Ford GT review in the Tory-graph

[Coventrysucks]

I hardly count the Daily Telegraph as the pinnacle of automotive journalism, but I thought this was quite a good write up. (Despite Andrew English's damning review of the TVR T350C for no reason other than he doesn't like Peter Wheeler, which is pathetic coming from a "journalist")

Originally Posted by Andrew English

Anglo American
(Filed: 24/07/2004)

Forty years since the birth of the car that inspired it, Andrew English went for a spin in the new 212mph Ford GT

Pink hair, pink lipstick, pink eyeshadow, pink earrings, pink dress, pink gloves, pink socks, pink shoes and probably pink pants, too. That's electric fuchsia pink, pulling in your gaze like a Vulcan tractor beam. Pop concerts provide the last word in people-watching, but the woman at last weekend's festival in Guildford really wanted you to look at her.

Drive the new Ford GT and you'll feel the same: there's nowhere to hide. Children crane over gates, cars almost drive into you, headlamps flash in greeting, dogs look over their shoulders, postmen stop to stare and pretty girls smile. With just 28 of these £120,000-plus, 212mph supercars scheduled to arrive in the UK from Detroit, they'll have exclusivity in numbers, and in looks. From the snouty nose, follow those Shelby-esque stripes to the Kamm tail and you're looking at one of the most successful, bad-ass pieces of American chutzpah ever to have crossed the Atlantic.

Or are you? This is not a GT40, the epochal sports-racing prototype, first revealed 40 years ago, that won the Le Mans 24 Hours four years in succession between 1966 and 1969. Stand the two cars together and the new GT is taller, wider and longer than the original, which was just 40in high (hence its name). Like the new Beetle, the MINI, the S-type and the Mustang, the GT has all the styling cues of the original, but a lot less of the style.

Besides, the GT40 was a racing car, built by Lola craftsmen just a chocolatey whiff away from the Mars factory on the Slough Trading Estate. The entire project was ordered by Henry Ford II in a fit of pique after he was thwarted in his plans to buy Ferrari for $10 million. Modelled on the Lola GT racer, the first three GT40s were built by men such as Laurie Bray, now Lola's archivist. "We were working 80-hour weeks back then," he recalls, "so there wasn't much time to think about what a historic thing it was. But I do remember being very wary of the Americans. They came on the scene with all this money and started to throw their weight around; they claimed they were going to win."

That took a while, and the participation of proven winners such as John "Death-ray" Wyer, Roy Lunn, John Cowley, Alan Mann, John Holman and Carroll Shelby, plus the formation of two specialist racing operations, Ford Advanced Vehicles (also on the Slough Trading Estate) and Kar Kraft in Detroit, along with a stable of top-flight drivers including Telegraph Motoring regular Sir John Whitmore. In 1966, Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon took America's first Le Mans laurels in a formation finish with two other GT40s, and the rest - including the first champagne-spraying (by the 1967 victor Don Gurney), the French classic's closest ever finish and the first win by the same car in two consecutive years - is history.

Or bunk. The genesis of the new GT was altogether different, coming at a time when Ford had suffered the loss of charismatic boss Jac Nasser and was facing severe financial woes, most of which still reverberate today. Incoming chairman and Ford family scion Bill Ford promised that the GT would be Ford's "Hero Car", a machine of which the workers could feel proud and on which the company could pin its centenary hopes of reborn greatness. New Beetle designer and Ford design head J Mays penned the lookalike shape and what Ford calls its "dream team" engineered the chassis.

I was thinking about all this as the big, 1·6-ton GT lurched into a sickening spin across the Surrey test track. I was making a fool of myself in the only European GT test car, a car that Ford is making a lot of claims for - the programme, the technologies and the performance.

It's not often you find yourself dragging back a bush and half a gravel pit to the pits and the inscrutably grey faces of official minders from Ford and race team Roush, so I drove slowly. I had time to think about how much more accommodating the driving position is than the original, and how big the pedals are; you could drive this car in wellies, although even in racing pixie boots you'd be hard pressed to heel and toe the brake and throttle.


I also thought about how some Sixties designs were fantastic, and how others weren't. In a genuine GT40, you sit in a figure-hugging hammock, your head jammed against the roof, your knees against an alloy dash, facing a row of incomprehensible instruments. In the GT, you sit in a conventional seat, which fits where it touches and fails to support your thighs or very much else, the roof misses your head and grabs your hair instead, the dash is miles away and still looks incomprehensible. As Motoring editor Peter Hall said: "It's uncomfortable, but in a different way."

There is nowhere to store anything in the cabin, and as for passengers it's perhaps best to quote Willie Green, who owned and raced several of the original cars: "Girls didn't like the GT40 because it was so horrifying to be driven in." Too bloody right, and not just for the gals.

The GT's clunky, alloy-skinned door-trims bite into your upper arms if you brace yourself against the arm rests while passengers get less room because of the short footwell and ludicrous child-seat mounting system behind the seat - mothers would surely rather give up their children to the witches than let their husbands loose with their child in a GT. It's left-hand drive only, so they also get a grandstand view down the long bonnet of oncoming cars closing at ludicrous speeds. They then adopt a rictus grin when you tell them about the top speed and marvellous steering, and gibber about believing in God if only he'll let them live.

The luggage space under the bonnet is given up to a first-aid kit and a car cover (which says all you want to know about future GT owners), so basically this is a car in which you will need to get back home before your tea - and that means track days, of which more later.

Meanwhile, we should talk about the performance. I've been studying the torque curve, which says that there's more than 350lb ft at 2,000rpm, although on the road you'll feel diddly squat of that at lower revs. Frankly, the Lysholm supercharger doesn't really wake up until 2,000rpm and then, rather than exploding into life, it simply powers the GT remorselessly faster in the manner of massive Amtrak locomotive suddenly freed from the rest of its coaches.

Ford's US press department doesn't mention acceleration figures, but Autocar magazine managed a 0-60mph sprint in 3·5sec, and on the track it feels all of that. But where the original GT40 challenged Ferrari's descant scream with a menacing bass boom from its town-drain exhausts, the GT's 5·5-litre pick-up truck V8 is muffled so hard it sounds like a fart in a space suit.

Even so, it's real-world fast, barely needing a gearchange to lift its skirts and charge to the next speed camera.

[Coventrysucks]

Overtaking? Even with left-hand drive, two cars are possible, maybe three or even four: you'll be past them and back in lane before the oncoming drivers have fumbled for their headlamp flashers. With 550bhp of grunt available from the blown engine, who cares about the claimed top speed of 212mph except at track days - and we're getting to that.

Fortunately the brakes are probably the most fantastic thing about this car, surpassed only by the best braker in the business, the Porsche 911. Normal 200mph-plus cars have brakes that clank and graunch around the car park and have all the low-speed stopping power of a seal in an empty fish lorry. Not so the Ford, which has the Focus's exemplary pedal feel at all speeds and the power to stop that leaves you breathless and giggling at 20mph or light-headed and laughing at 120.

The Ricardo-developed transaxle gearbox handles all that power and, more importantly, torque, although the shift loads are heavy at low engine speeds and the dogleg first-to-second shift is best learned. The steering, meanwhile, has all the fluency and linear feel of a hot hatchback. Turn the wheel and you instinctively know how much to twirl. The ratio is perfectly judged and so is the weighting. Shame there isn't a lot of feedback to the driver; the GT tends to faithfully nose down every bump, camber and tramline in the road while transmitting little detail about the surface.

With massive, low-profile tyres, the road grip is wonderfully strong. The rear wheels will step out of line on slower corners, but provided you obey the rules of mid-engined cars (have a driving plan, pick your turn-in point, power through the bend and never lift off or brake), the GT rarely surprises. The ride is good, too, although potholes and off-camber bumps tend to smash through the double wishbone suspension and into the cabin.

From myriad potential customers, Ford has now picked 28 lucky ones - including Damon Hill, Jeremy Clarkson, and Martin Brundle. So imagine yourself in their place and take your life-size Scalextric toy to Brands Hatch to exercise its legs.

What are you going to find? Caveat emptor might be the most appropriate phrase, as I found at the test track. Proper racing drivers refer to the GT40 as a heavy car, and that weighed just 998kg. The GT weighs 600kg more and, with nearly 60 per cent of that over the rear axle, it's a rear-biased pendulum. Willie Green on the original again: "With the weight of that big, cast-iron engine behind you, the tail will go if you hang it out a little too much. It's all about polar moments of inertia, which means that if you get it wrong you're having an accident."

Drive the GT properly in the dry, ease it up to its limits and the incredible grunt of the engine will allow you to hang the tail out, as I found on subsequent laps of the test track. It's not a particularly forgiving car, though, and if you end up going too fast into a corner and trying to sort it out half way through, you'll be going backwards before you can think, "Blimey, what was that?" Those two small pockmarks on the test car's rear wings are mine forever.

Ford thinks the GT proves it can make a supercar, but that much was never really in doubt. Why its supercar had to look like a 40-year-old racer is a lot more difficult to figure out - after all, Holman and Moody will build you a brand new original for $1 million and there are some very good replicas for not much more than the GT's price. Is this the best thing that Ford can come up with in 40 years, a 20th-century car from a 21st-century company? An equivalent Ferrari or Lamborghini costs more and is slower, but they're future-looking, modern designs for the road and they sound like supercars, too.

"Pastiche is the new authenticity," said the much missed motoring writer Russell Bulgin when winding me up about owning a classic car. As in most things, he was probably right, but I think I'd rather have the real thing - modern or old, just not both at once.

Ford GT

Price/availability: about £120,000/deliveries of the 28 UK cars begin in 2005.

Engine/transmission: 5,409cc all-aluminium-alloy V8 with DOHC per bank and four valves per cylinder; Eaton-made Lysholm screw-type supercharger with water-to-air inlet-charge cooling; 550bhp at 6,500rpm and 500lb ft of torque at 3,750rpm. Ricardo six-speed transaxle gearbox with helical limited-slip differential. Rear-wheel drive. Performance: top speed 212mph, 0-60mph in about 3·5sec (see text), average fuel consumption about 12mpg.

We like: The design, but we like the GT40 better. The performance. The brakes.

We don't like: The ride quality over bumps. Little steering feel. No storage space. Lack of passenger leg room. Non-existent exhaust note. Slightly bogus quality.

Alternatives: Aston Martin DB9, from £103,000. Lamborghini Gallardo, from £117,000. Ferrari 360 Modena, from £103,300. Porsche 911 Turbo, from £90,520.

Why does Ford insist that the top speed is 212mph when the fastest speed it achieved was 205mph at Nardo?

[cuntukimushroom]

maybe they simulated that or its capable of doing that

[Chinky_boi]

Originally Posted by Coventrysucks

Why does Ford insist that the top speed is 212mph when the fastest speed it achieved was 205mph at Nardo?

Well from what i read off the Top Gear site. Ford GT reached 212mph but the makers of the GT Detuned it to be 205mphs... something like that. But it could be like when the McLaren F1 was out. They said 230mph but it went to 241mph.

[Guibo]

Originally Posted by Coventrysucks

Why does Ford insist that the top speed is 212mph when the fastest speed it achieved was 205mph at Nardo?

I think you have it the other way around:
"In fact, it seems they over-achieved. A couple of days earlier, this very Ford GT cracked 190mph at Nardo. And it didn't stop until it hit... 212mph. Not just once, but on three occasions, driven by three separate drivers.
Now, due to some unfathomable bureaucratic decision, Ford has decided to down-play the GT's top speed, planning to publish it as a still-mighty 205mph - a figure high enough to make this the fastest Ford road car ever."

http://www.topgear.com/servlet/tg?DE...ber=02_01.html