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  For all practical purposes, Ford designed one of its most striking, exotic, historic, and widely anticipated (not to mention rapturously received) cars in the automotive equivalent of a broom closet.

  “We formed a very small team, and we literally put them in the basement of our Product Development Center, all the way in the back, where nobody ever goes,” Callum said.

  “It had been used for milling and storage,” he said, before confessing that he and his small team of designers had engaged in a “little bit of subterfuge” to keep the GT under wraps and away from prying eyes as it was perfected.

  The ruse went all the way to top, where Mark Fields himself enjoyed all the spy-movie secrecy.

  Then there was the sign.

  “We put a printed sign on a piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper, and it said something mundane like ‘Past Model Parts Depot,’” Fields said. “And then we challenged the team to come up with a successor.”

  Beyond the sign and the need-to-know-basis security, the design process also included waiting until Sundays to wheel the car out from the basement so it could be studied under natural light. According to Christopher Svensson, Ford’s design director for the Americas, design reviews were started at seven o’clock in the evening and went on until eleven.

  And then there was the key.

  Callum seemed to think this small detail was the most hilarious aspect of the entire double top-secret design process for the GT.

  “It was physically a metal key,” he said, chuckling, clearly amused that a vehicle as high-tech as the GT—it’s made almost entirely of carbon fiber, and the fabrication techniques that went into building it allowed for some fairly outlandish curves and shapes—would be guarded by what was the state of the art for security in 1930.

  The key was later replaced by security cards, but the birthplace of the GT wasn’t similarly upgraded.

  Ford released a video of the studio in 2015. Anyone expecting a tour of a state-of-the-art facility, full of chic people sipping lattes and muttering about aesthetics while debating curves and scoops, would have been greatly disappointed. The top-secret GT studio was, for one thing, crowded. There wasn’t much room for the camera to navigate the gloomy, grungy space, and Callum and his design team were packed in with foam mock-ups, clay models, rolling bulletin boards covered with conceptual renderings and engineering studies, various bits and pieces that would go into the finished car, and the obligatory computer equipment to envision and execute the GT.

  It looked far more like a garage set up for hot-rodding on a semipro scale than a state-of-the art design mecca, a Motown equivalent of Ford’s lovely and well-equipped facility in southern California.

  In Dearborn, there was a buzzing sense that Callum and his guys were up to something. And the team stoked the impression that it had something under wraps—quite literally. Callum recounted a holiday party at which various Ford designers created snowmen to show off their design chops.

  “Ours was in the corner,” he recalled. “It was covered by a sheet, and it had a padlock on it.”

  That was a clear signal that Callum’s team probably wasn’t creating a new Explorer. There was a fresh and exciting car on the horizon, and figuring out what it would be was left to the deductive faculties of Ford employees. A little math, of course, and an ear to the grapevine, a finger on the thrum of the rumor mill, would have led to reasonable guesses about a Le Mans car. What savvy scrutinizers of Callum’s secret design workshop couldn’t know was that the GT was being developed simultaneously as a road car and a race car. (In an interesting modern-day twist, among the few people in the know was a small group of Microsoft Xbox video-game designers, who were working to include the GT in the Forza Motorsport 6 update, which came out in 2016.)

  Multimatic Motorsports, Ford Performance’s race-car builder, would bolt together two machines north of the U.S.–Canadian border, near Toronto, a few hours from Detroit by car, and two others in England, for the European side of the Le Mans campaign. The demands of constructing a race car are significantly different from those of creating a road car. For example, a race car needs to be easy to take apart, so that it can be repaired as quickly as possible, and in some cases race cars have less-sophisticated components than their road-car counterparts, depending on the regulations of the governing body of the series they compete in.

  Multimatic had expertise with carbon-fiber fabrication, a vital aspect of modern race-car and supercar production. Light but strong, carbon fiber is an ideal material to use for constructing racing vehicles. It’s essentially threads of carbon glued together in tidy fashion with a polymer, then treated to create a reinforced plastic material that can be shaped into just about anything, from a smartphone case to a supercar body panel. Multimatic had gotten skilled at carbon-fiber fabrication from building high-performance race cars, most of which are now made of the stuff. The advantages of carbon fiber are numerous: it’s ten times stronger than aluminum and eight times stronger than steel, can be sculpted into a variety of shapes, resists heat and corrosion very effectively, and doesn’t fatigue as easily as other materials, thanks to its flexibility. For years, automakers have tried to figure out how to use it in more mainstream vehicles, but carbon fiber, at around twelve dollars a pound, is also extremely expensive; aluminum is only about two dollars per pound, and steel is less than a dollar. For that reason, high-end road cars often use aluminum, while mass-market vehicles are made with good old-fashioned steel.

  Only 500 GTs for the road and four for the track would initially be built, with two racing in North America and two in Europe. The car would be exceptionally rare, and that low production number, along with the steep price tag, signaled that although Ford was creating the race cars and road cars at the same time, the GT was first and foremost a competitive machine, committed to race in both the United States and Europe until 2019. Every other vehicle that it would race against in 2016 would be built (in some cases had been built) in far greater numbers for the road and would not be so strictly limited in terms of total production.

  Interestingly, although the new GT was created under these unusual conditions, it wasn’t a tense or difficult process. Under the circumstances, this was remarkable.

  “It was less of a challenge,” Callum said, “than designing, say, the next-generation Fiesta”—that small Ford vehicle I had checked out in Irvine several years before. An inexpensive mass-market car like that has to be designed and built to a price point, engineered for the production of hundreds of thousands of units in many different countries. When designing such a vehicle, you’re always deciding what not to do.

  The GT was different. “We tried to stretch the limits as much as possible,” Callum said.

  He got the nod to design the supercar about eighteen months before its scheduled debut at the Detroit show in January 2015. “It was a great privilege,” Callum said, but he quickly added that he didn’t sweat the process of assembling the team, nor did he cherry-pick a band of specialists to gather a GT Special Forces unit. “We had people fresh out of design school, and we had people with a lot of experience. What we were seeking was some naïveté. And in the end it was the most collaborative project of my career.”

  Such a laid-back approach didn’t diminish the daunting task ahead. “The original Le Mans–winning GT is one car that we look back on and say, ‘We got everything right,’” he said.

  Once design began in earnest, the requirement of making the 2016 deadline for Le Mans entry drove everything. Callum had just over a year to create something breathtaking. But the work went fast. The ideas were in place, the grand theories had been cultivated in advance, and so it all came down to execution. That was all it took to create a machine that would dazzle at an epic level.

  Three months in, Callum and the GT team had solidified the basic design theme. The new GT had to be stunning, but it also had to evoke the GT40—without repeating the look o
f the mid-2000s GT—and it had to be an effective race car. “The racing rules helped us,” he said. “What the racing guys wanted was what we wanted.”

  That included even the most exotic aspects of the GT: signature “flying buttress” wings that curved down from the rear roofline to the back wheels; Callum called these wings a “natural choice.”

  “It came in early,” he recalled. So did the overall aerodynamic layout of the car.

  Team member Garen Nicoghosian, who oversaw the exterior design of the car, essentially envisioned the GT as a combination of machine and sculpture, whose first job was to interact dynamically with the atmosphere. He described the body of the car to Hot Rod Network as a “collection of items that collect air, avoid air, or make better use of air.” Even the doughnut-shaped taillights are designed to vent air as it rushes over, around, and through the GT.

  The familiar concept of the sports car as work of art was, in this case, derived directly from history. Callum noted that the original GT40, although it has been characterized as more of a blunt, industrial instrument than the Ferraris it trounced in the 1960s, was sculptural.

  The Le Mans–winning 1960s cars were a combination of smoothly crafted front ends and harshly rectangular rears, low and wide. Even today, they cut a striking image, one of brute power wrapped in a taut skin: the muscles are slablike, the sinews tight.

  The GT40 of the 1960s was considered gorgeous by some but an American brute by others. Today, given its size and scale, it doesn’t look especially crude. But whatever beauty it might have possessed in rough form in 1965 and ’66 was far surpassed by the Italians and their aesthetic flair later in that decade and the one to follow. Ironically, even though Ford ended Ferrari’s reign at Le Mans, it was Ford that retreated from the supercar era. There wouldn’t be another GT until the early 2000s, and it was more replica than aesthetic advance, although it did beat the performance of the GT40’s titanic 7.0-liter V-8 engine with a more modern and compact 5.4-liter supercharged V-8. Otherwise, however, it lacked the old GT40’s raw threat. The infamous British car journalist and erstwhile Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson called it “civilized.”

  No one would have said that about the GT40. Chris Amon, the man who drove the winning 1966 Le Mans GT40 with Bruce McLaren, reminisced in 2016 about how the car nearly beat him to death. After a driving stint, he would immediately shed his sweat-soaked racing suit and have a shower.

  The bottom line was that the GT40 was built to race, and to win Le Mans, and everything about it flowed from that purpose. Style and comfort were completely secondary. The follow-up GT was, in many respects, an homage to the original car, with modern creature comforts thrown in.

  Callum called the new GT “a synergy of design theory and engineering,” defusing one of the oldest disagreements in automotive history: that between designers coming up with outlandish creations and the guys who actually build the cars telling them that they need to dial it back.

  Not much was dialed back on the GT. Even the engine was a no-compromise undertaking—although it isn’t the screaming V-8 of a Ferrari 458, or the burbling, potent V-12 of a Lamborghini Aventador.

  Instead, the new GT, stunning on the outside, is under the hood an advertisement for Ford’s shift to turbocharged power plants. The beauty of a turbo engine, especially in a race car, is that it adds less weight overall than a supercharger, which requires the engine, rather than exhaust gases, to drive the increase in air pressure.

  The drawback is heat: turbos get hot—extremely hot. So the air has to be cooled, as does the turbocharger itself. The trick with turbos on the racetrack is to make sure that they’re durable enough to withstand, in the case of endurance racing, hours and hours of intense heat. In the GT, there are two turbochargers assisting the V-6 in cranking out 600 horsepower.

  There are far more powerful supercars—they fall into an ele­vated class now referred to as “hypercar,” or even “megacar,” and can notch horsepower ratings of 1,000 and above—but the GT was designed, from the beginning, to race in the GT Le Mans class, not against those monster machines in the prototype class. In fact, of the cars in the GTE Pro class (GTLM in North America) for the 2016 season, only the Ferrari 488, itself featuring a turbocharged eight-cylinder mid-engine configuration, could be called a purpose-built race car, since all Ferraris have racing in their DNA. The rest of the field was made up of sports cars adapted for racing. That’s not a knock on those designs—the Corvettes in the GTE Pro class performed fantastically well in sports-car racing against the Ferrari 488’s predecessor, the 458. But like the GTs of the 1960s, the new cars were created with the track in mind. Not many people would get to keep one in the garage. By contrast, Ferrari sells some 7,000 cars a year (although most are not the mid-engine supercars).

  When Ford first unveiled the GT in Detroit in January 2015, it didn’t say anything about the cost or how many road cars it would be making. These details it revealed at the Chicago Auto Show in February: the new GT was going to cost in the mid-$400,000s, and Ford would be making 500 of them, 250 a year for two years. And the company would be scrupulous about who got to enjoy the unique pleasure of parting with all that money to buy one. In April 2016, Ford announced that it would be accepting applications for GT ownership over the following month, via a special website that featured a “configurator,” which enabled prospective buyers to spec out their cars, choosing exterior colors, interior setups, wheels, and even the color of racing stripes.

  It was a savvy idea. When the application period closed on May 12, Ford had received 6,506 fully completed applications to purchase the superhot supercar, and almost 200,000 people had used the configurator. (The car was so successful that Ford extended production for an additional two years, making the announcement in mid-August. Year three would address the waiting list from the initial application process, while year four would allow for reapplications. The entire process would also enable Ford to keep racing for three years after the debut.)

  “We’re excited by the amount of enthusiasm fans are showing for the new Ford GT,” said Dave Pericak in a press release. And the fans were showing plenty of enthusiasm. Hundreds of potential buyers submitted videos with their applications, and many stressed their social-media reach in addition to showing how they’d use the car—whether to drive around town, like eGarage, whose video showed a GT being used to run errands with a baby in the passenger seat; take it on the track, like Brooks Weisblat, owner of DragTimes.com; or make it part of a large collection, like John Kiely and his father, Jack Kiely, who run a construction business in Long Branch, New Jersey.

  It was generally assumed the fix was in for certain VIPs to jump to the head of the buying list. But Henry Ford III, the great-great-grandson of Henry Ford himself and the marketing director for Ford’s Performance division, told me that the company was starting with as level a playing field as possible for future GT ownership. Prospective buyers had to fill out an extensive questionnaire as part of their application, answering questions about whether they were collectors, or owners of a current Ford GT or any Ford, whether they did business with the automaker or were involved in Ford-affiliated charities, and whether they considered themselves as “an influencer of public opinion.” From the application, which inquired whether the prospective buyer held a motorsports sanctioning-body competition license, it seemed clear that Ford wanted people who didn’t just drive the car but used all its abilities. Additionally, buyers had to agree not to sell their car for a quick profit.

  Henry Ford III is the embodiment of trustworthiness. He has a bright, uncomplicated, Midwestern look—before he joined the family business, he spent some time as a teacher, and you can tell he was probably well liked by his students. His blond hair isn’t worn in a fancy cut, and I’ve never seen him wearing anything more fashionable than a polo shirt and a pair of slacks. He’s tall, but he doesn’t lord it over anybody, and when he talks, you can tell he’s smart—and also sharp en
ough to use straightforward English, never veering into business-speak.

  But Henry III, like all Fords, does possess some formidable diplomatic skills. He stressed that initial consideration for sales would be given to existing Ford GT owners (about 10,000 cars of the previous version had been produced), as well as well-known owners of Ford’s other high-performance cars. None of this was unreasonable. It’s standard procedure among the world’s supercar manufacturers. Most of the people offered the opportunity to buy Ferrari supercars are existing Ferrari owners—and this is likewise the case for the more exotic versions of Porsches and Lambor­ghinis. There are exceptions: The Audi R8 is produced in decent enough numbers that just about anyone can buy into being Tony Stark, the billionaire playboy superhero played by Robert Downey Jr. in the Iron Man franchise. And certain bargain supercars, like the Corvette Z06 and the Nissan GT-R (affectionately labeled “Godzilla” by enthusiasts), turn heads owing to their reputations and looks, not because spotting one on the freeway is a rare event.

  Henry III was certainly proud of the new GT. “It sends a chill up my spine,” he said, when I asked him about going back to Le Mans. But he also expressed awe at what Callum and his team, as well as the Ford Performance engineering group, had pulled off with the GT.

  “It really has been the highlight of my career to work side by side with the designers and engineers,” he said. “They created a masterpiece. Every time I see the car, I take a step back.”

  Effectively, however, not one but two masterpieces were created at the same time. And they were not tortured productions. There were no glitches or setbacks for Callum and his design team, although, because the new GT would be both a race car and road car, some compromises would be required, mainly for the road-going GT. (The racer would be stripped down and highly customized, with few creature comforts.) The up-swinging scissor doors required that the air-conditioning and heating vents be positioned in an unusual way, but as Amko Leenarts, Ford’s Netherlands-born interior design director, explained to me, it wasn’t especially difficult to develop the cockpit for the two-seater. He echoed Callum’s comment that with something as focused as a supercar, much of the design takes care of itself, owing to the obvious spatial constraints that the designers are presented with. Additionally, there’s an assumption that a $400,000-plus car will contain lots of premium materials, but no potential customer expects a Rolls-Royce when he or she slips inside.