The new Ford GT: is it worth it?

Would you pay £250,000 for a Ford? That's the question on Michael Harvey's lips as he profiles the model unveiled at the Detroit motor show this month


Michael Harvey BY MICHAEL HARVEY JANUARY 16, 2015 14:07


Here’s something to ponder this weekend; would you pay £250,000 for a Ford, even if it did look as striking as the Ford in the pictures? Launched earlier this week at the Detroit motor show, the “new” Ford GT is, despite appearances, not a concept car. If Ford is able to stick to its schedule, production of the car will begin later this year so the car can be on the road to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Ford’s extraordinary run of four straight wins in the Le Mans 24 Hour race, starting in 1966.


"Extraordinary" because winning at Le Mans, and beating Ferrari in the process, was not what Ford was supposed to do back in the 1960s. Today, and despite a subsequent and even longer spell on top of the world of Grand Prix racing, building a supercar is not what you expect Ford to do; they are - even with Z-Cars, The Sweeney, The Professionals and all that - an American company and American’s don’t do supercars, Europeans do.


On the face of it, the specification of the GT would tend to confirm that. It has none of the technology that’s taken the latest and extreme products from Ferrari, McLaren and Porsche to a new level of performance. But then as you might expect, it’s nothing like as expensive as the LaFerrari and its gang. There’s no confirmed price, just a suggestion of “somewhere between a Ferrari 458 Speciale and a Lamborghini Aventador”, so that’s somewhere between £208,000 and £265,000 then. Let’s call it a quarter of a million pounds and at that price it is on the money, albeit with one glaring exception.


Ford says the GT prototype is made entirely of hand-laid carbon just like its more exotic (and more expensive) rivals. It will have active aerodynamics. It will have what Ford is describes either as “the best” or “among the best power-to-weigh ratios of any car” depending on who is speaking, courtesy of that carbon structure and its 600bhp engine. Its 600bhp, twin turbocharged V6 engine.


Yes, a V6. And not a V6 as part of a complex hybrid drivetrain with electric motors and generators here there and everywhere to cover for its deficiencies. Just 3.5-litres in capacity, Ford’s Ecoboost V6 is not entirely without pedigree, albeit an obscure one, but it is a V6 and V6s have not had a very good press recently, cited as one reason the world generally lost interest in F1 last year.


In past F1 cars have had V8s (like the Speciale) and even, in the dim and distant, V12s (like the Aventador). V6s struggle to sound spectacular, therefore rarely make an appearance in supercars, the respected but largely unloved original Honda NSX an exception.


Is Ford about to make the same mistake? Well its motives for opting for the V6 — very heavily turbocharged in the GT to extract that amount of power — are laudable. Yes, Ford is launching a new sporty sub-brand - Ford Performance - as well as rolling out its Ecoboost-branded, high-efficiency drivetrains across the planet.


The GT then has the tricky task of acting as poster child for both programmes, although the two are not as contradictory as they might seem; environmentally responsible performance is the thing these days - that’s why F1 cars run those whispering V6 hybrids.


And Ford of course does have form, those GT40s that ripped up Le Mans from 1966 through ’69 rank among the great racing cars. Ford has paid tribute to that car before with the previous GT, a suitably muscle-y V8-powered tribute that turned everybody’s head in 2004.


That GT was a recreation in spirit of the GT40, notionally a recreation but in fact a much more sophisticated and indeed more beautiful car. The project was guided by Ford’s previous head of global design, J Mays, and perfectly embodied his “retro-futuristic” take on design (previously Mays was at VW/Audi where he launched the new Beetle and the Audi TT).


Highly collectable now, the GT sold in large numbers although crucially not quite in the numbers Ford imagined. Crucially because the GT had the right engine and absolutely had the right look. On paper the new car has neither, although the nose and cabin of the car are clearly from the same line. The rest of the car is not. It’s a complex, wild-looking beast, the work of Brit Chris Svensson under the direction of May’s successor Moray Callum (brother of Jaguar design director Ian).


It was executed in secret in less than a year, meaning that if Ford does get the car in to production this year the whole process will have taken less than 24 months, which is very quick for a car, even one that does not involve the creation of heavy, expensive metal-bashing machine tools. Ford then has its work cut out, especially if it is to keep to its weight target. (Making the whole thing smaller would be a start there, BTW team. The last car was verging on the un-driveably wide on European roads and this car is even wider). But Ford has always been the most sophisticated of the American manufactures, the most European. It has the engineering and design talent, but will the GT find a market?


More robust performance brands than Ford have struggled with supercars and the new GT doesn't so obviously call on its heritage as its predecessor (although Ford does intend to take the new car racing). Ferrari for one doesn’t see a huge amount of growth in demand for supercars and is instead concentrating on extracting more margin from its existing market while shoring up the rock-solid investment potential of its cars.


Can Ford bust that paradigm? The original GT40 was designed to break Ferrari’s stranglehold on the racetrack, but I can’t help but think that, 60 years on, Ford is going to find that a whole lot harder to do on the road.

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SBR said:

Is the new car wider than the 05/06?

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