Car_and_Driver_USA_July_2017

Ford’s fabulous GT takes its
lucky, if cramped, pilot right
back to Le Mans.
_BY AARON ROBINSON _PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC URBANO
Last year, Ford Performance chief Dave Pericak found
himself standing next to Edsel Ford II at the edge of a
certain pastoral French racing circuit that has witnessed
84 years of glory, gore, grudges, and relentless
grit. “You know,” mused Ford, according to Pericak’s
recollection, “I was here 50 years ago with my father,
when we won it. Now I’m here with my son.”
When you work at FoMoCo, you work for a family.
Pericak, who, with a small group of volunteers, took
over a padlocked basement room in Dearborn, Michigan,
and labored on his own time and after hours for
months on “Project Phoenix” before it was even approved, tells me
with a faraway look: “To bring that trophy
back and hand it to that family, to return
the most coveted prize in family history,
that’s what it was about.”
Le Mans veterans will tell you that if you
bring a new team, you should keep your
expectations in check. And the GT’s
attempt last year to celebrate Ford’s 1966
Le Mans victory with a class win started
ominously. In sheeting rain, one of the four
GTs, already saddled with last-minute
weight and boost penalties, suffered a stuck
gearbox right before the green flag. Wanting
to be near the action, Pericak’s boss, Ford
executive VP and chief technical offcer Raj
Nair, leaped a rain-slicked pit wall, slipped,
and broke his elbow. Amid the tension,
nobody even noticed.
Almost a year later, we’re standing
beside another circuit, a 2.2-mile slice of
the Utah Motorsports Campus west of
windy Salt Lake City, next to the roadgoing
version of the GT that will trickle into buyers’
hands at the rate of 250 annually over
the next four years. Finally, after the surprise
January 2015 reveal at the Detroit
auto show, after countless magazine covers
and breathless coverage, a few lucky members
of the fourth estate will at long last get
to drive Project Phoenix.
I am in that group, about to pilot the
first cousin to an honest-to-Ronnie-Bucknum
Le Mans car! And unlike the GT3 and
the McLaren, there will be no model
updates for this car—at least, not anytime
soon. The GT is pure Ford history and
enthusiasm condensed against all odds and
business sense into a drivable carbon-fiber
Hot Wheels toy that will forever remain rare enough to drop jaws
wherever it goes. And I get to drive it. On a circuit.
Nobody is luckier than me, I think, as I stride up to the GT,
doors levitated to a spread eagle, and thrust my right leg in, twist
sideways, and . . . ah, no, that didn’t quite work. Let’s try sitting
The GT’s seats don’t
move. So to make sure
drivers can manage the
car’s functions, nearly
all the controls are put
on the adjustable
steering wheel.
down on the wide sill, swinging a leg in,
and—ow!—just bashed my head on the
FIA-spec roll cage hidden behind the
low-hanging headliner. Okay, stand up
again, right leg in, twist while bending the
left knee a bit, and—pop!—I feel a tendon
go. There’s a white-hot flash of shooting
pain in my knee, and as my left leg collapses
like the bridge on the River Kwai, I tumble
backward into the GT and, voilà! I’m in!
Because the GT’s narrow, vertical buckets
don’t move (the pedals and steering
column do, with wide latitude for different
body types), most of the car’s buttons cluster
on the rectangular wheel so you don’t
have to reach to the architecturally sculpted
dash of carbon-fiber bridges and buttresses.
This car is not at all retro like its 2005–06
predecessor with its comparatively giant
cabin; all data comes via digital screens, the
one in front of the driver flashing the speed,
revs, and plebeian messages such as “Driver
Door Ajar.” A big anodized button in the
slim center console lights the twin-turbo
3.5-liter V-6, and the nearby rotary shifter
seems a little out of place, like something
from a Fusion or a Lincoln Continental.
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