, the colossal model of the modern corporation, simply offered more choice.
Excerpted from Return to Glory: The Story of Ford’s Revival and Victory at the Toughest Race in the World by Matthew DeBord
But Ford had hardly been irrelevant in the years after that. It created beautiful sedans and produced what would become the best-selling vehicle in America for decades—the F-Series pickup truck. In the mid-1950s, the marvelous Thunderbird hit the road, defining in the process the sporty American coupe. In 1960, Ford introduced the Falcon, an innovative smaller car that stood in counterpoint to the massive cruisers of the Eisenhower era.
The Escort, introduced in 1980, proved that the automaker could build a decent small car. The mid-1980s brought the Taurus, whose rounded shape would stand in contrast to the boxy sedans of the period; more than 7 million units would be sold. Through the heyday of sport-utility vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s, Ford’s models sold well, starting with the Explorer, which has been in production since 1991. In the late 1990s, Ford’s Lincoln division invented the luxury SUV market with the Navigator. The Mustang—the quintessential “faster horse” Henry Ford, quite possibly apocryphally, said was what his customers would have said they wanted, had he asked them—was and still is an American icon.
And then there was racing. In this realm, Ford was less like an American car company than a European one. It proved its technology on the track and then put it in the cars it sold to the public.
The story of how Ford brought the GT40 to Le Mans in 1966 and went on to command the legendary endurance race is one of the most remarkable in the history of high-speed competition, not least for the business rivalry between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari, which wound up being played out on the French racecourse.
Since then the GT40 has been bound into Ford’s DNA, for better or worse. To a certain extent Ford had been haunted by the GT40’s success. You might even say cursed. Why, people wondered, has the storied American company never again been able to live up to that moment? With 2016 looming, the talk intensified: How could Ford not return to Le Mans for the fiftieth anniversary of the greatest victory of its greatest race car?
Destiny beckoned, it seemed, and by the late autumn of 2014 it was obvious Ford had something in the works. In the following January, at the Detroit auto show, the world saw what it was: a breathtaking conceptual expression of what a new GT would look like, in a street-legal version. It was a fearsome, futuristic carbon-fiber predator, painted a luminous blue, with an innovative six-cylinder engine mounted behind the driver. The overall design immediately put Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, and a host of other exotic supercar manufacturers on notice.
That six-cylinder engine had something else going for it: a pair of turbochargers enabling—and this was what ultimately caused the collective dropping of jaws in Motown—600 horsepower. Beauty was combined with power and set against a glorious racing backstory. As a stage setting, the GT introduction was masterly.
But the vehicle also completely changed the conversation in the auto industry. Prior to the show, all anyone had been talking about was the arrival of self-driving cars—the latest chapter in the melding of the automobile and technology. With the debut of the GT, speed was suddenly back in the picture, as was the prospect of actual human drivers—driving fast.
Like many impressive creations, the new GT wasn’t exactly born—it was coaxed to life, slowly and haltingly at first, and then with the accelerator pedal jammed to the floor.
In Dearborn, the GT started in a basement, with a mysterious sign, a key, and a team of designers who, once the cover had been pulled off their baby, were shocked that they’d been able to keep it secret, right up until the car was revealed in Detroit.
“For once, it’s true,” Moray Callum told me, with a guffaw, when I talked to him in early 2016, right after the new GT’s racing debut at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, a few months before the road car would be available for preorders.
Moray Callum doesn’t exactly look or act the part of a car designer.
His nature is cheerful, not intense or austere. He dresses unpretentiously, forgoing the sleek black suits, gigantic and costly wristwatches, and severe eyeglasses that most auto-industry observers associate with the more artsy employees of the business.
Secrecy was of the essence for the GT. It was, however, an off beat sort of secrecy, more garage band than arena rock, more skunkworks than high-profile industrial undertaking. If the massive River Rouge plant signified Henry Ford’s ambition and defined Ford during the automaker’s mid-century heyday—then the mysterious, low-key GT studio defined how Ford wanted to develop this most exciting of post financial-crisis cars.
“We kept it quiet, for obvious reasons,” Callum told me. “Very few people knew what was going on, and a lot of executives didn’t see the car until the day of the Detroit show.”
For all practical purposes, Ford designed one of its most striking, exotic, historic, and widely anticipated (not to mention rapturously received) cars in the automotive equivalent of a broom closet.
“We formed a very small team, and we literally put them in the basement of our Product Development Center, all the way in the back, where nobody ever goes,” Callum said.
“It had been used for milling and storage,” he said, before confessing that he and his small team of designers had engaged in a “little bit of subterfuge” to keep the GT under wraps and away from prying eyes as it was perfected.
The ruse went all the way to top, where CEO Mark Fields himself enjoyed all the spy-movie secrecy.
Then there was the sign.
“We put a printed sign on a piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper, and it said something mundane like ‘Past Model Parts Depot,’” Fields said. “And then we challenged the team to come up with a successor.”
Beyond the sign and the need-to-know-basis security, the design process also included waiting until Sundays to wheel the car out from the basement so it could be studied under natural light. According to Christopher Svensson, Ford’s design director for the Americas, design reviews were started at seven o’clock in the evening and went on until eleven.
And then there was the key.
Callum seemed to think this small detail was the most hilarious aspect of the entire double top-secret design process for the GT. “It was physically a metal key,” he said, chuckling, clearly amused that a vehicle as high-tech as the GT—it’s made almost entirely of carbon fiber, and the fabrication techniques that went into building it allowed for some fairly outlandish curves and shapes—would be guarded by what was the state of the art for security in 1930.
In Dearborn, there was a buzzing sense that Callum and his guys were up to something. And the team stoked the impression that it had something under wraps—quite literally. Callum recounted a holiday party at which various Ford designers created snowmen to show off their design chops.
“Ours was in the corner,” he recalled. “It was covered by a sheet, and it had a padlock on it.”
That was a clear signal that Callum’s team probably wasn’t creating a new Explorer. There was a fresh and exciting car on the horizon, and figuring out what it would be was left to the deductive faculties of Ford employees. A little math, of course, and an ear to the grapevine, a finger on the thrum of the rumor mill, would have led to reasonable guesses about a Le Mans car.
What savvy scrutinizers of Callum’s secret design workshop couldn’t know was that the GT was being developed simultaneously as a road car and a race car. (In an interesting modern-day twist, among the few people in the know was a small group of Microsoft Xbox video-game designers, who were working to include the GT in the Forza Motorsport 6 update, which came out in 2016.)
Once design began in earnest, the requirement of making the 2016 deadline for Le Mans entry drove everything. Callum had just over a year to create something breathtaking. Three months in, Callum and the GT team had solidified the basic design theme. The new GT had to be stunning, but it also had to evoke the GT40—without repeating the look of the mid-2000s GT—and it had to be an effective race car. “The racing rules helped us,” he said. “What the racing guys wanted was what we wanted.”
That included even the most exotic aspects of the GT: signature “flying buttress” wings that curved down from the rear roofline to the back wheels; Callum called these wings a “natural choice.”
Team member Garen Nicoghosian, who oversaw the exterior design of the car, essentially envisioned the GT as a combination of machine and sculpture, whose first job was to interact dynamically with the atmosphere. He described the body of the car to Hot Rod Network as a “collection of items that collect air, avoid air, or make better use of air.” Even the doughnut-shaped taillights are designed to vent air as it rushes over, around, and through the GT.
The fate of the entire company wasn’t riding on the car, as it might have been with the new F-150, but the GT was a symbol to end all symbols: of Ford’s determination, of its legacy, and of its revival.
“It was all about challenging traditions,” Fields told me. “The traditional approach would have been to put a big-ass V-8 in there, or let’s do another V-12 and stuff it in. But [the team] came back and said that they could use a 3.5-liter EcoBoost engine that produces over 600 horsepower. And what that did for Moray and the team was that it gave the designers huge degrees of freedom, because the engine is so compact.”
So the deliberate engineering choices led to a gorgeous yet functional design that few found anything to complain about. The car looked fantastic from every angle, with a front end that alluded to the legacy of past GT cars without being in their thrall. The lines then swept back to a compressed rear end, but with the wheels pushed out, providing an opening for Callum and his team to use the flying buttress, effectively an integrated wing. For over fifty years, cars have been trying to look like planes. The GT genuinely appeared as if it might be able to take flight.
But the car was specifically designed to do the opposite. Both the race car and the road car would need to use inverted lift—downforce—provided by the aerodynamics to stay stuck to the road or to the racecourse.
In automotive parlance, this is known as being “planted.” The impression that you get when driving a car like this, with these technologies included in the design and engineering, is that the machine is controllable enough to push to the edge of being uncontrollable.
That line of demarcation is what separates a performance car from one that’s meant mainly to cruise around normally. Even a spirited sports sedan, such as the BMW 5 Series, will start to lurch and yaw and slip if you lay it into a corner too hard. This is the car’s way of telling you it’s had too much, and you need to dial it back, for safety’s sake.
The GT forestalls that reckoning until the last possible moment. You’ll never feel as if a supercar wants to roll over—because it doesn’t. The worst possible driving outcome is that the rear tires lose grip and the car slides, a phenomenon known as “oversteer”— and one that enthusiasts and professional drivers favor.
The driver can accommodate for oversteer by steering in the opposite direction and allowing the car to drift through a corner, ever so slightly. The goal isn’t to raise a glorious plume of tire smoke and drive the car sideways, as Jeremy Clarkson and his mates used to do on the hit BBC show Top Gear; that would cause the car’s speed to decline precipitously. Rather, the idea is to give the driver some play, so that the car can handle more fluidly, thanks to the combination of tire oversteer and driver counter-steering to compensate for it. The car feels alive. Many pro drivers prefer this to the jarring lack of movement they can experience in all wheel-drive race cars that don’t approach unstable dynamics unless they’re driven on unpaved surfaces, as in off-road rally races.
If a driver gets the counter-steering technique wrong, the masses of horsepower being channeled to the wheels from the engine will cause the car to over-rotate and spin. But the GT’s mid-engine design helps to mitigate that possibility by placing the center of gravity at the center of the car, rather than parked out over the front wheels, as in a Corvette, or over the rear wheels, as in a Porsche 911. All other things being equal, a powerful mid-engine race car with rear-wheel-drive and a responsive transmission will outdrive everything else on a track.
When Ford first unveiled the GT in Detroit in January 2015, it didn’t say anything about the cost or how many road cars it would be making. These details it revealed at the Chicago Auto Show in February: the new GT was going to cost in the mid-$400,000s, and Ford would be making 500 of them, 250 a year for two years.
And the company would be scrupulous about who got to enjoy the unique pleasure of parting with all that money to buy one. In April 2016, Ford announced that it would be accepting applications for GT ownership over the following month, via a special website that featured a “configurator,” which enabled prospective buyers to spec out their cars, choosing exterior colors, interior setups, wheels, and even the color of racing stripes.
It was a savvy idea. When the application period closed on May 12, Ford had received 6,506 fully completed applications to purchase the superhot supercar, and almost 200,000 people had used the configurator. Hundreds of potential buyers submitted videos with their applications, and many stressed their social-media reach in addition to showing how they’d use the car—whether to drive around town, like eGarage, whose video showed a GT being used to run errands with a baby in the passenger seat; take it on the track, like Brooks Weisblat, owner of DragTimes.com; or make it part of a large collection, like John Kiely and his father, Jack Kiely, who run a construction business in Long Branch, New Jersey.
It was generally assumed the fix was in for certain VIPs to jump to the head of the buying list. But Henry Ford III, the great-greatgrandson of Henry Ford himself and the marketing director for Ford’s Performance division, told me that the company was starting with as level a playing field as possible for future GT ownership.
Prospective buyers had to fill out an extensive questionnaire as part of their application, answering questions about whether they were collectors, or owners of a current Ford GT or any Ford, whether they did business with the automaker or were involved in Ford-affiliated charities, and whether they considered themselves as “an influencer of public opinion.” From the application, which inquired whether the prospective buyer held a motorsports sanctioning-body competition license, it seemed clear that Ford wanted people who didn’t just drive the car but used all its abilities. Additionally, buyers had to agree not to sell their car for a quick profit.
Matthew DeBord
Henry III stressed that initial consideration for sales would be given to existing Ford GT owners (about 10,000 cars of the previous version had been produced), as well as well-known owners of Ford’s other high-performance cars. None of this was unreasonable. It’s standard procedure among the world’s supercar manufacturers. Most of the people offered the opportunity to buy Ferrari supercars are existing Ferrari owners—and this is likewise the case for the more exotic versions of Porsches and Lamborghinis.
Nobody at Ford had any doubts that the GT supercar would be a runaway success. Drastically limiting production and setting the purchase price in the mid-$400,000 range would ensure that. The original GT40s had inspired a thriving replica market, with various period-appropriate V-8s dropped into the familiar chassis. The follow-up for the mid-2000s, which had sold for a mere $150,000, had achieved a cultish status. Sure, you could own a couple of Ferraris and a Lamborghini, maybe even something more exotic, like a Koenigsegg, Pagani, or Bugatti, but only a GT screamed “race car.” It wasn’t the car for millionaire wannabes. It was, and still is, the car for motoring enthusiasts with a deep sense of history. Henry Ford III wasn’t breaking a sweat about whether there would be 500 applications for Ford GT ownership. He was probably worried that there would be 500,000.
Excerpted from RETURN TO GLORY: THE STORY OF FORD’S REVIVAL AND VICTORY AT THE TOUGHEST RACE IN THE WORLD © 2017 by Matthew DeBord. Reprinted with the permission of Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
