The resulting production model isn’t just radical for a car wearing a Blue Oval badge, it’s the razor’s edge of automotive design, with a weight-to-power ratio of roughly five pounds per horsepower to back it up.īased on the neo GT’s $450,000 starting price, you might say the confidence borders on hubris, though.
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But instead of some paint-and-tape Mustang, Ford Performance unleashed both a full-fledged GT racing program and a homologation road car that’s pretty close to being the 2016 Le Mans GTE-Pro class winner with a license plate. To recognize the 50th anniversary of Ford’s Le Mans podium sweep, Dearborn was wont to do a special-edition road car. “That car gave us the confidence to do this car,” he says. That those GTs now trade for more than $300,000 (they originally retailed for $139,995) allowed his team to shoot for the moon this time around.
As the program manager for the 2005–06 Ford GT, the original mid-engined GT40 nostalgia trip, he witnessed firsthand the internal resistance to selling a six-figure Ford. A career Ford engineer, Hameedi knows a thing or two about corporate bureaucracy.
The guy responsible for all of Ford’s performance variants, from the flying F-150 Raptor to the $40,000 350-hp Ford Focus RS, still marvels that his team was allowed to build a car this extreme. For competitive analysis, you understand. Hameedi talks about the GT program like a man who’s gotten away with something, and not just that he was able to buy a Ferrari 458 Speciale and a McLaren 675LT on Ford’s dime. Ford won’t let us behind the wheel just yet-at least not while the car is moving-but in between in-depth discussions with Hameedi, I was treated to 647-hp chest compressions and gut-punch lateral g’s in the passenger seat, with Maxwell and vehicle dynamics development engineer Murray White taking turns driving. So, yeah, the GT stirred something inside me.Īfter two years pirouetting on auto-show turntables, the Ford GT is finally making its own moves. I feel as if my gut has been run through a Vitamix and is now sweating out through my palms. “How was it? Did you feel something more visceral than in a McLaren?” No amount of poise can neutralize the effects of cornering, braking, and acceleration with that kind of intensity. Back in the pits, Jamal Hameedi, the chief engineer of Ford Performance, wants my feedback.
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