Chapter 3

Behold the New GT

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.

Mark Fields had always wanted to build a true successor to the GT40, a completely new car, not an homage like the GTs of 2004 to 2006. As much as the fiftieth anniversary of the Le Mans win presented the perfect opportunity, Ford’s recovery from the financial crisis made the timing difficult.

For Ford, going back to Le Mans with a Mustang would have been a lot easier. Scott Atherton, the president of the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA)—sports-car racing’s governing body in North America—told me the Le Mans comeback was originally supposed to be Mustang-based. Raj Nair, Ford’s chief technical officer and the final decision-maker for the GT racing and road-car program, said the same thing. That would have made sense. There are Mustangs that can be upgraded to endurance-race worthiness, with a setup similar to what Corvette Racing had run in the IMSA series and had used to win Le Mans: a big V-8 up front, rear-wheel drive out back, and a downforce wing rising from the trunk lid.

There also wouldn’t have been issues with satisfying the requirements of both IMSA and the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (or FIA, the overseer of European motorsports), which stipulate that cars in the GT racing classes have road-going counterparts. (The reason for this is that endurance race cars are supposed to be test beds for technologies that ordinary consumers will someday experience.) Ford had been building Mustangs since 1965. The car was already an established racing platform, although Ford didn’t have a racing team that enjoyed the full support, funding, and sponsorship of the entire Ford Performance organization—what’s known in racing as a factory team. That could have been corrected easily; there was no shortage of available high-performance Mustang packages. Raj Nair told me much later that there had indeed been discussion about returning to Le Mans in 2015 with a Mustang to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the iconic “pony car.” But for Ford, a Le Mans Mustang would have been a huge missed chance.

At the highest executive level, Ford decided in late 2014 to scrap the Mustang idea and take the plunge with a brand-new supercar. It would be the centerpiece of an entire division of the automaker, showcasing the fastest, the most exciting, and the most exotic: Ford Performance.

And yet it made sense to worry about the GT’s Le Mans chances just a bit, given that the Ferrari 488, with 606 horsepower, had an extra dollop of grunt. Its predecessor, the 458, was also one of the premier sports cars on earth—and a familiar racing weapon, running in both IMSA and FIA World Endurance Championship events for years. It was a reminder that although Ford had ­NASCAR and was no stranger to racing, Ferrari had already staked out territory that the new GT would be attempting to storm.

I had driven the road version of the 488, and also several versions of the Chevrolet Corvette, including the pride of the Bowling Green, Kentucky, factory, the Z06—Chevy’s own front-engine ­supercar—and the C7 Stingray, the seventh generation of the iconic Vette. The Z06 has a 650-horsepower motor and is one of the most mentally demanding cars I’ve ever driven. It has so much power, available anytime you want it, that it’s hard to take it easy, even when you’re just cruising around. The Stingray, on the other hand, was simply magnificent, with a 455-horsepower V-8 that sounds like eight angry angels with a jones for speed.

The C7.R sat in between and was given the bespoke race-car treatment by Pratt & Miller, a Michigan-based shop that has been hooked up with Chevy for almost a decade. Pratt & Miller had constructed a 491-horsepower machine that had been getting it done on the track since 2013. The C7.R was also the defending Le Mans champ from 2015. Together, Pratt & Miller and Chevy had won Le Mans eight times.

It’s fair to say that because of its record, General Motors saw Ford as something of an arriviste in its return to Le Mans. But as good as the Vettes had been, it was also clear that in 2016, a change was afoot in sports-car racing, shifting the balance of power back toward mid-engine cars in the old GT40 legacy and away from front-engine and rear-engine designs. In fact, it was strongly rumored that Chevy was going to create a mid-engine Corvette, and I have to believe that the project was driven in part by what Ford had done with the GT.

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.

Callum, who is Scottish, heads up Ford design. He’s from a car-design family. His older brother, Ian, dictates the look of Jaguars and staged his own triumph in late 2015, with the debut of Jag’s first-ever SUV, the gorgeous F-PACE.

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. He originally wanted to be a veterinarian, before a season working on a farm convinced him to pursue another calling. First he tried architecture and then he found car design.

Callum landed at Ford in 1995, after stints with Chrysler and the French automaker Peugeot. He worked for J Mays, a car designer’s car designer. Mays had crafted the revived Beetle for Volkswagen, oversaw the rehabilitation of Audi, and conceived a retro-modern Thunderbird for Ford. In 2001 Callum took over design for Mazda (Ford and Mazda had a partnership from 1979 until the financial crisis forced a split in 2010), where one of his first responsibilities was a revamp of the beloved MX-5 Miata roadster. He has, to say the least, been around the design block a few times, and for a kid who initially wanted to heal animals and then create buildings, it’s been a tremendous ride. Talking to him, you can tell he’s relished every minute of the job. Nearly sixty by the time the Le Mans fiftieth anniversary rolled around, he would get to see a design he dreamed up make a run for renewed glory on a course that has mythical meaning for the Ford Motor Company.

That he was chuckling about how the GT was created, rather than shedding tears, was a testament to his own lineage.

“The Scottish are a nation of engineers,” Ian Callum told the New York Times in 2006. “But they are very creative engineers. They seem dour, but underneath they are quite romantic.”

Romance is all well and good, but secrecy was of the essence for the GT. It was, however, an offbeat 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 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.

The key was later replaced by security cards, but the birthplace of the GT wasn’t similarly upgraded.

Ford released a video of the studio in 2015. Anyone expecting a tour of a state-of-the-art facility, full of chic people sipping lattes and muttering about aesthetics while debating curves and scoops, would have been greatly disappointed. The top-secret GT studio was, for one thing, crowded. There wasn’t much room for the camera to navigate the gloomy, grungy space, and Callum and his design team were packed in with foam mock-ups, clay models, rolling bulletin boards covered with conceptual renderings and engineering studies, various bits and pieces that would go into the finished car, and the obligatory computer equipment to envision and execute the GT.

It looked far more like a garage set up for hot-rodding on a semipro scale than a state-of-the art design mecca, a Motown equivalent of Ford’s lovely and well-equipped facility in southern California.

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.)

Multimatic Motorsports, Ford Performance’s race-car builder, would bolt together two machines north of the U.S.–Canadian border, near Toronto, a few hours from Detroit by car, and two others in England, for the European side of the Le Mans campaign. The demands of constructing a race car are significantly different from those of creating a road car. For example, a race car needs to be easy to take apart, so that it can be repaired as quickly as possible, and in some cases race cars have less-sophisticated components than their road-car counterparts, depending on the regulations of the governing body of the series they compete in.

Multimatic had expertise with carbon-fiber fabrication, a vital aspect of modern race-car and supercar production. Light but strong, carbon fiber is an ideal material to use for constructing racing vehicles. It’s essentially threads of carbon glued together in tidy fashion with a polymer, then treated to create a reinforced plastic material that can be shaped into just about anything, from a smartphone case to a supercar body panel. Multimatic had gotten skilled at carbon-fiber fabrication from building high-performance race cars, most of which are now made of the stuff. The advantages of carbon fiber are numerous: it’s ten times stronger than aluminum and eight times stronger than steel, can be sculpted into a variety of shapes, resists heat and corrosion very effectively, and doesn’t fatigue as easily as other materials, thanks to its flexibility. For years, automakers have tried to figure out how to use it in more mainstream vehicles, but carbon fiber, at around twelve dollars a pound, is also extremely expensive; aluminum is only about two dollars per pound, and steel is less than a dollar. For that reason, high-end road cars often use aluminum, while mass-market vehicles are made with good old-fashioned steel.

Only 500 GTs for the road and four for the track would initially be built, with two racing in North America and two in Europe. The car would be exceptionally rare, and that low production number, along with the steep price tag, signaled that although Ford was creating the race cars and road cars at the same time, the GT was first and foremost a competitive machine, committed to race in both the United States and Europe until 2019. Every other vehicle that it would race against in 2016 would be built (in some cases had been built) in far greater numbers for the road and would not be so strictly limited in terms of total production.

Interestingly, although the new GT was created under these unusual conditions, it wasn’t a tense or difficult process. Under the circumstances, this was remarkable.

“It was less of a challenge,” Callum said, “than designing, say, the next-generation Fiesta”—that small Ford vehicle I had checked out in Irvine several years before. An inexpensive mass-market car like that has to be designed and built to a price point, engineered for the production of hundreds of thousands of units in many different countries. When designing such a vehicle, you’re always deciding what not to do.

The GT was different. “We tried to stretch the limits as much as possible,” Callum said.

He got the nod to design the supercar about eighteen months before its scheduled debut at the Detroit show in January 2015. “It was a great privilege,” Callum said, but he quickly added that he didn’t sweat the process of assembling the team, nor did he cherry-pick a band of specialists to gather a GT Special Forces unit. “We had people fresh out of design school, and we had people with a lot of experience. What we were seeking was some naïveté. And in the end it was the most collaborative project of my career.”

Such a laid-back approach didn’t diminish the daunting task ahead. “The original Le Mans–winning GT is one car that we look back on and say, ‘We got everything right,’” he said.

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. But the work went fast. The ideas were in place, the grand theories had been cultivated in advance, and so it all came down to execution. That was all it took to create a machine that would dazzle at an epic level.

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.”

“It came in early,” he recalled. So did the overall aerodynamic layout of the car.

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 familiar concept of the sports car as work of art was, in this case, derived directly from history. Callum noted that the original GT40, although it has been characterized as more of a blunt, industrial instrument than the Ferraris it trounced in the 1960s, was sculptural.

The Le Mans–winning 1960s cars were a combination of smoothly crafted front ends and harshly rectangular rears, low and wide. Even today, they cut a striking image, one of brute power wrapped in a taut skin: the muscles are slablike, the sinews tight.

The GT40 of the 1960s was considered gorgeous by some but an American brute by others. Today, given its size and scale, it doesn’t look especially crude. But whatever beauty it might have possessed in rough form in 1965 and ’66 was far surpassed by the Italians and their aesthetic flair later in that decade and the one to follow. Ironically, even though Ford ended Ferrari’s reign at Le Mans, it was Ford that retreated from the supercar era. There wouldn’t be another GT until the early 2000s, and it was more replica than aesthetic advance, although it did beat the performance of the GT40’s titanic 7.0-liter V-8 engine with a more modern and compact 5.4-liter supercharged V-8. Otherwise, however, it lacked the old GT40’s raw threat. The infamous British car journalist and erstwhile Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson called it “civilized.”

No one would have said that about the GT40. Chris Amon, the man who drove the winning 1966 Le Mans GT40 with Bruce McLaren, reminisced in 2016 about how the car nearly beat him to death. After a driving stint, he would immediately shed his sweat-soaked racing suit and have a shower.

The bottom line was that the GT40 was built to race, and to win Le Mans, and everything about it flowed from that purpose. Style and comfort were completely secondary. The follow-up GT was, in many respects, an homage to the original car, with modern creature comforts thrown in.

Callum called the new GT “a synergy of design theory and engineering,” defusing one of the oldest disagreements in automotive history: that between designers coming up with outlandish creations and the guys who actually build the cars telling them that they need to dial it back.

Not much was dialed back on the GT. Even the engine was a no-compromise undertaking—although it isn’t the screaming V-8 of a Ferrari 458, or the burbling, potent V-12 of a Lamborghini Aventador.

Instead, the new GT, stunning on the outside, is under the hood an advertisement for Ford’s shift to turbocharged power plants. The beauty of a turbo engine, especially in a race car, is that it adds less weight overall than a supercharger, which requires the engine, rather than exhaust gases, to drive the increase in air pressure.

The drawback is heat: turbos get hot—extremely hot. So the air has to be cooled, as does the turbocharger itself. The trick with turbos on the racetrack is to make sure that they’re durable enough to withstand, in the case of endurance racing, hours and hours of intense heat. In the GT, there are two turbochargers assisting the V-6 in cranking out 600 horsepower.

There are far more powerful supercars—they fall into an ele­vated class now referred to as “hypercar,” or even “megacar,” and can notch horsepower ratings of 1,000 and above—but the GT was designed, from the beginning, to race in the GT Le Mans class, not against those monster machines in the prototype class. In fact, of the cars in the GTE Pro class (GTLM in North America) for the 2016 season, only the Ferrari 488, itself featuring a turbocharged eight-cylinder mid-engine configuration, could be called a purpose-built race car, since all Ferraris have racing in their DNA. The rest of the field was made up of sports cars adapted for racing. That’s not a knock on those designs—the Corvettes in the GTE Pro class performed fantastically well in sports-car racing against the Ferrari 488’s predecessor, the 458. But like the GTs of the 1960s, the new cars were created with the track in mind. Not many people would get to keep one in the garage. By contrast, Ferrari sells some 7,000 cars a year (although most are not the mid-engine supercars).

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. (The car was so successful that Ford extended production for an additional two years, making the announcement in mid-August. Year three would address the waiting list from the initial application process, while year four would allow for reapplications. The entire process would also enable Ford to keep racing for three years after the debut.)

“We’re excited by the amount of enthusiasm fans are showing for the new Ford GT,” said Dave Pericak in a press release. And the fans were showing plenty of enthusiasm. 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-great-grandson 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.

Henry Ford III is the embodiment of trustworthiness. He has a bright, uncomplicated, Midwestern look—before he joined the family business, he spent some time as a teacher, and you can tell he was probably well liked by his students. His blond hair isn’t worn in a fancy cut, and I’ve never seen him wearing anything more fashionable than a polo shirt and a pair of slacks. He’s tall, but he doesn’t lord it over anybody, and when he talks, you can tell he’s smart—and also sharp enough to use straightforward English, never veering into business-speak.

But Henry III, like all Fords, does possess some formidable diplomatic skills. He 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. There are exceptions: The Audi R8 is produced in decent enough numbers that just about anyone can buy into being Tony Stark, the billionaire playboy superhero played by Robert Downey Jr. in the Iron Man franchise. And certain bargain supercars, like the Corvette Z06 and the Nissan GT-R (affectionately labeled “Godzilla” by enthusiasts), turn heads owing to their reputations and looks, not because spotting one on the freeway is a rare event.

Henry III was certainly proud of the new GT. “It sends a chill up my spine,” he said, when I asked him about going back to Le Mans. But he also expressed awe at what Callum and his team, as well as the Ford Performance engineering group, had pulled off with the GT.

“It really has been the highlight of my career to work side by side with the designers and engineers,” he said. “They created a masterpiece. Every time I see the car, I take a step back.”

Effectively, however, not one but two masterpieces were created at the same time. And they were not tortured productions. There were no glitches or setbacks for Callum and his design team, although, because the new GT would be both a race car and road car, some compromises would be required, mainly for the road-going GT. (The racer would be stripped down and highly customized, with few creature comforts.) The up-swinging scissor doors required that the air-conditioning and heating vents be positioned in an unusual way, but as Amko Leenarts, Ford’s Netherlands-born interior design director, explained to me, it wasn’t especially difficult to develop the cockpit for the two-seater. He echoed Callum’s comment that with something as focused as a supercar, much of the design takes care of itself, owing to the obvious spatial constraints that the designers are presented with. Additionally, there’s an assumption that a $400,000-plus car will contain lots of premium materials, but no potential customer expects a Rolls-Royce when he or she slips inside.

One of the few surprises in store for eventual GT owners was what Multimatic vice president Larry Holt—an elusive man with a wild mane of curly gray hair, who was handling the simultaneous engineering of the GT road and race cars—called its “cozy” driver and passenger compartment, in a January 2016 interview with Car magazine. Anyone who has ever been in a Corvette Stingray, a Lamborghini Huracán, a Ferrari supercar, or even a Mazda Miata will tell you that a two-seater isn’t about creature comforts. But with the Ford GT, there was an additional wrinkle: although Callum and his designers had been able to go for the dramatic with the exterior, the interior’s scale would have to be more purposeful. The ultimate mission of the car, in the end, was to accommodate one driver and to go fast. So Multimatic and Ford Performance used what Holt told Car was the smallest interior on the market in 2014, in the United States or Europe, as their benchmark: the ultra-snug Lotus Elise, a roadster that’s twelve and a half feet long and weighs less than 2,000 pounds.

A Le Mans car has to be designed in a way that makes it easy to take apart and easy to put back together. All the aerodynamic elements need to be swappable, as does the gearbox. Brakes must be able to be changed in a matter of minutes (typically, the pads—the parts that fit inside calipers to squeeze down on alloy disks to slow the car from 200-plus miles per hour to 50—might be changed once or twice over twenty-four hours). Engine failure is much harder to manage—it can be done, although it’s generally fatal for winning. A blown engine usually means retiring the car.

A supercar for normal public motorways and freeways isn’t executed in the same way. As Raj Nair noted in a Ford video during the Le Mans lead-up, you built a race car from the tires up, starting with the point in contact with the track surface. “What do the tires want?” Nair asked.

A consumer supercar, Nair said, is designed around what the owners expect, and even though supercars used to be uncomfortable, those days are long gone. I’ve driven numerous supercars, and all the modern ones have modes that enable you to drive your Audi R8 or McLaren 675LT as if it were a Honda Accord. You can flip a switch and unleash the beast, but anyone who drops between $200,000 and upwards of a million and change on a supercar doesn’t want to be squashed into a stiff racing seat, thinly upholstered with fine leather but entirely lacking in padding. He or she also doesn’t want to be made to scrimp on infotainment. There should be more than two speakers and an AM/FM radio—much, much more. GPS navigation is a given. That supercars are sometimes called “GTs” is a bit of a misnomer, because a proper GT—a gran turismo or “grand touring” car—has a backseat and the engine in the front. The buyers of mid-engine supercars used to be OK with tremendous discomfort. Now they want nothing more extreme on the inside than what they’re used to in a daily driven BMW or Acura sports sedan.

Ford was lucky that the GT ended up being an unexpected breeze to design, engineer, and build, because the timetable, if the race car was going to be ready for a January debut in the United States, at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, was brutal. It would be OK if the supercar lagged the race car by a few months, as long as Ford could start auditioning buyers during the year. Multimatic could create some of the 250 model-year 2017 production vehicles that sold in 2016, rolling out into the light of day an actual operational, roadworthy GT, fully tested for safety and blessed by the governments of the United States and Europe.

But the race cars had to be ready for their first track tests in Canada by late spring 2015 and then for testing by late summer in the United States. Multimatic and Ford Performance nailed those milestones, which culminated in a full-day visit to Road Atlanta in Georgia on August 4. The GT was impressive.

“The first time we ran it was last spring,” Multimatic test driver Scott Maxwell told auto journalist Gordon Kirby. “I’ve tested a lot of out-of-the-box cars and I was the first guy to drive the car. You always know pretty quickly, just through experience, whether it’s going to be a dog or not. We weren’t near the limit. We were just shaking it down but my gut told me that this was going to be a good car. It just felt right.” 

September would see the GTs flown to France, where FIA would check them out and determine whether any performance adjustments would be required to bring the cars in line with the other competitors in the GTE Pro class for the World Endurance Championship, of which Le Mans is the most prominent part. But it wouldn’t be the GTs’ first visit to France; tire maker Michelin explored the machine in June in order to get started developing the rubber that would quite literally meet the road at legendary racing venues on two continents.

The September FIA tests in France were the first indication that the GT Multimatic had built was extremely fast. Too fast, as it turned out, to enter the GTE Pro class without some tweaks. The racing authorities had two main ways to dial back the velocity of the swift new Fords. The first was fairly blunt: add weight. The GTs would come back to Europe forty-four pounds heavier, with lead-bar ballast weights bolted to the car by Ford and Chip Ganassi Racing and positioned in a way that wouldn’t damage the cars’ handling by unequally distributing the extra heft. The second was more specific to the turbocharged EcoBoost engine. Ford and Multimatic were instructed to reduce the car’s boost, making it less powerful than what had been specified for IMSA competition in North America. Boost is the amount of additional air pressure the turbochargers are creating, which translates into extra engine power. By dialing it up or down, engineers can make their race car go faster or slower, which enables them to meet the performance standards for their racing class.

The subtext in Europe for Ford and Multimatic, and eventually Ford Chip Ganassi Racing, was that, as Holt told Car magazine, FIA didn’t want a brand-new entrant to come “out of the box too hard.” As a racing pro with plenty of experience, he understood that if the GTs performed poorly in Europe when the WEC season started in April 2016, they could get back some boost, lose some weight, or enjoy a combination of both.

The GT program was hitting its benchmarks, but it wasn’t business as usual at Multimatic. A small contingent of engineers embedded with Ford would grow to dozens, working around the world. That was an advantage: the time differences enabled Multimatic to operate on a twenty-four-hour schedule, passing off responsibilities as the sun moved around the globe and the calendar closed in on the beginning of the IMSA and WEC seasons and marched inexorably toward Le Mans in June.

“This is a technological statement, taking on the best tech in the world,” Larry Holt said at the time, making Ford’s and Multimatic’s objectives clear. Raj Nair echoed Holt’s determination, insisting that GT had to be good as soon as it hit the track for the first time, because if it wasn’t, it would be hard to make it good, much less great.

The first GT race cars to break cover and run outside didn’t yet have their snazzy red-white-and-blue racing livery; they were a gloomy matte gray, almost charcoal. But the innovative shape was undeniable. And the car worked right away. It worked so well, in fact, that both the Ford and the Multimatic teams got nervous. It shouldn’t have been that easy.

Ford had pushed its luck and knew it, but there had been no major issues. The company hadn’t really built a true supercar before, although it had come close in 1995, with the GT90 concept car, a futuristic successor to the GT40 that, for a brief period, stoked some hopes about a Le Mans return. It never entered production, however. And while the EcoBoost engine had been raced by Ganassi in prototype-class cars, it had never been tested in sports-car competition, where the cars are heavier and handle differently, moving better through corners than the blistering-fast prototypes. But Le Mans in 2016 exerted an inexorable pull—it was the Gallic gravity well of deep history for Ford, epic and poetic in equal parts—and shaped Ford’s priorities. The schedule was merciless, the pressure extreme, the demands immense, the opportunity for disaster and disappointment ever present. 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.

On the marketing side, Ford was committed to using the new GT as a showcase for the technologies that it has developed. For Fields, a marketing guy at heart, it was a can’t-miss opportunity to sell EcoBoost not just as a good fuel-economy option but also as one of the best engines in the world. It could deliver good mileage in a pickup truck, it could pep up a small car—and it could win the most grueling race in the world.

“It was all about challenging traditions,” Fields told me, when I spoke to him at Le Mans in June. “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.

That doesn’t mean it will win every race, especially an endurance race. But it will handle better and as a result be faster—thanks to the driver’s ability to tackle corners more aggressively—than competing layouts. It’s a difficult balance that the racing team is trying to strike. Endurance races can be won by objectively slower cars that simply don’t break down. But durable cars can also be blown off the track. The ideal Le Mans racer is tough enough and fast enough—but those “enoughs” are moving goalposts. You don’t want to show up on race day with the toughest slow car, or the fastest unreliable one. In the 1960s, Ford struck this balance perfectly.

The new GT was a vast technological improvement over the GT40s of the 1960s and a leap beyond the GTs of the mid-2000s, which although capable of racing wouldn’t have been competitive in the 2016 field at Le Mans, owing to their inability to generate adequate downforce. Obviously, there was no fooling around with turbochargers and six-cylinder engines fifty years ago. The GT40 was, by the standard set by the current GT Le Mans class of cars, utterly, completely, and defiantly old school. The mid-engine layout was the same, but the engine was a 486-horsepower, naturally aspirated V-8 with now-antiquated carburetors (Weber four-barrels, the state of the art for carburetors when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House). The top speed was stunning, nearly 200 miles per hour, but the zero-to-sixty time was only so-so by comparison with modern supercars: just over five seconds. In the 1960s, of course, that kind of acceleration would have drivers thinking about underwear changes, but in 2016, the new GT was punching it out in 3.3 seconds. The GT40’s V-8 had to keep only 2,700 pounds moving at a bludgeoning pace once the car got going. The driver managed all that grunt with a four-speed transmission: he was squashed in low, between a pair of fuel tanks that held in excess of forty gallons of gas in total, and he surveyed a minimalist, industrial dashboard with analog gauges and switches to control the GT40’s basic functions. The car was wide and low and fantastically uncomfortable—and only forty inches high, hence the “40” after the GT designation. A fire extinguisher rode shotgun. There was no domesticated, road-going version of this rude beast. What you saw was what you got. If you wanted to take it for a weekend spin in the country, you took out what had been raced on the track.

The driving was treacherous. Modern supercars and race cars have computers at their disposal to take the coarse edge off high-performance. The GT40 had nothing of the sort. There was no sophisticated modern brake technology, no traction control to sense when the rear wheels were being forced out by the power surging from that V-8. The car was wild, loud, hot. It would break your back, if you let it. It could do far worse.

It is possible to obtain a contemporary supercar that delivers that kind of raw driving experience, but it isn’t clear why anyone would want to go that retro. With the GT40, of course, there was no choice. To see what it would be like to enjoy its nearly complete lack of obvious charms, just watch the 1966 film A Man and a Woman, directed by Claude Lelouch and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as a French Le Mans driver who nearly dies at the wheel, prompting his wife’s suicide. He stays with racing, becomes enamored of Anouk Aimée, and spends a scene testing a GT40 on the track. The true range of the car’s ferocious nature is on display as it roars and whines through the steeply banked corners, while Trintignant takes the measure of its steering inside the deafening cockpit.

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.

The GT race car was an entirely different story. In the auto industry, a machine created for competition would ordinarily influence the design, technology, and engineering of sports cars intended for the driveway rather than the paddock. But there would be a logical sequence: racing would precede the road. The GT wasn’t wasting time on that front. The supercar would be in many respects the same vehicle as the one assaulting the track in Florida and California in 2016 before heading to France. Parallel development made it a special player: it was really the only true purpose-built race car in the GTLM and GTE Pro fields in 2016.

While Multimatic’s engineers were busting their asses to keep the car on schedule through 2014 and 2015, Ford was preparing for the GT’s coming-out party. It wasn’t a stressful process. In fact, it was the opposite.

“When we first went out for the first review of the GT clay models, our jaws dropped,” Fields said. The executive team paid a visit to the Ford Product Development Center in Dearborn for the long-awaited moment. “I was stunned,” he said, “at how quickly the teams worked and what they came back with.”

And when the GT was revealed at the 2015 Detroit auto show, there was a collective intake of breath.

Not that it should have been such a surprise. After all, rumors about it had been circulating for at least a year. Still, the excitement just kept growing about Ford’s storybook return to endurance racing in France to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 win. “This is a bigger deal than everyone expected,” Road & Track magazine wrote in October 2014, a full three months before the GT blew everyone’s doors off in Motown.

“Earthshaking” is how the magazine described the probability that a new Ford GT production car would be announced at the 2015 Detroit auto show. “Say it with me now,” a scribe on the website Jalopnik wrote of the rumor: “Holy shitballs.”

And then there it stood—a car that demanded a kind of reverent attention.

The new GT, in a brilliant “liquid blue” (Ford’s new name for the color), rolled out onto a vast stage, over which a huge video screen flashed images of the new machine. Ford CEO Mark Fields presided over the reveal. “If you could use innovation to build the ultimate Ford performance vehicle,” he said, “what would it be?”

He was then joined by Bill Ford for a few minutes of enticing banter.

“So, Bill, you think we ought to build it?” Fields asked.

“I think we should,” the Ford scion replied, clearly relishing the historic moment.

“All right,” Fields said. “How about we build it . . . hmmm. . . . How about next year?”

The crowd, as they say, went wild, because it knew exactly what that meant: a return to Le Mans.

It was a triumph for Ford, and it was also an early signal that 2015 was going to be the best year the U.S. auto industry had ever seen, a defiant comeback from the financial crisis.

When I saw the GT up close and in person at the New York auto show a few months later, I couldn’t stop looking at it. The new car had advanced the art of the mid-engine supercar. Callum’s swoopy, evocative design was defined by that pair of winglike flying buttresses at the car’s rear. It was brash and bold, yet elegant and seductive, in the way Ferraris are. Callum’s GT was beautiful, whereas the racing GT40s and the GTs of the mid-2000s were blunt. But the car was really more than beautiful. It was transcendent in its combination of the old and the new, in its blissful, enrapturing conjoining of the race car from the 1960s and state-of-the-art supercar from the twenty-first century. The reason it sent shock waves through the auto-enthusiast crowd and also blew away people who otherwise had little interest in cars was that it summarized, with a luminous visual presence, everything that a sports car was supposed to be. The GT looked sexy, technologically adventurous, very fast, very sleek, and very ready to race. Studying its lines and shapes was simultaneously relaxing—because everything was in the right place and in the right proportion—and thrilling. It was palpably dramatic, and it glowed from within. It was far from a big car, but it occupied physical space with an attitude of pure self-confidence. A lot of powerful, outlandish, expensive cars command attention, but the new GT was almost immediately respected. It didn’t have to ask to join the club. It was already in.

The new GT established an entirely different tone in Detroit. The beast wasn’t a reincarnation; it was a reinvention. Wired magazine called it “spectacularly ludicrous.” “Holy mother of God,” Car and Driver exclaimed. “We were floored.” Mark Phelan of the Detroit Free Press wrote that it was “Stunningly gorgeous, remarkably advanced.” Pulitzer Prize–winning car critic Dan Neil was enthusiastic about its “shattering, future-shock shape” in the Wall Street Journal.

The car was remarkable—and Ford had seized its moment. Who could know if it was now or never? By 2066, Le Mans could be the equivalent of a quaint nineteenth-century horse-jumping competition today. By 2066, we could be racing SpaceX Tesla hovercraft on the Mars colony. Or we could utter the words “auto racing” or “motorsport” and be greeted with blank stares from our robot overlords or our adult grandchildren, who consider car racing to be something that happened in an alarming percentage of early video games. The mid-twenty-first century’s idea of a supercar could be a fully tricked-out Google pod-mobile that drives itself, converses about the symphonies of Beethoven and the more complicated corners of prime number theory, writes a little poetry when it’s parked, and tops out at a bloodcurdling forty miles per hour.

The GT ultimately earned its considerable accolades as it was sent out on the car-show circuit. Over the course of 2015, it appeared in different liveries. The original blue car shown in Detroit was joined by a slick, metallic silver version. A yellow GT then came online. By the time the Detroit auto show reconvened in 2016, a new bright white GT was tucked away on a mezzanine display alongside the rest of the newly formed Ford Performance lineup: a Mustang, a Fiesta, even a pickup truck (the Raptor, a high-performance take on the F-150). The more colors the GT came in, the more captivating it became.

A few grouchy big-engine partisans took issue with the turbocharged V-6, even though 600 horsepower put the GT firmly in the same league as the newest Ferraris—and a cut above the stalwart 491-horsepower Corvettes that would be defending their 2015 Le Mans title.

By the beginning of the 2016 IMSA season, the Ford GT buzz was incandescent. Without question, this was the most anticipated racing debut in decades, trumping Formula One, NASCAR, and the Indianapolis 500. Best of all, Le Mans would represent the culmination of an entire racing season. Fans both experienced and new would be aware of the GT’s performance, as it raced against its competition and sought to do something unprecedented: repeat history with a fresh new machine inspired by a fifty-year-old race car.

So, the Mustang wasn’t transformed into a half-assed GTLM contestant. A clean-sheet design was green-lighted. There was no big risk that the cars wouldn’t sell—Ford could already count the money. No, the challenge would be where it properly belonged: on the tracks leading up to that single, twenty-four-hour episode of exquisite torture in the French countryside.

Supercars are easy. Race cars are hard. The new GT had enjoyed a perfect birth. But it was now headed for its first major test.