It's official: Ford will build the GT40. Can't wait? Our Web exclusives will take you for an inside look at the GT40, including a photo retrospective and interviews with Chief Engineer of Ford SVT Engineering John Coletti, Vice-President of North American Product Development Chris Theodore, GT40 Designer Camilo Pardo, and Design Vice-President J Mays.
In these trying times, we're all inclined to seek out heroes. Even automotive ones. And as automotive heroes go, Ford's GT40 was to endurance racing what Gen. George Patton was to European butt kicking--crass, confident, and highly effective.
The year was 1963. Henry Ford II decided he needed to win the famous 24-hour endurance race at Le Mans. That March, he entered negotiations to join forces with Ferrari, but Enzo Ferrari halted talks abruptly on May 21. This steeled Henry's resolve to beat Enzo if he couldn't join him. Funds were allocated to construct a Yank-powered GT car built with help from Britain's Lola. In 1966, the dream was realized with GT40s finishing one-two-three at Le Mans. Ford's winning streak stretched through 1969, by which time Ferrari had withdrawn from the series. Is it any wonder, then, that Ford's Living Legends styling studio should follow up its T-Bird and Forty-Nine designs with a reincarnation of the fabled GT40?
Of course, this is not Ford's first GT40 homage. Remember the angular, geometric, completely modern GT90 that bowed at the 1995 Detroit show (C/D, January 1995)? That car's raison d'être was to prepare the public for the "new edge" designs that followed with the Cougar, Focus, and others. The GT90 was blatantly unfeasible--improbably low, impossibly expensive, and generally too extreme. This one has been designed as a fast, comfortable street-legal car that could see limited production. Its mission, therefore, is to ask well-heeled showgoers the $100,000 question: Can you live without one?
Comfort and legality mandates drove a 10-percent increase in the overall dimensions of the new car relative to the Mark I GT40. The wheelbase is stretched nearly a foot, the height goes up three inches from 40.5 inches (a figure that was rounded down to 40 in the naming of the original car) to 43.5 inches. Overall length stretches 17.1 inches longer than the original's 164.5. The passenger compartment is situated slightly farther aft within the wheelbase to lessen the intrusion of the front wheel wells. The seats are located outboard of a wide central backbone structure that houses the fuel cell, rather than inboard of two giant sills that housed the gas tanks in the original. Another wonderful concession to ingress/egress is the way the conventionally hinged doors wrap up into the roof, as the original doors did.
Design boss J Mays insisted on one more original design element--the large front and rear access panels, hinged near the bumpers, which open to expose all the car's mechanical systems. That requirement added considerably to Special Vehicle Engineering chief John Coletti's to-do list. Coletti was assigned to sort out the show car's running gear, and he would not have the world photographing ugly, half-baked, or ill-designed hardware. Hence, the Detroit show car's underpinnings are both geometrically realistic and functional.
And such underpinnings! For motivation there's a 5.4-liter 32-valve supercharged and intercooled V-8 (think Lightning truck motor with twice the valve count) making roughly 500 horsepower and 500 pound-feet at 6 to 8 psi of boost, and channeling that thrust through a Tremec RBT six-speed transaxle. This powertrain solution is just one option, should showgoers and car nuts convince Ford to produce more than one GT40.
"There are numerous ways to skin the cat," says Coletti. "The thing you really need to do at the end of the day is decide what personality you want the car to have. This supercharged [V-8] will have tremendous grunt off the line. If I were to go the turbocharged route, I'd give up a lot of off-the-line for midrange and high-end power. Or we could do a smaller engine, rev the heck out of it, and give up the low-end grunt for high-end power."
And as for the ultimate performance goals? Top speed will not be a priority, but the car must be stable and comfortable at 180-plus mph. And, Coletti adds, "If this car were to show up at a stoplight against a Viper, it needs to protect its honor." 'Nuff said.
The drivetrain nestles inside a gorgeous aluminum space frame--did we mention the target weight is about 3000 pounds? Long unique aluminum control arms are used front and rear, with other suspension components (bushings, half-shafts, and the like) borrowed from the vast Ford parts bin. Push- and pullrod rocker-arm coil-over shocks permit the exceptionally low front bodywork, but they impinge on already minimal luggage space. It's a simple, elegant design that Coletti envisions operating without active differentials, electronic shocks, or other high-tech gizmos.So would such a Ford supercar find itself dicing with Vipers and Corvette Z06s in the American Le Mans Series? Not with factory support. Given the GT40's grand racing heritage, Ford figures it has nothing to prove. Of course, it wouldn't make a bad race car for a Roush or Saleen.
The enviable task of massaging this living legend back to life in three dimensions fell to a true GT40 devotee, the soft-spoken, pony-tailed 38-year-old Camilo Pardo. Pardo has been doodling modern GT40s and painting vintage GT40s in action for many years (some of his GT40 art hangs in the executive offices of Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn). He worked on the GT90 and has served as chief designer on the current project.
"We wanted to be able to convey 'GT40,' but it was tough to massage this larger car into the proportion of the low, sexy original. We moved immense amounts of clay in between reviews," explains Pardo. The original is a beautiful design, but it was styled in a hurry, with the singular purpose of winning races. As such, there are a lot of areas that are poorly resolved, some of which took months to get right without looking overly "designed." J Mays describes the attention paid to the rear quarter as an example.
"I kept pushing for more testosterone in the car, and every time we would add more meat to the rear flare, we'd have to go back and add more to the front flare. Finally, I decided we needed a much wider section on the tire to invoke the sort of power that so many vehicles of the '60s had. Once we added tire section, we realized the haunches were too small again, so we ended up going through four or five iterations of modeling, taking it outside and looking at it. I love that, because it's the total antithesis of the computer-generated automobile. You can tell somebody has just massaged the clay endlessly."
Much of this design is antithetical to the current mode of fashion. The nose was lengthened several times in an era when wheels are being pushed to the corners. The rear is dominated by a prominent ducktail, the likes of which disappeared in the 1970s. Viewed from above, the greenhouse widens toward the back, rather than forming the de rigueur teardrop shape. But eventually, the endless tape loops of Grand Prix, Le Mans, and other vintage-'60s movies playing in the studio got the team in the right mind-set. Unlearning some lessons is part of the deal in the Living Legends studio, and as such, many other designers may dismiss the GT40 as simply "a new old car."
