Is a Ford GT the WORST road trip car ever?

do you have the documents and is that legal to which i said yes and the girl's like okay off you go from the moment that i first ever saw the new ford gt i instantly fell in love with the car and hoped it was going to be possible to one day acquire one and hopefully do many adventures and build up many memories with it down the line little did i know at the time how the process would run i'd been there at the launch of the car originally and at le mans as well when they were introducing the racing car but at that stage we didn't know the cost we didn't know the availability we knew it was going to be a rare car and hard to to get a hold of and i was lucky to go down the line and to secure an allocation 404 gt and as i think ford hoped i was determined that i would use the car to the maxim to the fullest and that would include bringing it over to the united states of america having flown the car from the uk to go through a multiple month road trip around the entire country however the problem that presented is how do you go on a road trip with a car that when you have two occupants you don't have any luggage space anywhere to store anything i know it's the first worldest of first world problems but it's quite an interesting thing to understand a little bit more about and some of the planning about how we put together this trip to go everywhere from times square new york to ocean drive miami to the golden gate bridge in san francisco rodeo drive los angeles and take the car pretty much around the entire country covering the supercar scene of the united states one of the best trips of my life something i'll never forget that i did especially that first moment i went around to the cargo terminal at jfk and there was my car with its british license plates sitting ready and raring to go for the trip ahead the ford gt is of course a car that is built first and foremost for racing it's the road-going derivative of the racing car they effectively built the racing car first the road car followed the opposite way around to most manufacturers taking part in that space the result of that is that it's fantastic to drive a brilliant experience when being driven in anger on a racetrack but they weren't really considering practicality from things like storage bins inside the cabin and where you could even put your mobile phone or your drinks all the way through to any luggage space now it does run the controversial fairly small engine the 3.5 liter twin turbocharged v6 as opposed to the larger v8 lumps found in the previous generation of the gt which means you have a very small compartment going on at the back of the engine space underneath the rear hatch a space that not only is big enough for about a wash bag and a pair of shoes but also gets very very very hot we're talking about a car with over 650 horsepower from a small engine twin turboed it gets warm back there so the last thing you want to do is put anything you care about in that luggage space which means you're limited to what you have in the cabin we're again talking about a cabin with very compact dimensions you're sitting right alongside your passenger in fact basically brushing shoulders all of the cars are left hand drive so even my uk car where normally the right hand drive is is a left-hand drive car but outside of that you don't have anywhere in the footwell the passenger footwell is actually taken up by a part of the crash structure so even the passengers legs don't really have room to fully extend you've got a tiny little compartment tray underneath your legs in the driving seat and a small little rubber mat sitting just underneath the infotainment but you're not really gonna fit anything there so if you want to go on a drive taking somebody with you you can't even fit a small laptop bag maybe a handbag or something like that but you're not going to be taking your clothes for multiple months you're not going to be taking all of your charges and whatever you might need and you're not going to be taking all of your camera gear that you might want to be making videos and photos and things as you travel so from the very outset this was a case of how am i going to do this how am i going to take my car all around the country without being able to actually use it and for one or two legs i planned ahead and i made sure that i was able to drive on my own and i could fill the passenger seat with my luggage or we could arrange for somebody to join us with another car to take some luggage but obviously even if you're traveling light when you're talking multiple months whatever you do you've got reasonable amounts of stuff and i tend to travel very very light i'm i've been doing this for quite a while and spending a lot of time up in the air and on the move so hand luggage wherever possible but not for that length of time so i had to come up with ways of doing all of these different legs now this caused a bit of controversy i think people maybe thought i was going to drive more miles than i could for multiple reasons in fact but the fundamental one being that i wasn't traveling on my own so i didn't have a way to do this the second one being the rules imposed on me by the bank who had funded the car in the first place of course being financed this meant that i needed to kind of respect their wishes to not put some crazy amounts of miles on it now i did actually still drive it 3 000 miles during that trip which for a new ford gt is up there with the most my car sits on about 7000 miles now at home which i believe in europe outside of ford's own media cars is probably right up there if not the highest mileage gt that they've delivered so far which is quite quite a cool title i guess for the car but it meant that for driving around i had to be conscious of luggage restrictions and mileage restrictions so the last thing i wanted to do was sit on highways for 500 miles a thousand miles for no major exciting driving no no particularly exciting moment so i really carefully planned this out in advance having spent months and months looking forward to the ford gt trip making sure i knew exactly where i was going to be going when i was going to be going there and working out exactly which roads i wanted to drive for example up the pacific coast highway towards monterey car week through death valley on the way over to las vegas taking part in a number of different events like palm beach cars and coffee and driving with a convoy so making sure that i was optimizing my available mileage but also optimizing the legs and how we were going to do it and we had suitcases going in everything from rally support trucks to photographers who joined taking bags with us to obviously having to transport the car and sending luggage with the uh with the transporter along the way to some legs where some things would go here we would leave bags in different cities because we were flying left right and center you know i'd arrived in new york as it happens initially my car actually had had developed a fault in transport one of the brake lights had gone out which was a much more complicated situation than you would think being an american car back here in america that should be easy to fix no american cars have red blinkers for the taillights european cars have amber blinkers for the taillights so we actually had to get a tail light expedited from europe back over to america while i then flew a few days after being in new york over to los angeles to go to the launch of the new corvette c8 my car went to the ford dealer with luggage in it while i was traveling without for me to come back they delivered it back to me and off we go again already set and prepared but it took a lot of logistics to pull all of this together to make it all work and to ensure that everything always ended up in the right place before the trip i had thought about doing something extreme perhaps installing a roof box up on top where we could take everything without any problems but then i wanted to go to some race tracks and drag races and things and while it's very very very cool as a short time thing or maybe for a rally to put a roof box on a supercar in fact as somebody who used to ski a lot the idea of a ski rack on a supercar is just unbelievably epic when you're actually going to be using it all the way through and it's not just a one week two week event i figured that would almost be so much of a hindrance that it wasn't going to be an option that we could live with i also considered do i get somebody to come with me the whole way and we do the whole thing with a support car but you do end up driving a lot of miles with not a huge amount necessarily happening along the way and this actually just was a really convenient way to do it you know my car visited all the places i wanted it to go up the up the west coast to chicago i took it to detroit obviously the home of ford i took it down the east coast to a number of different stops philadelphia new york and obviously down in florida as well and ultimately got to effectively travel around the country didn't do a stupid amount of miles learnt a lot along the way and to be honest with some of these legs we had some pretty entertaining moments for example when i would call an uber to come and meet us with the car so we could drive in the car and the uber would take the luggage and of course the uber driver needs to make sure that you're not setting them up for something strange so there we would be sat at the side beside the car with our luggage opening it all up to show the uber driver that these are genuinely close and the things we've accumulated on the trip that we need to move on to the next hotel and in fact that actually happened right here in ed's driveway at vinwicki one thing that i knew would happen is that being here in the u.s with a uk license plate on the back and the front of the car is that people wouldn't necessarily know what that was and in particular the police wouldn't know what that was and true to expectations within a matter of days at the start of my visit in new york city in manhattan in fact right alongside central park i had my first pulling over experience my first time being pulled over in the usa so i didn't really know exactly how this was going to go i was all prepared with my documentation my import documents all the carne everything that basically said the car's allowed to be here so long as i'm here and it goes within 12 months that's the maximum you're allowed as a visiting car under its home registration the new york policeman comes up to the window and he says why are you driving with no tags where are your tags as if you know what what is this yellow plate on the back i mean new york plates are yellow but they don't look the same as a uk one and of course i proceeded to explain that i was from the uk i'd brought my car over but again where are your tags you can't drive it's illegal to drive around with that with no tags on the car until i produced all the documents and he went away and looked through all of the paperwork and all was well of course my next experience with the police was something completely different down in miami and i think this says a bit of the the attitudes of different places around the us from new york being very very strict in miami the question was effectively do you have the documents and is that legal to which i said yes and the girl is like okay off you go that was right on ocean drive i thought yeah that that fits what i might expect in miami the third and final time that i was pulled over was in san francisco we were heading over towards the golden gate bridge and we saw the police officer go past we saw him look back at the car quickly turned on the lights flipped the ue and came straight after and it was almost i was almost ready to pull over before before he even did the u-turn it's like i know this is coming but the really interesting thing for me as a visitor of the experience in san francisco was that the first thing that the police officer asked was obviously where are your tags and then i i said it's a british car imported here temporarily he was immediately like can you explain it to me how does that work i'm really curious and i thought that fit so well with the kind of tech generation tech idea and i had these three cliche police experiences around the country all fine all well no trouble no tickets in the entire time i was over here but just a really interesting experience off the record can help you find a speeding ticket or traffic citation no matter where you get it you just download their app take a photo of your ticket and they match you with the best local attorney to achieve the best possible outcome they can help you avoid costly insurance premium increases points on your license and other issues and when you register use the code venwiki for a discount on their services if you don't have a ticket that you need to fight right now go ahead and download their app and register using the vinwiki code and that will reserve your discount for whenever you might need it in the future it's a great thing to have in your pocket when you never know who's going to pull up behind you on your next road trip

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 200,906

Rating: 4.8784676 out of 5

Keywords: Shmee, Shmee150, Tim Burton, Ford GT, New Ford GT, British, travel, visa, vinwiki, car stories, vehicle history, road trip, insurance, finance, financing, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Photographer, adventure

Id: lt_IaSCUUc0

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021