Ford GT40 CHALLENGE | Top Gear - Part 1

can I talk about the gt40 now yes good you see over the years a number of kit car manufacturers have made copies of it they've been kind of plastic facsimile is with that Rover v8 engine that you were talking about earlier absolute some had the Mustang engine as well and to be honest some we're pretty good I mean these are very good indeed but now Ford themselves has had a go at making a copy so I think of it really as a gt40 for the 21st century this isn't it this is the old gt40 the one from the sixties the seven liter 200 mile-an-hour monster the one the my times on the trot [Music] [Music] this is the new version which ford says merely takes its inspiration from the old one but it has the same massive haunches the same enormous tires the same Emmental front end all full of holes [Music] when you put the two of them together they really do look exactly the same except for one thing the old car was called the gt40 because it's 40 inches tall look it isn't even as high as my legs and as a result of that I've never been able to fit inside let me show you the extent of the problem okay you have to kind of thread your legs between the steering wheel and the gear leaver there we go okay I've got my knees under the dash my feet are on the pedals but technically you have to say I'm not really in the car though it's kind of a fat peg in a small hole really happily however the view car is 43 inches tall which means I can fit inside and that means I can take it for a drive by actually drove one of these cars in America last year but it was a pre-production mule this this is the one hundred and the eleven thousand pound finished product the customers will actually buy so let's see what it's like the acceleration is Thomas shake it actually hurts your neck muscles right but then it would because this car develops 550 brake horsepower and good pound-feet of torque it's not just faster than the old racer it's faster than any car even by today into burn a hundred hundred ten hundred twenty into more sixty the speed so it's faster than the Porsche Carrera GT into the McCain Mercedes the key to this ferocious speed is of course the engine it's a five point four liter supercharged v8 but don't get too excited because it says here it was hand-built with pride by Ronald ken basically it was hand-built by Ron and Ken and the block well well that comes for one of those yep the GT has pretty much exactly the same engine as a Ford Lightning pickup truck just like the old gt40 damn this is a blue-collar working-class hero taking a sledgehammer to the blue blooded automotive aristocracy the funny thing is though is it's all very civilized what was expecting it to sound like a wolf stuck in a jet trap 30 miles an hour now and I barely have to raise my voice this is amazing when you think that huge engine and the whirring supercharger melted just an inch here is the suspension which efficiency from all the bumps and ridges because it's so quiet and comfortable you sometimes phillotson of course it isn't the staring for instance is incredibly direct and incredibly precise just after one over the white lines and I can tell whether they used gloss or emulsion paint gloss then there's the breaks that deceleration is so ferocious it kind of pulls your head forwards like a giraffe at this rate my neck muscles a little bit more understeer than I was expecting here but there's so much power we can cure it this car is a sensation

Channel: Top Gear

Views: 6,186,760

Keywords: BBC, BBC Worldwide, Top Gear, Autos, Cars, Motoring, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, GT40, Ford, Ford GT40

Id: 0UAnlMNvK8Y

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2010