The Ford GT Succeeded After 7 Failures to Exploit the GT40 Legend — Jason Cammisa Revelations Ep 22

[Music] in today's world we're not used to having to wait you press a button and your car starts but this is the way it used to be back when dinosaurs and carburetors roamed the earth you just kept trying and eventually you knew the goddamn thing was going to start [Music] okay i guess we'll just let it sit uh i i bet you didn't know that ford tried seven times to capitalize on the success of the incredible gt40 and it took 37 years of cranking before it finally caught but when it did you saw the movie you know all about the whole ford versus ferrari thing or do you the movie was great but they sort of glossed over a whole bunch of really important stuff [Music] first of all when the gt40 popped onto the scene ferrari wasn't the road car company we know today at that point in the 1960s ferrari barely made road cars but enzo's team dominated racing and especially endurance racing in a way unlike anything we have today with the possible exception of mercedes f1 winning streak ferrari had won le mall six times in a row which is kind of outrageous [Music] but that doesn't even come close to painting the full picture because in each one of those six years ferrari didn't just take first place every single year ferrari also took second and with the exception of 1960 the first year of that winning streak ferrari also took third place which means for six years in a row ferrari took first second and third places at le mans oh oh oh hold on oh in 1963 ferrari took first second third fourth fifth and sixth place at le mans so ford wasn't just up against some company that occasionally won le mans ferrari completely and totally humiliated all of its competition every single year and so then matt damon walks in dressed up as carol shelby and tldr ford humiliates ferrari in 1966 finishing first second and third yeah you know this but what i don't think the movie explained all that well was the backlash that the big american win wasn't a big american win and that's because the gt40 wasn't really a ford and it wasn't really american it was a british car a lola gt with styling on it that was inspired by a 1962 ford concept car called the mustang the gt40 used a ford motor but the chassis was designed and built in england which is why it was right hand drive something you probably didn't notice in the movie anyway even after actual carol shelby got involved it's not like it became a ford at the end of the day the gt40 was a race car commissioned by ford built by a bunch of people who are not ford people oh i'm gonna get crucified for that statement and some people had a problem with this so the next year ford returned with the gt40 mark iv for the 1967 24 hours of formal it was then an all-american car designed and built in the u.s powered by an american v8 and just to make sure everybody shot up it was driven by two american drivers dan gurney and aj foyt and it won vermont again finishing 32 miles ahead of the second place car which was a ferrari and then ford won the next two years making four consecutive wins win on sunday sell on monday so the saying goes so obviously ford should have made a gt40 road car to cash in on the success of the gt40 race car like mercedes had done with the 300sl but they didn't ford did make a couple of road-going-ish versions but neglected to make them usable streetcars with no real openable windows or luggage space and they cost something like four times as much as a corvette as a result sales were basically non-existent what happened next was a drawn-out saga lasting almost four decades where ford tried to create a mid-engined halo for its brand so please ignore that beautiful thing behind me for a second while we leaf through the annals of ford's crank but no fire history ford's first attempt was the gt44 but now by the end of the 1960s ford worried that the market was too concerned with looming fuel economy emissions and safety requirements so it died number two the mach 2 part ranchero pickup truck part mustang and completely bizarre killed off because lee iacocca instead chose to attempt to sell the ford powered de tomaso pantera through its us dealerships key word attempt dead number three the gt-70 made for the world rally championship with a v6 in the middle six cylinders matches the number of cars built had it done well there might have been a street car it didn't there wasn't dead number four named caroline a lotus esprit with a ford v8 dead number five the gn34 this was cool and it almost happened the gm 34 was approved for production as the ford allegro to compete with the ferrari 328 using a high output version of the yamaha v6 from the taurus show it was to be built all which is french for in france however two years into the project unfavorable exchange rates meant it would make little to no profit so ford killed it in favor of some stupid suv that was allegedly going to make them all kinds of money i mean have you ever even heard of an explorer ugh either way gm34 dead whereas the french would say no number six the gt90 named not for being 90 inches tall but to celebrate the 1990s with a 720 horsepower quad turbocharged roush v12 ford even brought out the 67 lemon winner aj foyt but then killed the gt90 dead finally number seven the ford indigo concept it looked like the front engine plymouth prowler but it was a mid-engine thing with a carbon aluminum monocoque and two duratec v6 sandwiched together in the middle to make a 435 horsepower v12 engine made its way into the aston martin lineup the car went to the grave dead let's get back to the plymouth prowler for a second one of the guys behind that car was a man named chris theodore and he was also responsible for the dodge viper which he admits was a rip-off his word not mine of the ford shelby cobra and that the plymouth prowler was a rip-off of the 1934 ford his motivation while at chrysler was and i quote let's see what else we can pillage we don't have any heritage of our own let's steal it from somebody else completely badass next on chris theodore's list was a mid-engined viper to steal from ford's gt40 glory but luckily ford hired him before he could push that project through while at chrysler and then two weeks into his job at ford chris theodore finds himself on an airplane with design director jay mays everybody gets drunk chris whips out a pencil and sketches the gt40 and by the time they landed the decision was made ford was going to make a new one the project's secret code name was petunia because of course no supercar would ever be called petunia and the design team spent literal years on it they created multiple different designs that made their way to full-scale clay models all mid-engine cars inspired by the gt40 but that had matured into 2000s design language but no matter what they did nobody ever loved it and they were stuck in this purgatory designing and redesigning and redesigning this car for like two years until once again chris theodore got busted doodling at an executive meeting on his sketch pad yet again as a gt40 and at that moment the team realized they had been trying to shove a round petunia into a square gt40 hole they didn't need to reinvent the car why not just make a new gt40 and that's exactly what they did most cars take thousands of pages of nerdy feasibility studies to get approved including hundreds of thousands of man-hours of careful planning the gt took a two-page document a measly 150 million dollar budget and one well-played stunt in october of 2001 just as the design was finally gelling ceo jack nasser was ousted replaced by bill ford and management decided there needed to be a big announcement to declare that ford was back the decision of how to make that announcement lie with ceo nick shayla even after seeing the gt's sketches he was leaning towards the 49 concept which had already been shown to the public wrong answer and so jay may is the design director had one of the full-size fiberglass models painted in gulf livery like that and he parked it in the parking garage directly across from the executive elevator and asked shayla to please come downstairs for a minute well he did and when the elevator doors opened there it was headlights on how you gonna say no to a face like that and so the gt was approved just like that the project should have taken 50 to 55 months once it was approved but instead it had to happen in just 15. bill ford said it would need to be ready for him to drive one for the ford's 100th anniversary celebration if you haven't noticed the 100 in the gt's headlights well now you have entire books have been written on the challenges involved in making a 2000s road car out of a 1960s race car this one is particularly good as is chris theodore's own book on shelby but one of the most impressive things about the ford gt is just how true it is to the gt40s looks it was about 10 percent bigger but it was 10 bigger in every dimension so the proportions didn't change much the extra inches kept the cabin about the same size but it meant street car things could also fit like a stereo openable windows air conditioning or crash protection the engine came straight out of a pickup truck and then was so heavily modified it didn't really share any parts with the pickup truck engine but it did keep that 5.4 liter v8 absolutely enormous 105.8 millimeter stroke which means that at its 6500 rpm redline its peak piston speeds were greater than a ferrari 360 motonet at its 8 500 rpm redline enzo would have had a stroke but who needs revs when you have stroke and a supercharger speaking of ferrari 360s that was the ford gt target chris theodore's pitch was imagine pulling up to a stoplight in a gt and some guy in gold chains his image not mine pulls up in a red ferrari the whole premise of the car was that you'd be able to say my car is faster it's better looking and i didn't get ripped off in fact ford bought a ferrari a 360 to benchmark it and they put this bumper sticker on the back which is so cool by the way ferrari then bought a ford gt to benchmark it back anyway the 360s v8 made 400 horsepower this makes 550 and then it takes about 150 horsepower to spin this supercharger which means this thing burns 700 horsepower worth of fuel to do that it needed 16 injectors 16 is higher than i can count in italian 7 eight and then eight more it hit 60 miles an hour in first gear and in only 3.3 seconds top speed had to be limited to 205 miles an hour an unlimited gt would later be clocked at 211.8 miles an hour at nardo when the ford gt went up against not just a regular ferrari 360 but a 360 challenge stradale and a car driver comparison test it won and the opening line was it wasn't even a contest [Music] indeed in other words this gt did on the street what the gt40 had done on the track 37 years and seven aborted attempts later the lesson is annoyingly simple if it ain't broke don't fix it the original gt40 was so timeless that even 40 years later it took only a carbon copy to create a second icon icons isn't this revelation why do i why do i smell burnt toast [Music] so [Music] okay so you're just gonna keep the ferrari framed out the entire time right yep okay action i'm not some rich youtuber asking you to like and subscribe hey up up up up up up up up up up keep the ferrari out i'm an automotive journalist asking you to like and subscribe and that's because that's how youtube works if you don't click those buttons youtube doesn't know you liked what you've just seen and isn't going to show you any more of it and if you don't like what you've just seen well join the club and by that i mean the hagerty drivers club which gets you access to this award-winning magazine as well as discounts on amazing stuff and if if you still don't like what you've seen well then just leave a nasty comment because that's how the internet works i need to go clean that up

Channel: Hagerty

Views: 1,022,708

Keywords: Hagerty, Classic Car, Classic Cars, Hagerty Drivers Club, collector car, enthusiast car, collector cars, camisa, camissa, donut media, savage geese, throttle house, chris harris, top gear, clarkson, GT44, Ford v Ferrari, sound, noise, history, backstory, chris theodore, j mays, camilo pardo, mustang concept, GN34, taurus sho, mid-engine, fuenzo, F U enzo, Gulf Livery, parker, Parker nirenstein, Parker Nirenstein dad, Vehicle Virgins, Back Road, POV, Sound, piston speed

Id: LKIYUGNNEWk

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022