SPIRIT OF 66
After just four years, Ford’s GT has retired from endurance racing. We get the inside story on the car and its 50th-anniversary triumph at Le Mans from the mastermind behind it, then try the GTLM-spec machine for ourselves
The inside story of the modern Ford GT and getting behind the wheel of the racecar
HOLLYWOOD COULDN’T HAVE WRITTEN it better. Ford – that most American of automotive behemoths – makes a triumphant return to the Le Mans 24 Hours with a pure-bred, low-slung, mid-engined racer a full half-century after Henry Ford avenged Enzo Ferrari’s snub to score an outright victory in the world’s most prestigious endurance race.
OK, so the 2016 sequel was a class win, but when said conquest also came after a race-long (and ultimately acrimonious) battle with Ferrari, the symmetry with that historic weekend in 1966 is utterly intoxicating.
Unfortunately, what the Blue Oval giveth it also taketh away, so while Ferrari (and the other pure-bred sports car brands) are obliged to plug away season after season, decade after decade, Ford preferred to mount a brilliant smashand-grab raid. History made, lucrative run of supercars sold and halo polished, Ford Performance pulled the pin on its endurance racing adventure after a scant four seasons.
It all looked so easy. And so predictable. But this ignores the fact that the entire Ford GT programme was one of the best-kept secrets in the automotive industry. Until it was announced at the 2015 Detroit motor show nobody knew much about it at all, though this is perhaps due to the fact that a return to Le Mans hadn’t been discussed internally at Ford until mid-2013.
Like all the best road or race car programmes, the genesis of the latest Ford GT was the brainchild of true enthusiasts empowered by the financial and engineering might of a vast corporation. Those two characters were Raj Nair, Ford’s then head of product development, and Larry Holt, vice president at Canadian engineering giant
Multimatic. For Nair, Holt and indeed
Ford it was the perfect storm. Riding the wave created by his overseeing of the alloy-frame F-150 pickup and all-new ‘world’ Mustang, Nair was
WHILE OTHERS PLUG AWAY SEASON AFTER SEASON, FORD MOUNTED A BRILLIANT
SMASH-AND-GRAB RAID
THERE WERE ACCUSATIONS OF SANDBAGGING AND
LAST-MINUTE BOP ADJUSTMENTS TO HOBBLE
THE FLYING FORDS
arguably the most powerful man at Ford. As for Holt, well, as Multimatic had been responsible for a series of successful Ford motorsport programmes (not to mention myriad supercar programmes for other big automotive names) he knew the company inside out, and his exceptional engineering brain and instinctive racer’s mindset made him a legend within the highest echelons of the paddock. If you want to understand the Ford GT programme you speak to Holt, for he’s one of those rare characters who gives it to you straight, even if it means catching you off guard or going off-message.
‘When Raj and I first spoke about a programme [in 2013] he wanted to go to Le Mans with a kind of Super Mustang in the GTLM class,’ says Holt. ‘I said it couldn’t be done, he said he wanted to do it anyway. Long story short, Raj is a data-driven guy, so I went away and did the analysis and produced some renderings. What we ended up with was a weird looking thing that didn’t really look like a Mustang. We both knew he’d need to build and sell a bunch of them, and so things went quiet for a few months.
‘I thought that was that, but he calls again and basically says, “OK, the Mustang idea doesn’t fly, so what does it need to be?” I said it needed to be a better Ferrari 488 with its design focused on winning Le Mans. In mid-2014 we went out for a few beers and did a million napkin sketches where we roughed-out the design of the car and laid out the business case for building 1200 road cars that would effectively pay for the race car programme.
‘Going racing was totally Raj’s vision, and it was his drive that got Ford to buy into the dream. The kicker was the 50th anniversary was in 2016, so we knew we were expected to win first time out. It took three years for the GT40s to win…’
It was the kind of opportunity every race car designer dreams of. A big bucks effort by one of the world’s largest car companies. The challenge to deliver was colossal, but the prize irresistible. For Holt, the real beauty of it was he could build a clean-sheet race car, an opportunity he grabbed with both hands.
‘We developed the road and race cars in parallel. That meant a ton of work, but it also meant any compromise was built into the road car to advantage the race car. To give you an example, I was obsessed with minimising frontal area, so I benchmarked mid-engined cars that were worst in class for occupant space! I think we’re within half a millimetre of the
Lotus Elise in terms of where you sit in relation to the car’s centre line.
When you sit two people in the road car things get a bit snug, but the upside was a car that’s as slippery as hell yet produces terrific downforce.’
Remarkably, not only was the road car unveiled to a totally unsuspecting audience at the Detroit show at the beginning of 2015, but by mid-2015 the race car was being shaken down at Multimatic’s home circuit of Calabogie Motorsports Park in Ontario. Development continued rapidly, as it had to if the cars were to be ready for the Daytona 24 Hours in January 2016. It was an epic effort by all concerned.
Ford took the GT racing with two teams in two top-tier endurance championships. In the US, Chip Ganassi Racing would contest the IMSA series with a pair of cars, while Multimatic (under Holt and George Howard-Chappell) would field another pair in the World Endurance Championship. All four cars would race at Le Mans under the Ganassi banner. After experiencing gearbox issues at Daytona the pressure really was on as Le Mans loomed. There were a few WEC and IMSA events to get the car dialled in before Le Mans, but with LM24 the primary objective there was no room for a faltering start to the season.
There was another spectre to contend with, too. Namely the Balance of Performance, or BoP, in which cars of disparate design have their performance manipulated in order to achieve lap-time parity. It’s a perennial bone of contention amongst teams and fans, but it’s also a fundamental part of the game, albeit one that often threatens to overshadow the result. Unfortunately for Ford the 2016 race is perhaps the messiest example, with accusations of sandbagging and last-minute BoP adjustments to hobble the flying Fords.
It’s an area most teams prefer to shy away from discussing, but Holt is typically forthright: ‘Honestly, the GT was a mistake. Or at least it was once you factor-in the BoP. The car I conceived was all about that low frontal area for a high top speed – it was
a car built to win Le Mans. What I should have done was build a car the size of my house with the engine in the wrong place, then have BoP hand me a ton of power to push the stupid thing down the road.
‘The thing you need to understand about BoP is everyone sandbagged. Even when the Le Mans BoP was later switched to so-called Auto BoP, all the teams figured it out by using software that analyses pace relative to rival cars. BoP demeans the efforts of drivers and engineers. I hate it, but it’s the way things are.
‘In 2016 everyone was looking after the pace of their cars leading up to Le Mans. When we eventually got to the big race we had a decision to make. Raj and I reckoned you can’t guarantee you’re going to win your first Le Mans, but you can get pole…’
As it transpired, you can also get whacked with a last-minute BoP adjustment, but Holt is philosophical: ‘I don’t think the BoP situation took anything away from the win. If anything I think it made it all the more impressive. Think about it: the road car is circa 650bhp, but we’re having to strangle the EcoBoost motor back to 495bhp in the GTLM cars. That’s why they had that flat and kinda farty engine note. They just couldn’t breathe.
‘Because the car was so slippery we’d still be hitting a high V-max, but we just didn’t have any punch out of the corners, so the draggier cars left us for dead. We’d only see them again in the braking areas, which made racing extremely tough. We suffered from that and it certainly took the fun out of the next three years, but it achieved a pretty strong win record and can definitely hold its head up.’
As a racer and race fan I find it hard to begrudge Ford – builder of a bazillion blue-collar pickups and bread-and-butter hatchbacks – its success. It might seem a foregone conclusion now, but there are no dead certs in top-level endurance racing. That Ford seized the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build an all-new car to compete against the world’s greatest sports car brands, with the added pressure of marking the 50th anniversary of its historic Le Mans win, speaks volumes for the company’s corporate courage and racer’s guile.
Modern endurance racing may be very different to those heady days of the 1960s, but there’s a reassuring symmetry to the two history-making campaigns. Having set its mind to the task, Ford’s cars and drivers still went like hell.
DRIVING THE GTLM FORD GT
Perhaps the only good thing about Ford calling time on its most recent endurance racing adventure is the fact I’m standing on the pit apron at Virginia International Raceway (VIR), staring with lust and wonder at the no. 67 Ford GT (Chassis 005). A veteran of all four seasons, no. 67 finished 2nd at Le Mans in 2017 and 4th in 2019, and scored WEC victories at Fuji and Shanghai in 2016, and Silverstone and Shanghai in 2017. It’s a real warhorse.
I ‘drove’ the car and circuit in a stuffy simulator room at the secretive
Ford Performance HQ less than
24 hours ago. As I was shamefully ignorant of VIR – a magnificent circuit
which will soar straight into my top three favourites before my stint in the GT is over – the virtual laps are welcome, but still I don’t feel like I have much more than a passing acquaintance with either VIR or the GT.
Thankfully, prior to testing the GT we get some warm-up laps in one of Multimatic’s Mustang GT4s – a car I know well having raced it in a round of the British GT Championship last year – but I’m painfully aware the GT’s cornering and braking capabilities are of a different magnitude. VIR will look like a very different place through its windscreen. Fortunately Multimatic’s crew comprises largely super-chilled Canadians, so there’s no pressure other than that which I put on myself – which is more than enough to have me pacing around in my race suit before I’m finally given the nod to climb aboard.
The GT is a big car, but the aperture to get into it isn’t, so there’s a bit of huffing and puffing before legs are threaded down into the footwell and buttocks eased into the moulded seat. Even by contemporary standards the steering wheel is busy. And pretty ugly. The grips are tactile enough, but the huge slab of carbonfibre that bridges them clearly paid no attention to aesthetics and everything to ergonomics. I won’t be fiddling with many of the brightly coloured and clearly labelled switches during my six-lap run. In fact, I’ll only be keeping a watching brief on the LCD screen, just in case it throws an alarm that might require me to kill the engine before I, er, kill the engine.
Not that this is likely, because thanks to the dreaded BoP the raspy Roush Yates-built 3.5-litre V6 EcoBoost motor is effectively breathing through a mask and dosed with diazepam, restricting power from the road car’s 647bhp or track-only Mk II’s 700bhp to somewhere between 490 and 520bhp. I’m sure this will be enough to hold my attention, but there’s a sad inevitability to the lack of omigawd straight-line shove. Still, just like the road car, this GT racer induces a degree of intimidation thanks to a reverse Tardis effect. Its footprint covers a fair old acreage of track, yet the cockpit is confined. Not quite the space-capsule feeling you get in an LMP1 car, but more snug than the Ford’s class rivals.
Handily I don’t have a crash helmet with built-in comms, which means once I leave the pitlane I’m on my own. My reckoning is that so long as I remember to de-latch the pitlane speed limiter there won’t be much need for chit-chat. And if I crash this precious wedge of Ford motorsport history I’ll have popped my harness and run for the Virginian hills before anyone realises I’ve binned it.
Ford Performance Chip Ganassi factory racer Ryan Briscoe is on hand to talk me through the basics of the car, which he does once I’ve slotted – or rather squeezed – myself into the shrink-wrapped driver’s seat. Paddleshifters mean it’s pretty much point and squirt once you’ve pulled away, but unlike GT3 cars there’s no ABS on GTLM machines, so it is possible to lock a wheel – though this is unlikely as I’m 99 per cent certain my spindly left leg doesn’t have the muscle to hit the pedal hard enough, at least not into the really big braking areas.
One thing Briscoe mentions is switching the engine map from 11 to 12, freeing the motor from its BoP strangulation. Sounds like fun to me, though he’s at pains to ensure I head out with the switch set to 11, so I’ll need the presence of mind to go to 12 during my stint. Given I regularly forget what I’ve gone upstairs for, this could be an issue.
Whatever. Once Briscoe slams the big forward-hinged door and I’ve pulled away, all extraneous thoughts melt away, leaving me and the GT alone to explore VIR. Unlike cars that require you to pump a clutch pedal and shift gears with a stick, there’s really nothing to driving this Ford. You do need to show it a bit of commitment so you’re within the window for the clutch, transmission and ignition-cut calibration. If not, it just gets all raggedy and impatient. You also need to get some temperature into the tyres and brakes for much the same reason, but in terms of operation it’s no more taxing than the road car.
Like any brief track test in an unfamiliar car, it’s a case of rapidly feeling your way around a far larger performance envelope than you’re used to. Six laps isn’t a lot, but VIR’s full course is generous and packs pretty much everything you could wish for into each 5.26km, 18-turn lap. Inevitably it’s the last three laps when things begin to make sense. As predicted, the GT isn’t explosively accelerative, but its slippery shape pulls plenty of downforce from the air. However, it doesn’t seem to drive into an invisible brick wall like GT3 cars or more bluffnosed GTE cars do.
Around VIR this means a prodigious sense of speed down the
front and back straights, which then focuses you on just how effective the GT is in the braking zones. It doesn’t communicate like a road car – it’s too flat and too well within itself to offer signs a civilian would recognise – but as you summon the nerve to take leap after leap beyond the points at which your head questions whether a car really can make repeated direction changes at this speed, or indeed shed so much speed in so few metres, everything begins to gel.
My favourite section of VIR comes early in the lap, the fizz of anticipation kicking in as you power out of Turn 3 and point the Ford’s nose towards the fearsome uphill esses. It was scary enough on the sim, but when you’re gunning towards them flat in fifth, knowing that you’re supposed to hold a steady nerve – and right foot – as you zigzag your way over the trio of whoops at upwards of 240kmph, it has to rank as one of the mightiest sections of any racetrack in the world.
Do I remember to switch the engine map to 12 and pop the EcoBoost’s cork? Do I heck, which is a bit deflating as I’d love to have felt how the Ford fired out of the tighter corners and down the long straights with a good deal more fire in its belly. Of course, this means I have the perfect excuse for not being anywhere near as close to Briscoe’s data trace as I’d have hoped, but it does mean I’ve got a very clear image of the scenario Larry Holt described at Le Mans.
Six laps is just a taste of what this car can do, but it’s more than enough to appreciate the might of the machine and scale of its achievement. It’s a great shame these fabulous cars won’t be racing in 2020, but their legacy is assured. ⌧