Ford v Ferrari II: The Making of the Ford GT

00:00:12
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. And up next, to story from John Elfner. He’s a high school history teacher in Illinois who wants to introduce us to an incredibly special American car, carrying on a celebrated tradition. Here’s John.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: That’s the unmistakable sound of American V8 muscle that revs the hearts of the young and old alike. For some, the feeling has been with them since childhood. But for a lot of Americans, the thrill of high RPM V8s is new, and the introduction came for many with the Hollywood hit film Ford Versus Ferrari. That movie tells the story of how in the mid-1960s, Ford Motor Company decided to get into racing with one goal: beat Ferrari, the goliath of endurance racing. In 1964, Ford set a goal of beating Ferrari in the most famous endurance race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It took a few tries, but after three years of racing with the Ford GT, Ford did win, and they would continue to win, beating Ferrari for the next three years at Le Mans. And how did they do it? They built a supercar called the Ford GT40. In 2003, Ford decided to take on Ferrari a second time, building an updated version of the same car, but this one would be available for the public. Here’s Bill Ford Jr., chairman of the Ford Motor Company, announcing the return of the Ford GT at the 2002 Detroit Auto Show.

00:01:40
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the return of the GT40.

00:01:46
Speaker 4: Ford had decided to build a show car for the 2002 Detroit Auto Show. The thing was an absolute hit. It was really a hit.

00:01:56
Speaker 2: That’s Neil Wrestler, and at Ford, he’s a legend. He’s worked with Ford Performance Cars since the ’60s, holding just about any job you can think of at the company that involves cars going fast. Neil became a vice president at Ford in 1994, and then he retired in 2001, but he continued to do work with Ford on special projects, and one day while at the Ford headquarters, he bumped into Bill Ford Jr.

00:02:20
Speaker 4: I felt some hands on my shoulder, and I looked up, and it was Bill Ford Jr., who was the chairman at the time, and he said, “So, we got this show car in the Detort show that’s going on right now. It’s just taken the show by storm. People say I should put it in production. I don’t even know if I should.”

00:02:39
Speaker 2: You might be thinking, “Why was that even a question?” But the thing about a show car is they aren’t really road-ready.

00:02:46
Speaker 4: The show car was really a three-dimensional picture. It made a lot of noise, but you wouldn’t have driven it more than five miles an hour. And it looked great, but it wasn’t a car.

00:02:54
Speaker 2: Bill Ford Jr. could think of a lot of reasons to not put the Ford GT into production. This project would be exct expensive, and the project might fail. Furthermore, the Ford Motor Company wasn’t known for these kind of projects. People thought of Ford, and they thought reliability, nicely built trucks, a little bit sporty Mustang. But the Ford GT was something entirely different. In spite of that, Ford had one very big reason to build this car. They were about to celebrate an anniversary.

00:03:19
Speaker 3: Funny, tonight, here, made in America: the Ford factory celebrating its 100th birthday.

00:03:24
Speaker 4: Celebrating 100 years at Ford’s Rouge Factory means looking at the pass while keeping your eyes on the future.

00:03:31
Speaker 2: Looking at the pass while keeping your eyes on the future. That’s what the Ford GT project was all about, and that’s why Bill Ford decided to go ahead with production of the Ford GT. And according to Neil Wrestler, there was another reason Ford needed a project like this.

00:03:44
Speaker 4: We, we need something to talk about. We were a little bit light on products at the time.

00:03:51
Speaker 2: Building a modern version of the Ford GT40 was a chance to rebrand the image of the company, or as insiders at Ford would say: polish.

00:03:58
Speaker 4: The Blue Oval captured the imagination both of the magazines and the newspapers and the prospective buyers. So, Ford made a lot of it, but it came at a time when we needed to have something made of it.

00:04:12
Speaker 2: Bill Ford Jr. asked Neil Wrestler to come back to Ford for one more project, and Neil’s specialty was racing and finishing this car in time for the Centennial celebration. It was going to be a race.

00:04:23
Speaker 4: We had to have a finished car in June of 2003 because that was going to be the Ford Centennial celebration, which was a major blowout.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: The Ford Centennial was going to be huge. Ford knew the event was an opportunity to highlight how Ford Motor Company had been a consistent thread in the fabric of 20th-century America. During that century, Ford had invented the consumer car in the form of the Model T. Then during World War II, they quit making cars and built airplanes, tanks, and jeeps, which were vital to winning the war. After the war, Ford reimagined the sports car for the post-war generation. As a result, Americans not only drove their car to work, but in a Ford Mustang, they look cool doing it, and of course, they dominated endurance racing in the 1960s with a Ford GT40. In each of these cases, Ford, it attempted a moonshot, something that seemed nearly impossible, and in each case, they’d succeeded. The reissue of the Ford GT in 2003 was a chance to do that again and remind people that the Ford Motor Company was woven into the fabric of America. But building three production-level cars before this event—well, that was going to be tough. Sixteen months: that’s the amount of time the team had to build a car basically from scratch.

00:05:39
Speaker 4: We had less than two years from the start to get the finished cars ready, had design, develop, test, develop a supply base, get a factory up. We didn’t have a car. We didn’t have a location. We didn’t have a team. We didn’t have any suppliers lined up. We didn’t have anything. All we had was a dream.

00:06:01
Speaker 2: Given his background in racing, Neil knew exactly what he would need on this team to make it work.

00:06:06
Speaker 4: We would obviously have to lon a very small core team, and I was interested in having guys, but who had been involved in motor racing. And the reason for that is that if you’re an engineer in motor racing, and most of all, your concern with timing, and there’s never enough time in racing because, as the old saying goes, the race starts; the only question is whether you’re there.

00:06:29
Speaker 2: So Neil started to assemble a team made up with a lot of people who came out of professional racing.

00:06:34
Speaker 3: Primarily, I would always tell people what I do is help make the cars go faster the corners.

00:06:38
Speaker 2: That’s the voice of Scott Almon. He was one of the first engineers that Neil chose to help build the car, and Scott was the profile of the kind of person Neil wanted on his team.

00:06:47
Speaker 4: He was in my motorsports department, and he had spent at least, I think, two years with Bobby Rayhall’s team down in Ohio. Grayhall was very impressed with Scott, as I was too.

00:07:01
Speaker 3: My vehicle dynamics role at Tim Ray Hall was to help figure out the best setup for our lead drivers at some of the fastest racetracks in the world.

00:07:08
Speaker 2: Neil asked Scott to be part of the design team. For Scott, there were a lot of good reasons to take this job. The GT40 was Scott’s favorite car. He loved this car so much that before the program started, the four G T forty was his screensaver, and don’t tell anybody this, but all of Scott’s passwords included G T forty in some way. But despite his love for the GT, Scott knew this was going to be nearly impossible.

00:07:32
Speaker 3: The normal program would be like three years with almost three times amount of people versus our fourteen months with one-third.

00:07:39
Speaker 2: Of the people. The pressure on the design team was going to be immense, and the challenges of finishing this car in time, well, they were real. Despite these problems, Scott really wanted to work on this.

00:07:49
Speaker 3: Car. And that car actually just, just the style of the car, the beauty of the car was my favorite car in the world.

00:07:55
Speaker 2: But it wasn’t going to be easy.

00:07:57
Speaker 4: We obviously only had time for one pass. You had to design it and develop it, and you didn’t have time to fix anything. It was going to be what it was.

00:08:05
Speaker 2: And when he was introduced to a guy named John Coletti, the director of engineering, he told Scott the score.

00:08:10
Speaker 3: He said to me, said, “Well, we have no time, no budget, no people, no choice. Welcome to the team, Almon.” All of that was absolutely right on.

00:08:22
Speaker 2: The timing wasn’t the only problem.

00:08:24
Speaker 3: At the beginning, all we had was, was the body. Anything underneath was not done. We had to start from scratch.

00:08:32
Speaker 2: In the early days of the program, Scott didn’t think this job could get done.

00:08:37
Speaker 3: Even with my experience of working 70 to 100 hours a week, deadlines every single week in racing in IndyCar and then in NASCAR, this, this seemed really insurmountable, impossible.

00:08:50
Speaker 2: But four didn’t see it that way.

00:08:52
Speaker 4: The eyes of the company were on us, and they were expecting us to succeed, and failure is just not going to work.

00:09:00
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to this story of the making of the updated version of the Ford GT, celebrating, of course, not just the Hunters anniversary of Ford itself, but remembering the remarkable feat of producing one of the great race cars of all time, the Ford GT40. When we come back, the story of the Ford GT 2.0 continued, and we’re back with our American stories, and we’re continuing with the story of the Ford GT and its reincarnation. Here again is John Helfner.

00:09:51
Speaker 2: The Ford Motor Company had its 100th anniversary coming up in July of 2003, and to mark the occasion, they wanted to do the impossible. Wanted to build a supercar in the image of the four GT forty that beat Ferrari in the 1960s Le Mans races. And they didn’t just want this car to look good. They wanted this car to beat Ferrari, just like they had 30 years earlier. Here again is Neil Wrestler, the project’s director.

00:10:15
Speaker 4: We pick as our image cars at Ferrari 360.

00:10:19
Speaker 2: After nearly 30 years, Ford was going to take on Ferrari again, this time selling a supercar, but beating Ferrari, the makers of the best supercars in the world, was no guarantee. Given the extraordinary time pressures that were placed on this team. This project was different than anything Ford had done before, at least since 1963, and Neil’s decision to pick people who’d been involved in professional racing was essential to completing this project. Here again, it’s Scott Almon, one of the chief engineers on the project.

00:10:49
Speaker 3: What we would say in racing is you have to unload fast. Basically, the car has to be fast as soon as we unload because we have so little time before we race. It was the same kind of mentality as same mindset, the same importance on the Ford GG program. Because we didn’t have time to iterate, we had to get it right the first.

00:11:07
Speaker 2: And according to Scott, a lot of people within Ford didn’t even think this project would be a success, so they backed away.

00:11:14
Speaker 3: I mean, there was almost no one who thought that we would achieve the performance at the costs we were supposed to achieve it at, and within the timing.

00:11:23
Speaker 2: The short amount of time was certainly a challenge, but it also created an unexpected opportunity for the team. Executives not directly attached to the program begin to back off, and the team got an enormous amount of room to operate in the way that they wanted.

00:11:37
Speaker 3: So beyond just not having to have meetings for meetings, we didn’t have all this tracking and checking that would go on typically at Ford, and everybody trying to understand your status of every element of design, every part of the timeline. We didn’t have this tracking and checking.

00:11:52
Speaker 2: That allowed the team to operate more like a racing team.

00:11:55
Speaker 3: The Ford Centennial in June of 2003 was our race day. We had to have three production-level cars ready for the Centennial.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: By viewing the Forge Centennial as a race day, all these engineers with racing experience really became comfortable with the process. No, there wasn’t gonna be any real race, but they saw the Ford Centennial as the starting line.

00:12:15
Speaker 5: When you do racing, you can’t show up late.

00:12:18
Speaker 2: That’s Mark McGowan, and he was the test driver for the program.

00:12:22
Speaker 5: It’s like, you have to get it done and show up at the start line.

00:12:27
Speaker 2: Nobody’s gonna wait for you.

00:12:28
Speaker 5: If you can’t make it, they’re gonna leave without.

00:12:31
Speaker 2: You. And Neil Wrestler felt the same way.

00:12:34
Speaker 4: We were only gonna have time for one design iteration. There was definitely not gonna be time to go back and fix things. So, they had to work the first time.

00:12:43
Speaker 2: And that meant there would be plenty of long nights in this program.

00:12:46
Speaker 3: So my first all-nighter on the program was two weeks in.

00:12:49
Speaker 5: I think he was working on the tire design. We all went home, you know, seven o’clock at night. Head home. Of course, we come back in at seven in the morning, and there’s still, well, Scott, because Scott needs to get this thing done.

00:13:03
Speaker 3: And I had spent an all-nighter, and I was wearing the same clothes the next morning when of my manager came in, and he looked at me, and he did a double take, and he’s like, “Did you stay here all night?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “We’re not doing that on this program.” And I said, “What choice do we have?”

00:13:21
Speaker 2: And that became the mentality of the 30-person team. They worked for the next 14 months getting that car ready quickly, and out of that, the team developed a motto: “No churning.”

00:13:31
Speaker 3: “No churning” came from our director John Colletti, and really, it was an important aspect of the program that once a decision was made, and pretty much every decision was big on the Four GT, but once the decision was made, it was not revisited unless there was really a major issue. It was like racing. We had race day. We couldn’t push back that deadline.

00:13:54
Speaker 2: Because Neil Wrestler had put together a team that was used to the pressures of a deadline. They did get their car spilt few months, the first prototype was ready to test drive.

00:14:02
Speaker 3: For Sually, a first drive by Rydan Handing development guys. In the first prototypes, they were really quite happy with how the car behaved.

00:14:11
Speaker 2: Right out of the box.

00:14:13
Speaker 5: This car was an eye-opener. It doesn’t take long to realize that this car is going to be good.

00:14:21
Speaker 3: Making the car an extension of the driver was the goal.

00:14:24
Speaker 5: You knew the car was so good because you didn’t think about it. The car would just go where your mind put it, and it was like your brain was hardwired to the vehicle. It just did what your brain said to do, and it was so effortless.

00:14:40
Speaker 3: They were just excited about the car, and it was just, it was so different than what they had experienced before first level of prototypes.

00:14:46
Speaker 4: After one lap, we knew this was going to be really a good car. It didn’t have any problems, nothing. It just worked.

00:14:53
Speaker 2: It’s just so rewarding.

00:14:54
Speaker 5: It’s actually intoxicating. It’s almost, almost like a drug.

00:14:58
Speaker 3: It exceeded what they had experienced in the past by far.

00:15:02
Speaker 5: This thing is going to be something, and it’s going to be something very special.

00:15:06
Speaker 2: First drive was a huge success, but later the team needed to push this car to its limits. That’s why they went to Italy’s Nardo Ring.

00:15:14
Speaker 4: I really was insisting that the top speed start with a two. I wasn’t interested in anything that was going to go 199. We had to have something that would go over 200. We couldn’t do that anywhere in America. The only place we could go was Narda. I think it sounded like an eight-mile oval or something.

00:15:32
Speaker 2: The Nardo Ring is a famous test track in Italy designed for high-speed testing. Speed records of all sorts have been achieved at Nardo, and Neil knew the team could push the Four GT to its limits there.

00:15:43
Speaker 5: It was flat-foot the whole time.

00:15:45
Speaker 2: Here again is test driver Mark McGowan, and he was going to drive the Four GT to its limits.

00:15:51
Speaker 5: The first time we ever got one of these cars over 205 miles an hour was in Italy at a track called Nardo.

00:15:59
Speaker 2: I can still hear this.

00:16:00
Speaker 5: I think the tink of the accelerator pedal hitting the aluminum floor, and just sitting there for four laps, never lifting, and that’s a little mind-blowing. It’s like I haven’t lifted, and I’ve been on the floor for 15 minutes now. And of course, after 15 minutes, you’re out of gasoline. You go through 18 gallons of gas in 16 minutes.

00:16:21
Speaker 2: By the way, the testing at the