What you need to understand about the second-generation Ford GT is that it was a racing car, pure and simple. A machine conceived, designed, engineered and built to win one race in particular: Le Mans. Or at least its class.
Yet it wasn’t even going to be called the Ford GT because, originally, it was going to be called…Mustang.
Back in 2012, just after Mo Farah had discovered the Mo-Bot, the new sixth-generation Mustang had yet to make its public debut. But behind the scenes a small team of Ford’s ‘car guys’ – there were only about 12 of them to begin with – reckoned the new ’Stang could use a dose of ‘Race on Sunday, sell on Monday’ pedigree to give its image an extra boost. So a skunkworks project was quietly created to do just that and work on the craziest horse of all began.
But as the project evolved over the following months and the car got faster and naughtier, the team behind it began to realise that the machine they were building no longer bore much relation to a Mustang. By all accounts it was very fast and exceedingly powerful thanks to a monstrous V8 engine, but visually it looked too wild and was too unrecognisable, even as an ultimate incarnation of a Mustang, at which point the focus of the project shifted completely and the idea for a second-generation Ford GT was born.
