Ford GT secrets revealed: Discovering the genesis of new Ford Le Mans car

GT car that came out of that secret basement will race this year at Le Mans and in the World Endurance Championship

In a spy film, if there’s a secret project it’s down some anonymous stairs, along an almost forgotten corridor, and accessed by a special key – no digital touchpad to hack. Life really is like that sometimes, such as when Ford decided to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the GT40 winning at Le Mans.

A new supercar was the only possible way to celebrate. We’ve seen that car, but now we’ve seen how they did it. And all those facts above are true, that’s how it was done at Ford’s Product and Development Center in Michigan.

Out of 600 designers at the main facility, only 12 were involved in this project and they were all sworn to secrecy. Amazingly, they all kept their secrets too. This involved going in at weekends and in the evenings to avoid suspicion. They trekked down that corridor to an unremarkable door, behind which they created a truly remarkable car.

We saw that car when it was first unveiled to a startled public in 2015 at the Detroit motor show. Even some Ford management were startled as they knew nothing about it.

Jamal Hameedi, chief engineer of Ford Performance, says that the goal was the same as for the original GT40 of the ‘60s: to be a rolling showcase of the very best Ford design and technology which could beat Ferrari at their own game.

The key to the whole project was aerodynamics and this project meant that Ford went further than it ever had done into computational fluid dynamics. To get a fantastic race car and a road car is not easy, but three design routes were explored. It’s key that the design they chose of those three was the most aerodynamically efficient, not necessarily the most retro or the most beautiful.

The original design, which was made into a clay model, was changed hardly at all when it came time for a final verification model. Chris Svensson, design director for the Americas, said that there were fewer changes than on any other project he’d seen at Ford in the whole 23 years he’d been there.

You’ll notice we haven’t even mentioned the engine. There is one. But, as Hameedi says, Le Man is a fuel economy race now, so efficiency is a key criteria. In fact the engine was the easy bit. The 3.5-litre Ecoboost V6 has twin turbochargers and an output that can hit the homologation figure of 500bhp with ease. That means they can make the engine more fuel-efficient too.

The GT car that came out of that secret basement will race this year at Le Mans, Daytona and in the World Endurance Championship. If you fancy a GT road car that shares the qualities of the racer, then you’ll need about £280,000. With a limited production run, it should find many buyers, even though that price is hardly bargain basement.