Return to Glory Page 8
One of the few surprises in store for eventual GT owners was what Multimatic vice president Larry Holt—an elusive man with a wild mane of curly gray hair, who was handling the simultaneous engineering of the GT road and race cars—called its “cozy” driver and passenger compartment, in a January 2016 interview with Car magazine. Anyone who has ever been in a Corvette Stingray, a Lamborghini Huracán, a Ferrari supercar, or even a Mazda Miata will tell you that a two-seater isn’t about creature comforts. But with the Ford GT, there was an additional wrinkle: although Callum and his designers had been able to go for the dramatic with the exterior, the interior’s scale would have to be more purposeful. The ultimate mission of the car, in the end, was to accommodate one driver and to go fast. So Multimatic and Ford Performance used what Holt told Car was the smallest interior on the market in 2014, in the United States or Europe, as their benchmark: the ultra-snug Lotus Elise, a roadster that’s twelve and a half feet long and weighs less than 2,000 pounds.
A Le Mans car has to be designed in a way that makes it easy to take apart and easy to put back together. All the aerodynamic elements need to be swappable, as does the gearbox. Brakes must be able to be changed in a matter of minutes (typically, the pads—the parts that fit inside calipers to squeeze down on alloy disks to slow the car from 200-plus miles per hour to 50—might be changed once or twice over twenty-four hours). Engine failure is much harder to manage—it can be done, although it’s generally fatal for winning. A blown engine usually means retiring the car.
A supercar for normal public motorways and freeways isn’t executed in the same way. As Raj Nair noted in a Ford video during the Le Mans lead-up, you built a race car from the tires up, starting with the point in contact with the track surface. “What do the tires want?” Nair asked.
A consumer supercar, Nair said, is designed around what the owners expect, and even though supercars used to be uncomfortable, those days are long gone. I’ve driven numerous supercars, and all the modern ones have modes that enable you to drive your Audi R8 or McLaren 675LT as if it were a Honda Accord. You can flip a switch and unleash the beast, but anyone who drops between $200,000 and upwards of a million and change on a supercar doesn’t want to be squashed into a stiff racing seat, thinly upholstered with fine leather but entirely lacking in padding. He or she also doesn’t want to be made to scrimp on infotainment. There should be more than two speakers and an AM/FM radio—much, much more. GPS navigation is a given. That supercars are sometimes called “GTs” is a bit of a misnomer, because a proper GT—a gran turismo or “grand touring” car—has a backseat and the engine in the front. The buyers of mid-engine supercars used to be OK with tremendous discomfort. Now they want nothing more extreme on the inside than what they’re used to in a daily driven BMW or Acura sports sedan.
Ford was lucky that the GT ended up being an unexpected breeze to design, engineer, and build, because the timetable, if the race car was going to be ready for a January debut in the United States, at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, was brutal. It would be OK if the supercar lagged the race car by a few months, as long as Ford could start auditioning buyers during the year. Multimatic could create some of the 250 model-year 2017 production vehicles that sold in 2016, rolling out into the light of day an actual operational, roadworthy GT, fully tested for safety and blessed by the governments of the United States and Europe.
But the race cars had to be ready for their first track tests in Canada by late spring 2015 and then for testing by late summer in the United States. Multimatic and Ford Performance nailed those milestones, which culminated in a full-day visit to Road Atlanta in Georgia on August 4. The GT was impressive.
“The first time we ran it was last spring,” Multimatic test driver Scott Maxwell told auto journalist Gordon Kirby. “I’ve tested a lot of out-of-the-box cars and I was the first guy to drive the car. You always know pretty quickly, just through experience, whether it’s going to be a dog or not. We weren’t near the limit. We were just shaking it down but my gut told me that this was going to be a good car. It just felt right.”
September would see the GTs flown to France, where FIA would check them out and determine whether any performance adjustments would be required to bring the cars in line with the other competitors in the GTE Pro class for the World Endurance Championship, of which Le Mans is the most prominent part. But it wouldn’t be the GTs’ first visit to France; tire maker Michelin explored the machine in June in order to get started developing the rubber that would quite literally meet the road at legendary racing venues on two continents.
The September FIA tests in France were the first indication that the GT Multimatic had built was extremely fast. Too fast, as it turned out, to enter the GTE Pro class without some tweaks. The racing authorities had two main ways to dial back the velocity of the swift new Fords. The first was fairly blunt: add weight. The GTs would come back to Europe forty-four pounds heavier, with lead-bar ballast weights bolted to the car by Ford and Chip Ganassi Racing and positioned in a way that wouldn’t damage the cars’ handling by unequally distributing the extra heft. The second was more specific to the turbocharged EcoBoost engine. Ford and Multimatic were instructed to reduce the car’s boost, making it less powerful than what had been specified for IMSA competition in North America. Boost is the amount of additional air pressure the turbochargers are creating, which translates into extra engine power. By dialing it up or down, engineers can make their race car go faster or slower, which enables them to meet the performance standards for their racing class.
The subtext in Europe for Ford and Multimatic, and eventually Ford Chip Ganassi Racing, was that, as Holt told Car magazine, FIA didn’t want a brand-new entrant to come “out of the box too hard.” As a racing pro with plenty of experience, he understood that if the GTs performed poorly in Europe when the WEC season started in April 2016, they could get back some boost, lose some weight, or enjoy a combination of both.
The GT program was hitting its benchmarks, but it wasn’t business as usual at Multimatic. A small contingent of engineers embedded with Ford would grow to dozens, working around the world. That was an advantage: the time differences enabled Multimatic to operate on a twenty-four-hour schedule, passing off responsibilities as the sun moved around the globe and the calendar closed in on the beginning of the IMSA and WEC seasons and marched inexorably toward Le Mans in June.
“This is a technological statement, taking on the best tech in the world,” Larry Holt said at the time, making Ford’s and Multimatic’s objectives clear. Raj Nair echoed Holt’s determination, insisting that GT had to be good as soon as it hit the track for the first time, because if it wasn’t, it would be hard to make it good, much less great.
The first GT race cars to break cover and run outside didn’t yet have their snazzy red-white-and-blue racing livery; they were a gloomy matte gray, almost charcoal. But the innovative shape was undeniable. And the car worked right away. It worked so well, in fact, that both the Ford and the Multimatic teams got nervous. It shouldn’t have been that easy.
Ford had pushed its luck and knew it, but there had been no major issues. The company hadn’t really built a true supercar before, although it had come close in 1995, with the GT90 concept car, a futuristic successor to the GT40 that, for a brief period, stoked some hopes about a Le Mans return. It never entered production, however. And while the EcoBoost engine had been raced by Ganassi in prototype-class cars, it had never been tested in sports-car competition, where the cars are heavier and handle differently, moving better through corners than the blistering-fast prototypes. But Le Mans in 2016 exerted an inexorable pull—it was the Gallic gravity well of deep history for Ford, epic and poetic in equal parts—and shaped Ford’s priorities. The schedule was merciless, the pressure extreme, the demands immense, the opportunity for disaster and disappointment ever present. The fate of the entire company wasn’t riding on the car, as it might have been with the new F-150, but the GT was a sy
mbol to end all symbols: of Ford’s determination, of its legacy, and of its revival.
On the marketing side, Ford was committed to using the new GT as a showcase for the technologies that it has developed. For Fields, a marketing guy at heart, it was a can’t-miss opportunity to sell EcoBoost not just as a good fuel-economy option but also as one of the best engines in the world. It could deliver good mileage in a pickup truck, it could pep up a small car—and it could win the most grueling race in the world.
“It was all about challenging traditions,” Fields told me, when I spoke to him at Le Mans in June. “The traditional approach would have been to put a big-ass V-8 in there, or let’s do another V-12 and stuff it in. But [the team] came back and said that they could use a 3.5-liter EcoBoost engine that produces over 600 horsepower. And what that did for Moray and the team was that it gave the designers huge degrees of freedom, because the engine is so compact.”
So the deliberate engineering choices led to a gorgeous yet functional design that few found anything to complain about. The car looked fantastic from every angle, with a front end that alluded to the legacy of past GT cars without being in their thrall. The lines then swept back to a compressed rear end, but with the wheels pushed out, providing an opening for Callum and his team to use the flying buttress, effectively an integrated wing. For over fifty years, cars have been trying to look like planes. The GT genuinely appeared as if it might be able to take flight.
But the car was specifically designed to do the opposite. Both the race car and the road car would need to use inverted lift—downforce—provided by the aerodynamics to stay stuck to the road or to the racecourse.
In automotive parlance, this is known as being “planted.” The impression that you get when driving a car like this, with these technologies included in the design and engineering, is that the machine is controllable enough to push to the edge of being uncontrollable. That line of demarcation is what separates a performance car from one that’s meant mainly to cruise around normally. Even a spirited sports sedan, such as the BMW 5 Series, will start to lurch and yaw and slip if you lay it into a corner too hard. This is the car’s way of telling you it’s had too much, and you need to dial it back, for safety’s sake.
The GT forestalls that reckoning until the last possible moment. You’ll never feel as if a supercar wants to roll over—because it doesn’t. The worst possible driving outcome is that the rear tires lose grip and the car slides, a phenomenon known as “oversteer”—and one that enthusiasts and professional drivers favor.
The driver can accommodate for oversteer by steering in the opposite direction and allowing the car to drift through a corner, ever so slightly. The goal isn’t to raise a glorious plume of tire smoke and drive the car sideways, as Jeremy Clarkson and his mates used to do on the hit BBC show Top Gear; that would cause the car’s speed to decline precipitously. Rather, the idea is to give the driver some play, so that the car can handle more fluidly, thanks to the combination of tire oversteer and driver counter-steering to compensate for it. The car feels alive. Many pro drivers prefer this to the jarring lack of movement they can experience in all-wheel-drive race cars that don’t approach unstable dynamics unless they’re driven on unpaved surfaces, as in off-road rally races.
If a driver gets the counter-steering technique wrong, the masses of horsepower being channeled to the wheels from the engine will cause the car to over-rotate and spin. But the GT’s mid-engine design helps to mitigate that possibility by placing the center of gravity at the center of the car, rather than parked out over the front wheels, as in a Corvette, or over the rear wheels, as in a Porsche 911. All other things being equal, a powerful mid-engine race car with rear-wheel-drive and a responsive transmission will outdrive everything else on a track.
That doesn’t mean it will win every race, especially an endurance race. But it will handle better and as a result be faster—thanks to the driver’s ability to tackle corners more aggressively—than competing layouts. It’s a difficult balance that the racing team is trying to strike. Endurance races can be won by objectively slower cars that simply don’t break down. But durable cars can also be blown off the track. The ideal Le Mans racer is tough enough and fast enough—but those “enoughs” are moving goalposts. You don’t want to show up on race day with the toughest slow car, or the fastest unreliable one. In the 1960s, Ford struck this balance perfectly.
The new GT was a vast technological improvement over the GT40s of the 1960s and a leap beyond the GTs of the mid-2000s, which although capable of racing wouldn’t have been competitive in the 2016 field at Le Mans, owing to their inability to generate adequate downforce. Obviously, there was no fooling around with turbochargers and six-cylinder engines fifty years ago. The GT40 was, by the standard set by the current GT Le Mans class of cars, utterly, completely, and defiantly old school. The mid-engine layout was the same, but the engine was a 486-horsepower, naturally aspirated V-8 with now-antiquated carburetors (Weber four-barrels, the state of the art for carburetors when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House). The top speed was stunning, nearly 200 miles per hour, but the zero-to-sixty time was only so-so by comparison with modern supercars: just over five seconds. In the 1960s, of course, that kind of acceleration would have drivers thinking about underwear changes, but in 2016, the new GT was punching it out in 3.3 seconds. The GT40’s V-8 had to keep only 2,700 pounds moving at a bludgeoning pace once the car got going. The driver managed all that grunt with a four-speed transmission: he was squashed in low, between a pair of fuel tanks that held in excess of forty gallons of gas in total, and he surveyed a minimalist, industrial dashboard with analog gauges and switches to control the GT40’s basic functions. The car was wide and low and fantastically uncomfortable—and only forty inches high, hence the “40” after the GT designation. A fire extinguisher rode shotgun. There was no domesticated, road-going version of this rude beast. What you saw was what you got. If you wanted to take it for a weekend spin in the country, you took out what had been raced on the track.
The driving was treacherous. Modern supercars and race cars have computers at their disposal to take the coarse edge off high-performance. The GT40 had nothing of the sort. There was no sophisticated modern brake technology, no traction control to sense when the rear wheels were being forced out by the power surging from that V-8. The car was wild, loud, hot. It would break your back, if you let it. It could do far worse.
It is possible to obtain a contemporary supercar that delivers that kind of raw driving experience, but it isn’t clear why anyone would want to go that retro. With the GT40, of course, there was no choice. To see what it would be like to enjoy its nearly complete lack of obvious charms, just watch the 1966 film A Man and a Woman, directed by Claude Lelouch and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as a French Le Mans driver who nearly dies at the wheel, prompting his wife’s suicide. He stays with racing, becomes enamored of Anouk Aimée, and spends a scene testing a GT40 on the track. The true range of the car’s ferocious nature is on display as it roars and whines through the steeply banked corners, while Trintignant takes the measure of its steering inside the deafening cockpit.
Nobody at Ford had any doubts that the GT supercar would be a runaway success. Drastically limiting production and setting the purchase price in the mid-$400,000 range would ensure that. The original GT40s had inspired a thriving replica market, with various period-appropriate V-8s dropped into the familiar chassis. The follow-up for the mid-2000s, which had sold for a mere $150,000, had achieved a cultish status. Sure, you could own a couple of Ferraris and a Lamborghini, maybe even something more exotic, like a Koenigsegg, Pagani, or Bugatti, but only a GT screamed “race car.” It wasn’t the car for millionaire wannabes. It was, and still is, the car for motoring enthusiasts with a deep sense of history. Henry Ford III wasn’t breaking a sweat about whether there would be 500 applications for Ford GT ownership. He was probably worried that there would be 500,000.
&nb
sp; The GT race car was an entirely different story. In the auto industry, a machine created for competition would ordinarily influence the design, technology, and engineering of sports cars intended for the driveway rather than the paddock. But there would be a logical sequence: racing would precede the road. The GT wasn’t wasting time on that front. The supercar would be in many respects the same vehicle as the one assaulting the track in Florida and California in 2016 before heading to France. Parallel development made it a special player: it was really the only true purpose-built race car in the GTLM and GTE Pro fields in 2016.
While Multimatic’s engineers were busting their asses to keep the car on schedule through 2014 and 2015, Ford was preparing for the GT’s coming-out party. It wasn’t a stressful process. In fact, it was the opposite.
“When we first went out for the first review of the GT clay models, our jaws dropped,” Fields said. The executive team paid a visit to the Ford Product Development Center in Dearborn for the long-awaited moment. “I was stunned,” he said, “at how quickly the teams worked and what they came back with.”
And when the GT was revealed at the 2015 Detroit auto show, there was a collective intake of breath.
Not that it should have been such a surprise. After all, rumors about it had been circulating for at least a year. Still, the excitement just kept growing about Ford’s storybook return to endurance racing in France to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 win. “This is a bigger deal than everyone expected,” Road & Track magazine wrote in October 2014, a full three months before the GT blew everyone’s doors off in Motown.