Ford GT: Can The GT Take On Modern Competition?

The Ford GT has waged a successful war against the motoring establishment on track, but the new road-going version faces a much tougher battle.

- Steve Sutcliffe

It would be all too easy to introduce Ford’s new supercar with endless references to yesteryear, because we all know where the story for the Ford GT began… Henry Ford tries to buy a Ferrari with which to compete at Le Mans in the 1960s, Enzo rudely rebuffs him, Henry builds his own version of a Ferrari to do the job. It’s called the GT40 and with it he humbles Ferrari. The end.

Except there’s an intriguing new story doing the rounds about the birth of the latest Ford GT, and it only recently came to light at the car’s launch in the US. Initially Ford wasn’t going to build a new GT at all, it seems. Instead it wanted to return to Le Mans with a Mustang, and to then create a road car off the back of the racing project to market the Mustang globally.

For one whole year, it transpires, Ford tried and failed to come up with an über-racing Mustang to take on the 911s, Corvettes, Ferraris and Astons that compete at Le Mans each year. At the same time it tried to craft a roadgoing version to coincide with the Le Mans project to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary of its victory at the famous 24-hour race.

And then something called Project Silver happened. After a year Ford reached the painful realisation that the car they’d been attempting to engineer had begun to bear no resemblance whatsoever to a road-going Mustang. Which meant the marketing would never work. So the idea of going back to Le Mans with a Mustang was canned and replaced with a top-secret skunk works project – Project Silver – to build an all-new GT to take endurance racing, plus a corresponding road car to go with it. And thus, at the end of 2013, the idea for an all new Ford GT was born.