Ford GT: Review
So can the GT live up to the hype, the heritage, and the price? Oh yeah...
The racing is close, the grids are large and the cars, crucially, look like ones you can walk into a dealership and buy: Ferraris, Aston Martins, Corvettes, Porsches, that sort of thing.
Alongside them now, though, there's the Ford GT as well. And doesn't it look every bit like the racing car it was created as?
It's here!
Still, what's Ford to do? It wants to be back at Le Mans, yet if it had made a race car based on the Mustang - which was the original idea - it reckoned it would be uncompetitive. And Ford isn't about to make a £200,000 sports car that it could later take racing, because nobody would buy it.
So you can see how the logic goes. Develop GT. Race it. Sell some. And that 1966 Le Mans victory set a precedent that's still applicable today: it established Ford as perhaps the only mainstream brand that could make and sell a massively expensive, high-performance sports/super/hypercar.
How expensive is this one? It's £420,000 (or whatever $450,000 at the current exchange rate, plus VAT, works out at today), and Ford - or rather Multimatic, its Canadian partner, who helped engineer the GT and supports the race team - is going to build 1,000 roadgoing examples, at the rate of one a day. More than it strictly needs to by homologation standards, but make no mistake: this is racing car first, road car second.
Don't be deceived - it's snug in here!
Quite a lot of that is clear even before you sit in it. It has a carbon fibre tub with an integrated roll-cage built-in during production - to make it FIA compliant a few extra beams are welded into the race cars. The cabin fits two occupants but it's narrow in there - to reduce the car's frontal area - and the seats are fixed to the tub, with pedals that move via a fabric pull strap instead. Behind the narrow cabin is a narrow engine, a development of Ford's 3.5-litre Ecoboost V6, with twin-turbos.
Ford says that part of the GT programme - because it certainly isn't about making money, even with $450,000,000 in sales revenue coming in - is ensuring that advances on the race car meet its road cars. Quite often that's piffle, but when Ford started developing this V6 and racing it in IMSA, it kept blowing head gaskets and distorting heads. Changes to the race engine are now best-practice for Ford's street engine designers; 60 per cent of the GT's V6 is common with the one used in the F-150. The Raptor, granted, but still. A pick-up and a GT have largely the same donkey.
Anyway, that engine drives the rear wheels via a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox in the road car, a six-speed sequential in the race car. Steering is hydraulic, as is some of the suspension control.
By measurements it could be a GT42...
At each corner a pushrod acts on a rocker which then acts on spring one - a short torsion bar - which in turn meets another rocker that acts on spring two - a coil spring. That's in 'normal' mode. But if you select 'track' mode, the car hydraulically drops by 50mm, giving it just a 70mm ground clearance and locking tight the coil spring, thus doubling the spring rate (the bar and coil have similar rates) and tieing the GT down yet further. The dampers - which, technically, are passive, although are Multimatic's impossibly clever spool valve 'DSSV' dampers - have three states they can be set to. Normal and comfort in high body mode, or a firmer mode when the body is dropped on the deck.
And you should see how it drops. You know how supercar nose lifts or 4x4s on air springs creep up and down? None of that here. You push a button and the GT shoots up or down like it's on air jacks.
On road? Not at its best, actually
Anyway, you don't have all day and I don't have the entire internet to play with so enough technical detail; although I could go on about how the rear wing doesn't just change position, but actually changes its profile. Or how the engine's air is ducted in through the lower bodywork at the rear, meets the turbos, is ducted back to the sides where it passes through those intercoolers and is then fed via the buttresses to the engine. Or I could expand on how the dashboard is designed not just as a structural element but also has ventilating air passing through it. But let's move on.
The GT's fixed-base seats are comfortable, but crikey it's cramped in here. Driver and passenger are well into elbow-bashing territory; perhaps beyond Lotus Elise and into Caterham snugness. The roof is low, and because the scuttle is too, despite the GT only being 41.8 inches tall (in track mode), you don't feel like you're sitting on the deck. Some of the plastics are a bit shonky for a £420,000 car, but that's the nature of it.
The steering is reassuringly heavy - 2.5 turns lock-to-lock, too, so free from nervousness, and hydraulically assisted - and gears engage cleanly. The motor makes a straightforward sort of noise. Gruff, growly, powerful, but far from sonorous. However, I think that's alright, you know. The GT40's V8 made an amazing noise, but ultimately, it was an effective noise. The GT's is similarly honest.
Circuit is where the GT really shines, funnily enough
Curiously, that doesn't necessarily translate to making the GT a great driver's car on the road. It's good, make no mistake, but the steering's weight doesn't blend much road feel into the mix, while the brakes on our test car were a bit over-servoed at the top of the travel. I'm being critical here. It's enjoyable. The grip is there, and the poise, and the agility - the dry weight is 1,385kg - but on a decent road you'd get more back, more often, from something like a Porsche 911 GT3 or a McLaren 720S.
Road racer
Where the GT feels happier - and this is probably no surprise - is on a circuit. 'Pssht' that suspension into its lower setting in an instant and the body ties itself to the floor, with enough suppleness in hand to flow over kerbs. And it all makes sense. There are cars with 655hp and 550lb ft that could seem intimidating, but this isn't one of them.
You will wait for one, but it might just be worth it
Race-derived car is good on track, then. Which is about as surprising as finding out that a race-derived car is good at racing. But I can quite easily ship out my cynicism about how it plays to the rules: what balls of Ford to make it, after all. Who else, beyond the traditional supercar makers, could do that? As a road- and track-going supercar it's a brilliant, flawed, compromised, wonderful, capable, fabulous thing. [Matt Prior]
FORD GT
Engine: 3,497cc V6, twin-turbo
Transmission: 7-speed dual-clutch auto, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 656@6,250rpm
Torque (lb ft): 550@5,900rpm
0-60mph: 2.8sec
Top speed: 216mph
Weight: 1,385kg (dry)
MPG: 14 (est)
CO2: tbc g/km
Price: £420,000 including VAT, before options
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Only one thing to note, the original GT40 was a pure race car. It was made with zero concessions for the road. They did make a road going version, the Mk3, but it was a total failure.
I do love the bold design of the thing, but I suspect very few owners are ever going to use them properly because I'm not sure there is even any storage in it? Kinda knackers you for a weekend away - something you can easily do in a Ferrari/McLaren/Lambo
Only one thing to note, the original GT40 was a pure race car. It was made with zero concessions for the road. They did make a road going version, the Mk3, but it was a total failure.
I do love the bold design of the thing, but I suspect very few owners are ever going to use them properly because I'm not sure there is even any storage in it? Kinda knackers you for a weekend away - something you can easily do in a Ferrari/McLaren/Lambo
I hate that they built a purpose designed GT against the spirit of the rules without having produced or sold any, and then ran and won. Anyone with a basic knowledge of sports car racing history knows that's how to kill competition and ultimately the category/sport.
I love that apparently it handles like a real sports car but with superduperhyper car performance.
I kinda dislike that it sounds a bit like a fart in a fish tank...
Not really love/hate; more like it is a naughty car, but it sounds like it is a very, very nice one too. Not perfect, but flippin' awesome all the same.
You could get a 488GTB, 911 Turbo and V8 vantage (i.e. the rest of the WEC GTE field, even if the 911 Turbo isnt a 100% match) for the price of a ford GT
I think the 675LT now looks good value for money too considering the price of this one.
What a sensationally hardcore car for its type - pedals adjustable with a webbed strap? Brilliant.
It almost seems like a modern-day Stratos to me - tiny cabin, fantastic pricing.
As for the road-going GT40 Mk3, it was hardly a commercial success was it? More a curio of the time, but all the more desirable now for it!
Sadly, it seems that cars at the moment must be all things to all men – hence the preponderance of ‘high-performance SUVs’ filling our roads and ultra high-performance hatchbacks. Like the original GT40, this car has been designed for one job – to win races, and on the back of that sell cars, even if through the halo effect. The road car, again like the GT40, is compromised by this but Ford, knowing that had to build some in order to go GT racing, went ahead anyway. Going back to the GT40 ancestor, Eric Broadly, brought in to oversee the initial GT40 project after Ford had seen his Ford-powered prototype at the 1963 24hr Le Mans, thought their idea of producing a race car was massively compromised by Ford also stating straight away that they wanted a road car, too, from the project.
As I’ve noted previously on another forum, the GT40 bent some rules in order to fulfil the motorsport requirements, BUT… many manufactures have bent the rules in pursuit of race track glory – Porsche 917, and many of the Group B rally cars. We still lust and love these cars, nonetheless. As a sportscar race fan and petrolhead, I for think this is a fabulous machine.
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