Equity Mag Sep_17 Book Folder

COLLECTOR'S PIECE
AUTOMOBILE
AMERICAN SUPERHERO
Born on a track, finished on the highway – it’s everything we ever wanted in a supercar, and
some more
Words by Varun Godinho
In the Sixties, Ford made a play for Ferrari. The American
carmaker wanted to buy the Italian Prancing horse. Il
Commendatore strongly rebuffed Hank the Deuce and –
as the legend goes – he was neither polite nor gentle when
going about it either. Ford got mad, and then decided to
get even.
Ford got around to building its own supercar that could
compete with a Ferrari. If you are going to stick it to Ferrari
though, you need to do more than just raise the bar – you
must fling it right off its hinges. That’s precisely what Ford
did with the GT40, a ground-up home-grown supercar.
In 1966, Ford entered the GT40 into the 24 Hours of Le
Mans – one of the most gruelling endurance races in the
world. It finished in first position, and repeated that feat in
’67, ’68, and ’69. Ford had a bonafide champion on its hands.
Fifty years after that inaugural Le Mans race-winning
performance, the American carmaker decided to re-enter
the endurance race once again. It initially wanted to do so
with a modified Mustang, but swiftly discarded those plans
when it discovered that the Mustang was too large and
unwieldy to do the job. Instead, it decided to build a
bespoke GT car and that’s how it went about building this
all-new Ford GT last year. Mind you, it won in its category
at the 2016 edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
For a car to be entered into the endurance racing
category though, one of the rules stipulates that there
needs to be a homologated street-legal version of it.
That’s how we got the 2017 Ford GT road-going supercar
which was pressed into production late last year, with
deliveries commencing this year.
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EQUITY