When Ford went to Le Mans in 2016 and won a class victory with a modern version of the GT40 that had taken overall victory 50 years earlier, it seemed like a perfect tribute to its own history. But it’s not actually the story the blue oval had envisioned.
Ford knew that the 50th anniversary of its legendary Le Mans victory was coming up, and it knew that it wanted to work with Multimatic to try and get another W at the famed French endurance race. But it wanted to win with a Mustang.
“When we decided to make Mustang global – to sell it around the world in left- and right-hand drive – for the previous generation, we knew the 50th anniversary of the Le Mans win was coming up,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told Top Gear recently. “We started to talk inside the company about winning Le Mans with the Mustang.”
Read: The Ford GT Is A Legitimate Race Car For The Road
So the company started doing some research. It spoke to the regulators in charge of Le Mans and America’s sports car championship, IMSA, to see what it would take to get a Mustang into endurance racing shape.
Meanwhile, Multimatic started doing simulations, but the results of all this research weren’t as good as Ford was hoping. Farley said that it started to become clear that winning Le Mans with a car that bore the Mustang’s silhouette wouldn’t be all that possible, so it chose to pivot.
“We decided at that time to take a totally left turn with Multimatic and Larry [Holt]’s technical leadership,” said Farley. “And we designed the Ford GT. But the original idea was never to have a new GT. We wanted to win Le Mans with the Mustang.”
That’s not to say that Farley and Ford aren’t happy with the car that they wound up creating. The Ford GT sold well and got great reviews, but the fact that it raced before it was actually sold was partly due to the last minute change up.
In some ways, Ford’s vision of an ultra high-performance Mustang lives on today with the new GTD. Also built by Multimatic, the model is made to deliver supercar performance in a Mustang body.
