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  I went to Ford’s West Coast design center in Irvine, California, several times right after the carnage from the financial crisis had begun to abate and saw One Ford in the flesh. I also saw the consequences of the crisis: Ford had occupied the entire building, just off the freeway, when it had owned Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, and Aston Martin. But by the time I dropped in, those premium brands had been sold off, and half the building was leased to Taco Bell. The luxury brands were leftovers from the Nasser years, and Ford had sold them, one by one or in pairs (as with Jaguar and Land Rover), to clarify its portfolio and quit wasting money developing and supporting those snazzy nameplates.

  One event in Irvine centered on the Fiesta, an inexpensive small car; Ford had enjoyed success with the Fiesta in Europe and had decided to make a bigger push for it in the United States, where gas prices were high and incomes had been reduced if not destroyed. Another event centered on the new Ford Taurus, a nameplate Mulally himself had asked to have brought back. This was a full-size four-door that was aimed squarely at families.

  By 2010, Ford was in a solid position with the core products. That year a hybrid version of the Fusion sedan would win the prestigious North American Car of the Year award at the Detroit auto show. Later that year I would get a good look at One Ford in action, when I made my annual visit to the Los Angeles auto show in November. Displaying a range from small cars to big trucks, and with plenty of Mustangs on the floor as a reminder that Ford hadn’t abandoned its high-performance efforts, the carmaker proved it could build just about anything a customer might want. If you needed a car or a truck or a big truck or a hybrid, Ford had you covered.

  This sort of product perfection is rare in the auto industry. (Volks­wagen, for one, had for years been trying to stage a comeback in the U.S. market and kept getting its mix of cars and SUVs wrong.) And it never lasts, as models come to the middle of their market cycles and often have to wait for full-on redesigns, subsisting instead on what carmakers call “refreshes.” But at Ford, the stars aligned as the U.S. market began its slow recovery from a cratered annual sales number of 10 million after the financial crisis. And even as the market improved and gas prices dropped, and as customers were less interested in Fiestas and Fusions, shifting back to Explorer SUVs and F-150 pickups, Ford was prepared to take ongoing risks.

  A big one was the risky redesign of the F-150, Ford’s undisputed cash cow, in 2015. The F-150—sometimes called the “F-Series,” an evocation of its existence in the U.S. market for four decades encompassing changes in the numbers associated with its name and the addition of larger pickups—accounted for nearly 800,000 vehicle sales in 2015. Even in years when the market isn’t epically strong, the F-150 wins the sales crown. It has been America’s top seller for thirty-four years in a row, through multiple recessions and downturns and even one near-depression. It’s almost always the best-selling vehicle every month, although it was briefly dethroned in May 2008, when the Toyota Camry and Corolla and the Honda Civic captured more buyers. No one was surprised by this, given the economic conditions at the time, but the vulnerability of Ford’s most important vehicle would spur a major change in how it was put together.

  The federal government also played a role, by requiring that automakers raise their CAFE standards starting in 2017 and stretching into 2021. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency, established that the new standard across an automaker’s fleet would have to rise to forty-one miles per gallon.

  Full-size pickups don’t get anywhere near forty-one miles per gallon. The F-150, in its popular eight-cylinder-engine versions, doesn’t even get twenty. The automakers have some options here. One is to build more of what they often derisively refer to as “compliance” vehicles—fuel-sipping small cars, hybrids, and electric cars—which collectively raise their CAFE numbers but unfortunately don’t sell very well and can cost more to build than they bring in when they do sell.

  The argument in the industry is that the government is forcing it to build higher-MPG, lower-emissions vehicles to satisfy a mandated number, but that customers don’t want and won’t buy those vehicles, defeating the purpose of raising the CAFE standards in the first place. Smaller engines in larger vehicles, an obvious work-around, aren’t an option, because the buyers of big trucks and SUVs want power—and not just to accelerate on freeways but so that they can use their vehicles to tow trailers and boats.

  The best solution, apart from petitioning the government to extend the CAFE deadlines (something the automakers did actively in 2015 and 2016), is to develop new engines that achieve higher MPG ratings without sacrificing power, and reducing the weight of vehicles, taking advantage of a basic rule of physics that says an engine will consume less gas if it has to move less weight around.

  Ford tackled the problem using both of those tactics. Interestingly, the payoff would help lead to the new GT that was revealed at the 2015 Detroit auto show—a car that was about as far from being a “compliance” effort as any ever produced.

  The huge bet that One Ford enabled was the redesign of the F-150 to include more lightweight aluminum than the heavier steel used previously. The huge risk was that F-150 buyers wouldn’t accept that a truck made of lighter material would be able to stand up to the punishment that F-150s routinely absorb. Owners want to be able, without worry, to throw anything into the bed of their Ford trucks. And anything could mean, say, an antique sideboard, bales of hay, the rusted cast-iron engine of an old Ford truck, a few hundred pounds of dirt, a harvest of tomatoes, eight bags of soccer balls, three dogs, a chopped-down and sectioned oak tree, six Marshall 100-watt amps, or twenty-five cinder blocks. Would the new aluminum-bodied truck be able to take it?

  The lighter material was a risk-abatement strategy: Ford needed to be able to continue to sell its very profitable F-150 in massive numbers and to avoid offsetting its lower fuel economy by adding a bunch of Fiestas to the fleet. Some owners might doubt the plan, but Ford had to power through their reservations and convince them that the new F-150 could get the job—any job—done. One clever way the company addressed this anxiety was by calling the new aluminum alloy used for the pickup “military grade.” The appellation was accurate, given that the chosen aluminum alloy had been defined as military grade for years. Any skeptic might have asked whether “military grade” meant “war-zone grade,” and Ford would have answered no, but the notion that the mighty F-150 would be made of the same flimsy, crushable stuff as a Bud Light can was dispelled.

  The launch of the new truck wasn’t without problems. The assembly lines had to be revamped to bolt the new aluminum components together, whereas with the old truck welding was used. There weren’t enough F-150s, with enough of the extras that truck buyers require, to satisfy demand, so Ford had to play catch-up. But by spring of 2016 the risk had paid off, as F-150 sales continued to make their historic contribution to Ford’s bottom line—and perhaps more important, customers had few complaints about the new truck.

  Prior to rolling out the aluminum F-150, Ford developed a new engine technology, also intended to make the new CAFE standards easier to meet. Turbocharging had been popular in the U.S. market in the 1980s, but it was mainly provided by European automakers. Turbos were synonymous with Saab and Volvo, and Porsche had convinced enthusiasts that turbos were the way to go to extract more power from smaller engines (a good thing, as a smaller engine improves handling and speed). But American automakers shied away from the technology, preferring to put big V-8s in their trucks and SUVs, while dropping smaller V-6 engines into the midsize cars and four-cylinder motors into the compacts. These engines were simpler to build without the addition of the turbocharger, which uses exhaust gas to spin a turbine that compresses intake air before feeding it to the combustion chambers, thereby enriching the fuel-air mixture and yielding more power per cylinder. Presto! A smaller displacement V-6 can thereby match a V-8.

  The new C
AFE standards meant V-8s couldn’t make up as large a portion of the automakers’ fleets as they did previously, so Ford needed to engineer a way to achieve better fuel efficiency without compromising power.

  The solution was a new generation of turbocharged V-6 motors that Ford dubbed EcoBoost (“boost” is the technical term for how much extra power the turbocharger is adding to the engine’s output, and some cars actually include a gauge so that drivers can monitor it). Turbos have two drawbacks. One is that the additional power they deliver can take a few seconds to develop before it becomes available to the drive wheels as rotational energy, called “torque.” This is the dreaded “turbo lag.” The second is that turbos create heat, which is the enemy of engines: old turbos had a tendency to get so hot that they baked lubricants into their compressor blades and burned out seals: after a while, they leaked and needed to be overhauled.

  EcoBoost promised to turn all the old turbo anxieties into fading memories—and in execution, the new engines lived up to their ambitions. They were twin-scroll turbochargers, more complicated than the older types of turbos but capable of applying the principles of turbo compression more efficiently, which when combined with direct-fuel injection made for better MPG ratings and far less turbo lag.

  The motors were put into F-150s and won over customers who formerly would have bought only pickups with a V-8. The EcoBoost technology also showed up in smaller cars with four-cylinder engines, providing snappy acceleration along the lines of that found in sports cars. But it was on the track that the EcoBoost technology truly made its mark.

  It was an immediate success. In January 2015, Chip Ganassi Racing—a frequent partner with Ford—won the Rolex 24 at Daytona, the American race that most closely resembles Le Mans, with a prototype car using a 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6 built by Roush Yates Racing Engines. That engine normally cranks out 365 horsepower, but Roush Yates was able to jack it up to 600.

  At the time, it might have seemed to racing fans that Ford was just experimenting with a new engine. Automakers do it all the time. But the company had something much bigger in mind.

  Chapter 3

  Behold the New GT

  Like many impressive creations, the new GT wasn’t exactly born—it was coaxed to life, slowly and haltingly at first, and then with the accelerator pedal jammed to the floor.

  Mark Fields had always wanted to build a true successor to the GT40, a completely new car, not an homage like the GTs of 2004 to 2006. As much as the fiftieth anniversary of the Le Mans win presented the perfect opportunity, Ford’s recovery from the financial crisis made the timing difficult.

  For Ford, going back to Le Mans with a Mustang would have been a lot easier. Scott Atherton, the president of the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA)—sports-car racing’s governing body in North America—told me the Le Mans comeback was originally supposed to be Mustang-based. Raj Nair, Ford’s chief technical officer and the final decision-maker for the GT racing and road-car program, said the same thing. That would have made sense. There are Mustangs that can be upgraded to endurance-race worthiness, with a setup similar to what Corvette Racing had run in the IMSA series and had used to win Le Mans: a big V-8 up front, rear-wheel drive out back, and a downforce wing rising from the trunk lid.

  There also wouldn’t have been issues with satisfying the requirements of both IMSA and the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (or FIA, the overseer of European motorsports), which stipulate that cars in the GT racing classes have road-going counterparts. (The reason for this is that endurance race cars are supposed to be test beds for technologies that ordinary consumers will someday experience.) Ford had been building Mustangs since 1965. The car was already an established racing platform, although Ford didn’t have a racing team that enjoyed the full support, funding, and sponsorship of the entire Ford Performance organization—what’s known in racing as a factory team. That could have been corrected easily; there was no shortage of available high-performance Mustang packages. Raj Nair told me much later that there had indeed been discussion about returning to Le Mans in 2015 with a Mustang to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the iconic “pony car.” But for Ford, a Le Mans Mustang would have been a huge missed chance.

  At the highest executive level, Ford decided in late 2014 to scrap the Mustang idea and take the plunge with a brand-new supercar. It would be the centerpiece of an entire division of the automaker, showcasing the fastest, the most exciting, and the most exotic: Ford Performance.

  And yet it made sense to worry about the GT’s Le Mans chances just a bit, given that the Ferrari 488, with 606 horsepower, had an extra dollop of grunt. Its predecessor, the 458, was also one of the premier sports cars on earth—and a familiar racing weapon, running in both IMSA and FIA World Endurance Championship events for years. It was a reminder that although Ford had ­NASCAR and was no stranger to racing, Ferrari had already staked out territory that the new GT would be attempting to storm.

  I had driven the road version of the 488, and also several versions of the Chevrolet Corvette, including the pride of the Bowling Green, Kentucky, factory, the Z06—Chevy’s own front-engine ­supercar—and the C7 Stingray, the seventh generation of the iconic Vette. The Z06 has a 650-horsepower motor and is one of the most mentally demanding cars I’ve ever driven. It has so much power, available anytime you want it, that it’s hard to take it easy, even when you’re just cruising around. The Stingray, on the other hand, was simply magnificent, with a 455-horsepower V-8 that sounds like eight angry angels with a jones for speed.

  The C7.R sat in between and was given the bespoke race-car treatment by Pratt & Miller, a Michigan-based shop that has been hooked up with Chevy for almost a decade. Pratt & Miller had constructed a 491-horsepower machine that had been getting it done on the track since 2013. The C7.R was also the defending Le Mans champ from 2015. Together, Pratt & Miller and Chevy had won Le Mans eight times.

  It’s fair to say that because of its record, General Motors saw Ford as something of an arriviste in its return to Le Mans. But as good as the Vettes had been, it was also clear that in 2016, a change was afoot in sports-car racing, shifting the balance of power back toward mid-engine cars in the old GT40 legacy and away from front-engine and rear-engine designs. In fact, it was strongly rumored that Chevy was going to create a mid-engine Corvette, and I have to believe that the project was driven in part by what Ford had done with the GT.

  In Dearborn, the GT started in a basement, with a mysterious sign, a key, and a team of designers who, once the cover had been pulled off their baby, were shocked that they’d been able to keep it secret, right up until the car was revealed in Detroit.

  “For once, it’s true,” Moray Callum told me, with a guffaw, when I talked to him in early 2016, right after the new GT’s racing debut at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, a few months before the road car would be available for preorders.

  Callum, who is Scottish, heads up Ford design. He’s from a car-design family. His older brother, Ian, dictates the look of Jaguars and staged his own triumph in late 2015, with the debut of Jag’s first-ever SUV, the gorgeous F-PACE.

  Moray Callum doesn’t exactly look or act the part of a car designer. His nature is cheerful, not intense or austere. He dresses unpretentiously, forgoing the sleek black suits, gigantic and costly wristwatches, and severe eyeglasses that most auto-industry observers associate with the more artsy employees of the business. He originally wanted to be a veterinarian, before a season working on a farm convinced him to pursue another calling. First he tried architecture and then he found car design.

  Callum landed at Ford in 1995, after stints with Chrysler and the French automaker Peugeot. He worked for J Mays, a car designer’s car designer. Mays had crafted the revived Beetle for Volkswagen, oversaw the rehabilitation of Audi, and conceived a retro-modern Thunderbird for Ford. In 2001 Callum took over design for Mazda (Ford and Mazda had a partnership from 1979 until the financial crisis
forced a split in 2010), where one of his first responsibilities was a revamp of the beloved MX-5 Miata roadster. He has, to say the least, been around the design block a few times, and for a kid who initially wanted to heal animals and then create buildings, it’s been a tremendous ride. Talking to him, you can tell he’s relished every minute of the job. Nearly sixty by the time the Le Mans fiftieth anniversary rolled around, he would get to see a design he dreamed up make a run for renewed glory on a course that has mythical meaning for the Ford Motor Company.

  That he was chuckling about how the GT was created, rather than shedding tears, was a testament to his own lineage.

  “The Scottish are a nation of engineers,” Ian Callum told the New York Times in 2006. “But they are very creative engineers. They seem dour, but underneath they are quite romantic.”

  Romance is all well and good, but secrecy was of the essence for the GT. It was, however, an offbeat sort of secrecy, more garage band than arena rock, more skunkworks than high-profile industrial undertaking. If the massive River Rouge plant signified Henry Ford’s ambition and defined Ford during the automaker’s mid-century heyday—then the mysterious, low-key GT studio defined how Ford wanted to develop this most exciting of post-financial-crisis cars.

  “We kept it quiet, for obvious reasons,” Callum told me. “Very few people knew what was going on, and a lot of executives didn’t see the car until the day of the Detroit show.”