Birth Of A Notion

How the Ford GT Came to Be

- Angus MacKenzie

The new Ford GT was meant to be, but never meant to happen. The original plan, codenamed Project Silver, was to race a Mustang at Le Mans in 2016 and celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ford’s thrashing of Ferrari with a win over Maranello’s latest in the GTE class. However, when the team headed by Ford product development chief Raj Nair figured out how extensively the Mustang would need to be modified to make it competitive with a GTE-spec Ferrari 458, the project was killed.

But beating Ferrari once more at Le Mans was an itch Nair and his small group of enthusiasts— which included Ford Americas design director Chris Svensson and the newly minted head of Ford Performance and former Mustang chief engineer Dave Pericak—just had to scratch. So Nair authorized a skunkworks program, off the radar and out of sight to all but a mere handful of staffers in design and engineering. They worked out of a padlocked basement in Ford’s Product Development Center, with meetings held after hours and on weekends, and they focused on creating a car that could win at Le Mans.