One of first Ford GTs delivered to happy Canadian customer
Engineer and entrepreneur Richard L’Abbe shows off highly anticipated vehicle
A couple of weeks ago, Ottawa engineer and entrepreneur Richard L’Abbe, a man so keen to sell a helmet and suit developed by his company to protect against roadside bombs in war zones that he had himself blown up 19 times to prove they worked, took possession of one of the first four Ford GT racing/road cars delivered to Canadians.
And, naturally, being one of six partners who own the Calabogie Motorsports Park road-racing circuit in eastern Ontario, what better place to have it delivered so he could take his first ride?
And if a dozen or so automotive journalists happened to show up pretty much at the same time, why not offer to take them all out for a drive?
Now, I would suggest you have been living under a rock if you don’t know pretty much all there is to know about the Ford GT. I won’t count them up, but I have written a lot of stories about this car myself.
They go back to the Detroit Auto Show in January 2015, when a prototype was unveiled in front of the world’s automotive media.
To say it was a surprise at the time would be an understatement. I can still remember sitting in the Joe Louis Arena when the car was driven out on the stage and hearing — and feeling — the buzz of emotion that greeted its entrance. I mean, holy cow.
They lied that day, of course. Actually, the word “lie” is a little harsh. Let’s just say the Ford executives in “the Joe” that day didn’t exactly tell the truth. Yes, they said it had been a secret project, but suggested the car was designed to be a street car when, in fact, as we all came to know, it had been a racing car project right from the start, and after they were satisfied that it could beat Ferrari, which was the real point, it was subsequently modified for the highway.
The story of the cloak-and-dagger evolution of the car from concept to creation, and how the team made up of Ford and Multimatic executives managed to pull it off without anybody finding out, has been told time and again in newspapers (my most recent story about it was published in Toronto Star Wheels this past June) and in a quite brilliant book written by David Phillips called A Big Ask: the Story of Ford’s Triumphant Return to Le Mans.
The raison d’être for the car was the (at the time) looming 50th anniversary of Ford’s victory in 1966 over rival Ferrari in the 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race. At the time, Henry Ford II had tried to buy the Ferrari motor car company and been told to get lost. Angry, he turned his engineers loose to create a sports car to put the boots to the car, the company and — in particular — the man who had insulted him, Enzo Ferrari. That June, Formula One drivers Chris Amon and Bruce McLaren took a Ford GT40 to victory and the car was so dominant that it won the famous race the next three years running.
It was an open secret that Ford was thinking about going after Ferrari in the 50th anniversary race, but they denied everything — at least, in the beginning. When they finally ’fessed up and made the announcement in June 2015, nobody was really surprised. I mean, back when they’d driven the car onto the stage in Detroit five months earlier, they had shown a short film to illustrate the secretive nature of the project, and I’d recognized Toronto auto racer Scott Maxwell as his face flashed across the screen. As I wrote in a thestar.com blog that afternoon, if Maxwell was involved in that project, there was no doubt they were going to go racing somewhere, sometime.
As we all know, Ford went on to partner with Chip Ganassi Racing in the most recent Le Mans project (Ford did the same thing back in the ’60s, except that time it was Carroll Shelby they’d turned to) and, after some initial stumbles at the 2016 24 Hours of Daytona and some other endurance races, they’d gone to Le Mans and won the GTE class with Joey Hand, Dirk Muller and Sebastien Bourdais doing the driving. A Ferrari had finished behind them, second in class. Mission accomplished. Part of the deal when Multimatic agreed to climb on board was that the Markham, Ont., company would finish developing the road version of the GT, as it had the race car, and then manufacture the 1,000 (or so) that would be sold to the public.
Worth $560,000 (or thereabouts), L’Abbe was visibly happy to take possession of his GT that Ford says is the fastest production car it’s ever built. Powered by a 3.5L EcoBoost twin-turbo V6 engine (647 horsepower and 550 pound-feet of torque), the car has a top speed of 346 kilometres per hour.
As well as the assembled media, test pilot Maxwell was also on hand for the delivery and was clearly delighted to be introduced as the driver who had been in the cockpit not only for the car’s very first lap out of the box, but as the man who had been the first to drive it in anger.
Now, when I was 19 and just starting my newspaper career, I was sports editor for a year on the daily newspaper in Pembroke, Ont., called the Observer. Pembroke is about 147 km northwest of Ottawa. The composing room foreman when I was there lived in Calabogie and was known to everybody at the paper as “Calabogie Bill.” I asked one of the printers where Calabogie was, because I’d never heard of the place, and was told that it was “out in the middle of nowhere.”
So, Multimatic did all the testing of the Ford GT at the Calabogie facility for a very good reason: it really is out in the middle of nowhere. You go up Hwy. 17 about 50 km from Ottawa to Arnprior and turn left. When you get tired of driving, you’re there. If you have a secret project and don’t want prying eyes around, you can go to a place like Calabogie and experiment to your heart’s content and you won’t bother — or raise the suspicions of — anybody.
L’Abbe told me in an interview that Multimatic had asked everybody to stay away during the testing and he respected their request.
“The partners (the six who own the circuit) were not allowed out here,” L’Abbe said. “It was tested in full secret. The employees — a skeleton crew had to be here — had to sign nondisclosure agreements. It was very hush-hush. They didn’t tell us what was going on. We knew something was being tested, but we didn’t know what it was. So, for the first year, I didn’t see the car; I respected Multimatic’s privacy.
“And then, in 2015 after the car was announced at the Detroit Auto Show and they’d brought it here to tweak the design, we were allowed to see it from a distance. But I’m very respectful of all of our customers. If they say they’re not happy with you being here, you don’t come.
“I know this, though. This is car No. 71. It is one of the first four delivered to Canadians since the first of September.”
Ford has never said — and probably won’t — how they went about deciding who got to buy a Ford GT. Apparently, more than 60,000 from around the world applied, complete with deposits, but only 1,000 were chosen. L’Abbe, however, would seem to have been a perfect candidate. He was co-founder, in 1981, and president and CEO of a Canadian company called Med-Eng Systems (medical engineering systems) that designed, tested and manufactured military life-saving equipment that was sold to 120 countries around the world.
As well, and as mentioned, he’s a partner in Calabogie Motorsports Park and a member of the University of Ottawa faculty of engineering with a focus on encouraging entrepreneurship among engineering students.
According to Ford, he’s also the creator of the Richard L’Abbe Makerspace at the university, which is described as a unique invent-buildplay space that fosters “innovative creativity.”
Talking about Med-Eng, which he ran for 25 years before selling it: “We decided that if we weren’t going to be world leaders in this field (of providing solutions to terrorism and other extremist threats), that we weren’t even going to try.”
Which is how Ford goes about its business when it comes to designing, manufacturing and selling automobiles. Incidentally, the company plans to use much of the advanced technology developed for the GT on all of its products going forward, a piece of information that impressed L’Abbe. For instance:
“In the last few years that we had the company, we developed electronic countermeasure technology that ended up jamming radio-control systems used by the bad guys to detonate roadside bombs against our soldiers. So, that technology was very, very effective in changing the course of the war in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The team that we had to develop that product that went from nothing in 2003 to us becoming world leaders was in the exact same time frame as the (Ford development of the) GT. So, that’s the amazing part for me, because it’s exactly what we did with our product.”
L’Abbe, who describes himself as retired (he really isn’t; he does a lot of charity work), is a very smart guy. He was also a very brave guy, too. In order to prove that his company’s bomb suit worked, he became a crash test dummy.
“We used mannequins to test the bomb suit originally,” he said. “We had instrumentation in the mannequin to measure pressures, and so on, but in the end, after the mannequin is lying on the ground after the blast, you can’t walk up to it and say, ‘OK, dude, how did that feel?’
“And so as a young entrepreneur, as a young engineer, I was curious because I’m looking at these tests, and the violence of the blast is incredible, but what does it feel like? I had read every piece of medical history on blast injury that I could find, and I was starting to develop a high level of comfort and expertise and understanding, but you just never know what it feels like, and as the main salesperson for the company, I was in my 20s, and you had these bomb techs who were in their 40s and 50s and who are sitting there with the, ‘I’m not going to believe anything you say, young man,’ look on their faces, and they’re grinning and their arms are crossed and they’re just waiting for the appropriate moment to say, ‘Excuse me, son — anybody ever been blown up wearing yer bomb suit?’ And I was able to say, ‘Sure. Me.’ ”
L’Abbe, who says he suffered 19 concussions as a result of those tests and is starting to wonder, now that he’s in his 50s, whether doing what he did was really such a good idea, said the first time he stood there when a bomb went off was from a distance of about 10 metres.
“So, I got blown up, and I thought, ‘Well, that didn’t feel so bad,’ so then I got within three metres, and they detonated a kilo of dynamite and what was amazing was that the blast wave hits you — it’s a fraction of a second — and then it’s over. If you’re unprotected, the blast wave can kill you. It’s like having Mr. (Jose) Bautista take his bat and whack you on the forehead, as if he’s trying to get a home run. That’s what it feels like.”
Every time he made a presentation, the reaction from his potential customers was instantaneous: “You voluntarily blew yourself up? Are you nuts?” But L’Abbe says it was the best thing he could have done.
“I immediately developed this rapport; no longer was I a sales rep, I was one of them. For me, every time I went to see one of those 120 countries and territories around the world, it paid off.
“The funniest was Egypt. The military had a demonstration set up in the desert outside Cairo and all the officers are there, and I have the bomb suit on and I get to within three metres and they set off the kilo of dynamite and I walk through the smoke and I bow to the crowd and they all go, ‘Wow!’
“About six weeks later, the tender came out for 50 sets of equipment that we made and there was a small specification in the stipulations. It said that any company wishing to sell them their product had to be willing to send their president to Cairo to be blown up. Needless to say, we didn’t have any competition on that one.”
There were three cars on display at Calabogie the day we were there. L’Abbe’s spanking brand new GT, a replica 1966 GT40 and a 2006 Ford GT owned by a Montreal collector who didn’t want his name in the paper. L’Abbe offered all the writers a ride around Calabogie in his new pride and joy, but warned them that he wouldn’t be able to open it right up because the car was still in the middle of a rigid breaking-in period.
Fair enough, but there were no such restrictions on the GT40, which was there in the very capable hands of Mark McDonald, originally from Navan, Ont. McDonald owned a construction company but is now also retired and living — as is L’Abbe — the good life.
McDonald got interested in speed and sport when he was a kid on the family farm and there were snow machines everywhere. He finished second in national competition (that was when Canada still had really cold weather) before trying out cars six years ago. He won four championships in five years driving a Formula Renault, has done some rallying and some road racing, is a cousin of Canadian stock car ace Andrew Ranger, so wants to try oval racing, and recently bought a 1,000 horsepower Top Fuel nitrous dragracing car that he intends to race in Florida, where he spends the winters.
He asked me if I wanted to skip the slow ride in the L’Abbe GT and go for a flat-out with him in the GT40. You can guess which one I chose — and I’m glad I did. It’s always a delight to share a ride with a fellow fast traveller.
When L’Abbe first retired, he had some free time, so decided to take up race-driving.
“At the age of 50, I had never been on a track,” he said. “Motorsports for me was not really that interesting because I’d been so focused on what I was doing in business. Now I wake up and I’m looking to try other things. When I came to the circuit for the first time, I fell in love with the challenge of being able to drive a car on the track.
“And then, for me, it was an evolution: learning something new, pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, because, let me tell you, for a guy who used to drive minivans and small SUVs — I have three kids — this was not in my comfort zone. It was a very steep learning curve, because it wasn’t in my blood.”
L’Abbe said he took a lot of driving courses and tried a number of different racing cars before settling on a race-prepared Corvette.
“My goal was to get a (competition) licence, do one race and quit. Checkmate. Been there, done that. But let me tell you, once I did my first race, I was hooked. We raced here, at Shannonville Motorsport Park, and Canadian Tire Motorsport Park. I missed out on the championship by five points.” And is he still racing? “No,” he said. “I’ve moved on. There are just so many extraordinary things to try in life.”
Like being one of only 1,000 people in the entire world to take delivery of a brand, spanking new, Ford GT. ncmdonald@thestar.ca