October 23, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, s a part of its 100th anniversary celebration, Ford wanted a new supercar to showcase its heritage and future. Jon Elfner brings us this new Faerrari-slayer's story through the eyes of industry legends Neil Ressler, Scott Ahlman, and Mark McGowan.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Here's John. That's the unmistakable sound of American V eight
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
RPMV eight's is new, and the introduction came for many
with the Hollywood hit film Ford Versus Ferrari. That movie
(00:51):
tells the story of how in the mid nineteen sixties,
Ford Motor Company decided to get into racing with one
goal beat Ferrari, the goliath endurance racing. In nineteen sixty four,
Ford set a goal of beating Ferrari in the most
famous endurance race, the twenty four Hours of Lama. It
took a few tries, but after three years of racing
with the Ford GT Ford did win, and they would
(01:14):
continue to win, beating Ferrari for the next three years
at Lama. And how did they do it? They built
a supercar called the Ford GT forty. In two thousand
and three, 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, Junior,
(01:34):
chairman of the Ford Motor Company, announcing the return of
the Ford GT at the two thousand and two Detroit
Auto Show.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the return of the
GT forty.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
Ford had decided to build a show car for the
two thousand and two Detroit Auto Show. The thing was
an absolute hit. It was really a hit.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
That's Neil Wrestler and at Ford he's a legend. He's
worked with Ford Performance Cars since the sixties, 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 nineteen ninety four and then he retired
in two thousand and one, but he continued to do
work with Ford on special projects and one day while
(02:17):
at the Ford headquarters, he bumped into Bill Ford Jr.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
I felt some hands on my shoulder and I looked
up on it was Bill Ford Junior, who was the
chairman at the time, and he said so We got
this show car in the Detroit 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.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
You might be thinking why was that even a question?
But the thing about his show car is they aren't
really road ready.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
The show car was really a three dimensional picture. It
made a lot of noise, but you wouldn't have driven
at more than five miles an hour. It looked great,
but it wasn't a car.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Bill Ford Junior could think of a lot of reasons
to not put the Ford GT into production. This project
would be a 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 sporting Mustang, But the Ford GT was
something entirely different. In spite of that, Ford had one
(03:15):
very big reason to build this car. They were about
to celebrate an anniversary.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
Funny tonight hear made in America, the Ford Factory celebrating
its one hundredth birthday.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
Celebrating one hundred years at Ford's Rouge Factory means looking
at the past while keeping your eyes on the future.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
We we need something to talk about. We were a
little bit light on products at the time.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Building a modern version of the Ford GT forty was
a chance to rebrand the image of the company, or
as insiders at Ford would say, polish.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Bill Ford Junior 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.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
We had to have a finished car in June of
two thousand and three because that was going to be
the Ford Centennial celebration, which was a major blowout.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
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
twentieth century America. During that century, Ford had invented the
consumer car in the form of the Model T. Then
during World War Two they quit making cars and built airplanes, tanks,
and jeeps, which were vital to winning the war. After
(04:57):
the war, Ford reimagined the sports car for the postwar 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 nineteen
sixties with a Ford GT forty. In each of these cases,
Ford had attempted a moonshot, something that seemed nearly impossible,
and in each case they'd succeeded. The reissue of the
(05:20):
Ford GT in two thousand and three 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.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
We had less than two years from the start to
get the finished cars ready and 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.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Given his background in racing, Neil knew exactly what he
would need on this team to make it work.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
We would obviously have to form 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 concerned 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.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So Neil started to assemble a team made up with
a lot of people who came out of professional racing.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
Primarily, I would always tell people what I do is
he'll make the cars go faster the corners.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
He was in my motor sports department. He had spent
at least I think two years with Bobby Rayhall's team
down in Ohio. Bob ray Hall was very impressed with Scott,
as I was too.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Neil asked Scott to be part of the design team.
For Scott, there were a lot of good reasons to
take this job. The GT forty was Scott's favorite car.
He loved this car so much that before the program started,
the four GT 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,
(07:30):
Scott knew this was going to be nearly impossible.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
The normal program would be like three years with almost
three times in amount of people versus our fourteen months with
one third of the people.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:50):
Car and that car actually just the style of the car,
the beauty of the car was my favorite car in
the world.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
But it wasn't going to be easy.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
And when he was introduced to a guy named John Coletti,
the director of engineering, he told Scott the score.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
On, and timing wasn't the only problem.
Speaker 5 (08:25):
At the beginning, all we had was was the body.
Anything underneath was not done. We had to start from scratch.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
In the early days of the program, Scott didn't think
this job could get done.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
Even with my experience of working seventy tw one hundred
hours a week, deadlines every single week in racing in
Indy Car and then in NASCAR, this this seemed really insurmountable, impossible.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
But four didn't see it that way.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
The eyes of the company were on us and they
were expecting us to succeed and failure is just not
going to work.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've been listening to the 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 GT forty. When we
(09:20):
come back, the story of the Ford GT two point
zero continued, and we're back with our American stories, and
(09:42):
we're continuing with the story of the Ford GT and
its reincarnation. Here again is John Helfner.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
The Ford Motor Company had its one hundredth anniversary coming
up in July of two thousand and three, and to
mark the occasion, they wanted to do the impossible. They
wanted to build a supercar in the image of the
Ford g T forty that beat Ferrari in the nineteen
sixties Lemon races. And they didn't just want this car
to look good. They wanted this car to beat Ferrari,
just like they had thirty years earlier. Here again is
(10:12):
Neil Wrestler, the project's director.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
We picked as our image cars a Ferrari three sixty.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
After nearly thirty 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 nineteen sixty three, and
(10:41):
Neil's decision to pick people who'd been involved in professional
racing was essential to completing this project. Here again it is
Scott Alman, one of the chief engineers on the project.
Speaker 5 (10:49):
What we would say in racing is you have to
unload fast. Basically, a 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 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 time.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
And according to Scott, a lot of people within Ford
didn't even think this project would be a success, so
they backed away.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
That allowed the team to operate more like a racing team.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
The Ford Centennial in June of two thousand and three
was our race day. We had to have three production
level cars ready for the centennial.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
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.
Speaker 6 (12:15):
When you do racing, you can't show up late.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
That's Mark McGowan and he was the test driver for
the program.
Speaker 6 (12:22):
It's like, you have to get it done and show
up at the start line.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Nobody's gonna wait for you.
Speaker 6 (12:29):
If you can't make it, they're gonna leave without you.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And Neil Wrestler felt the same way.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
And that meant there would be plenty of long nights
in this program.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
So my first all nighter on the program was two
weeks in.
Speaker 6 (12:49):
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 Scott because Scott needs to get this thing done.
Speaker 5 (13:03):
And I had spent an all nighter and I was
wearing the same clothes the next morning when 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?
Speaker 2 (13:21):
And that became the mentality of the thirty person team.
They worked for the next fourteen months getting that car
ready quickly, and out of that the team developed a motto,
no churning.
Speaker 5 (13:31):
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 because.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:03):
Fortually a first drive by Rydin Handling development guys. In
the first prototypes, they were really quite happy with how
the car behaved.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Right out of the box.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
This car was an eye opener. It doesn't take long
to realize that this car is going to be good.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
Making the car an extension of the driver was the goal.
Speaker 6 (14:24):
You knew the car was so good because you didn't
think about it.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
The car would just go where your mind put it,
and it was like your brain was hardwired to the vehicle.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
It just did what your brain said to do, and
it was so efforless.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
They were just excited about the car, and it was
just it was so different than what they had experienced before.
At first level prototypes.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
After one lap, we knew this was going to be
really a good car. It didn't have any problems nothing,
It just worked.
Speaker 6 (14:53):
It's just so rewarding, it's actually intoxicating. It's almost almost
like a drug.
Speaker 5 (14:58):
It exceeded what they had experienced in the past by far.
Speaker 6 (15:02):
This thing is going to be something, and it's going
to be something very special.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
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.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
I really was insisting that the top speed start with
a two. I wasn't interested in anything that was going
to go one ninety nine. We had to have something
that would go over two hundred. 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.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
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.
Speaker 6 (15:43):
It was flat foot the whole time.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Here again is test driver Mark McGowan, and he was
going to drive the four GT to its limits.
Speaker 6 (15:51):
The first time we ever got one of these cars
over two hundred and five miles an hour was in
Italy at a track called Nardo.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
I can still hear.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
This stink, the tink of theccelerator 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 fifteen minutes now,
And of course after fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
You're out of gasoline.
Speaker 6 (16:18):
You go through eighteen gallons of gas in sixteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
By the way, the testing at the Nardo Ring was
an extraordinary success. McGowan drove that car around the eight
mile ring at two hundred and twelve miles an hour.
The team knew what they had in the four GT
and they were excited to get some of the automotive
magazines to review the car.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
But pretty much at the end of the program, we're
at a track on a western Michigan called gingermin Car
and driver was invited to come out and drive the car.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And for all that work production and testing, the day
of reckoning had arrived. They show up.
Speaker 6 (16:53):
With a Ferrari three sixty Stradhalia.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Hold on a second. The Stradali was the race version
of the three to sixty Modena. This wasn't the car
that they were trying to beat. This was the much
faster car that Ferrari produced.
Speaker 5 (17:06):
That car was specifically mont for running out of the racetrack.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
For fourteen months. All of the targets had been based
on the Modana, not the Stradali. So how would the
Ford GT compare to this Stradali.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
We didn't know. We didn't have one of those to
compare against, and so we you know, we weren't sure.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
But they tested it anyway against the Ford GT. And
what did car and driver and motor trend and road
and track have to say?
Speaker 6 (17:31):
First place Ford GT.
Speaker 5 (17:34):
It wasn't even a contest.
Speaker 7 (17:35):
And if we had wanted to make this a real challenge,
we would have had to go way up the supercar
price ladder.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
GT narrowly edged the Ferrari, and the lane change and
track lapping tests.
Speaker 5 (17:46):
The second per lap in vantage over Ferrari. Far more
downforced than the Ferrari Modena, much easier to drive hard
than the Ferrari three to six. The Ford was the
quickest in a straight line in every measured test FORRI
three to sixty Modena a wonderful car that the GT
should be able to leave.
Speaker 6 (18:02):
And it's done the turn of the Ferrari Slayer.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Ford GT passed its test with flying colors. It had
beaten Ferrari. There was still one thing waiting for them
race day, the Ford Centennial. Did they make it? You
bet they did. Ford was so excited about this car
that they bought a Super Bowl commercial to brag about it.
Speaker 7 (18:23):
Introducing the Ford GT. This is the one the pace
car for an entire company.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
In fact, Neil gave a speech to the entire team
at the celebration just before the car was introduced.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
I said, you know, I'm at the end of my career.
For me, this will likely be the highlight of my
career that you guys you will remember until the day
you leave Ford and even after that.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
Being my dream car and this is all I wanted
to do. Was an incredible program see it from start
to finish. For sure, it was you know, I mean
there was a lot that couty there.
Speaker 6 (19:02):
What other job would anybody else want?
Speaker 2 (19:04):
It was the car to work on.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
It was definitely a pinnacle.
Speaker 6 (19:07):
It was the highlight of my career.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
As far as I can tell, everyone who was on
the program regards it as the highlight of their career,
and I regard it that way myself.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
They've done it. They delivered a car to the starting
line for the Ford Centennial celebration. They'd beaten Ferrari, and
by treating the project like a race team, they didn't
just recast history. They ended up creating a modern day
classic that became for Ford Motor Company, a pace car
for a new generation.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
And a special thanks to John Elfner for digging in
on that story. And it's a classic, an American classic,
and my goodness, we got to hear from test driver
Mark McGowan, Scott Allman, and Neil Wrestler, legends in the business.
A great American car story. The second version of the
(20:02):
four GT, the updated version, the improved version, that story
here on our American Story
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.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Here's John. That's the unmistakable sound of American V eight
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
RPMV eight's is new, and the introduction came for many
with the Hollywood hit film Ford Versus Ferrari. That movie
(00:51):
tells the story of how in the mid nineteen sixties,
Ford Motor Company decided to get into racing with one
goal beat Ferrari, the goliath endurance racing. In nineteen sixty four,
Ford set a goal of beating Ferrari in the most
famous endurance race, the twenty four Hours of Lama. It
took a few tries, but after three years of racing
with the Ford GT Ford did win, and they would
(01:14):
continue to win, beating Ferrari for the next three years
at Lama. And how did they do it? They built
a supercar called the Ford GT forty. In two thousand
and three, 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, Junior,
(01:34):
chairman of the Ford Motor Company, announcing the return of
the Ford GT at the two thousand and two Detroit
Auto Show.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the return of the
GT forty.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
Ford had decided to build a show car for the
two thousand and two Detroit Auto Show. The thing was
an absolute hit. It was really a hit.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
That's Neil Wrestler and at Ford he's a legend. He's
worked with Ford Performance Cars since the sixties, 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 nineteen ninety four and then he retired
in two thousand and one, but he continued to do
work with Ford on special projects and one day while
(02:17):
at the Ford headquarters, he bumped into Bill Ford Jr.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
I felt some hands on my shoulder and I looked
up on it was Bill Ford Junior, who was the
chairman at the time, and he said so We got
this show car in the Detroit 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.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
You might be thinking why was that even a question?
But the thing about his show car is they aren't
really road ready.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
The show car was really a three dimensional picture. It
made a lot of noise, but you wouldn't have driven
at more than five miles an hour. It looked great,
but it wasn't a car.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Bill Ford Junior could think of a lot of reasons
to not put the Ford GT into production. This project
would be a 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 sporting Mustang, But the Ford GT was
something entirely different. In spite of that, Ford had one
(03:15):
very big reason to build this car. They were about
to celebrate an anniversary.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
Funny tonight hear made in America, the Ford Factory celebrating
its one hundredth birthday.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
Celebrating one hundred years at Ford's Rouge Factory means looking
at the past while keeping your eyes on the future.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
We we need something to talk about. We were a
little bit light on products at the time.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Building a modern version of the Ford GT forty was
a chance to rebrand the image of the company, or
as insiders at Ford would say, polish.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Bill Ford Junior 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.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
We had to have a finished car in June of
two thousand and three because that was going to be
the Ford Centennial celebration, which was a major blowout.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
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
twentieth century America. During that century, Ford had invented the
consumer car in the form of the Model T. Then
during World War Two they quit making cars and built airplanes, tanks,
and jeeps, which were vital to winning the war. After
(04:57):
the war, Ford reimagined the sports car for the postwar 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 nineteen
sixties with a Ford GT forty. In each of these cases,
Ford had attempted a moonshot, something that seemed nearly impossible,
and in each case they'd succeeded. The reissue of the
(05:20):
Ford GT in two thousand and three 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.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
We had less than two years from the start to
get the finished cars ready and 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.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Given his background in racing, Neil knew exactly what he
would need on this team to make it work.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
We would obviously have to form 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 concerned 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.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So Neil started to assemble a team made up with
a lot of people who came out of professional racing.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
Primarily, I would always tell people what I do is
he'll make the cars go faster the corners.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
He was in my motor sports department. He had spent
at least I think two years with Bobby Rayhall's team
down in Ohio. Bob ray Hall was very impressed with Scott,
as I was too.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Neil asked Scott to be part of the design team.
For Scott, there were a lot of good reasons to
take this job. The GT forty was Scott's favorite car.
He loved this car so much that before the program started,
the four GT 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,
(07:30):
Scott knew this was going to be nearly impossible.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
The normal program would be like three years with almost
three times in amount of people versus our fourteen months with
one third of the people.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:50):
Car and that car actually just the style of the car,
the beauty of the car was my favorite car in
the world.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
But it wasn't going to be easy.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
And when he was introduced to a guy named John Coletti,
the director of engineering, he told Scott the score.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
On, and timing wasn't the only problem.
Speaker 5 (08:25):
At the beginning, all we had was was the body.
Anything underneath was not done. We had to start from scratch.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
In the early days of the program, Scott didn't think
this job could get done.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
Even with my experience of working seventy tw one hundred
hours a week, deadlines every single week in racing in
Indy Car and then in NASCAR, this this seemed really insurmountable, impossible.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
But four didn't see it that way.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
The eyes of the company were on us and they
were expecting us to succeed and failure is just not
going to work.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've been listening to the 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 GT forty. When we
(09:20):
come back, the story of the Ford GT two point
zero continued, and we're back with our American stories, and
(09:42):
we're continuing with the story of the Ford GT and
its reincarnation. Here again is John Helfner.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
The Ford Motor Company had its one hundredth anniversary coming
up in July of two thousand and three, and to
mark the occasion, they wanted to do the impossible. They
wanted to build a supercar in the image of the
Ford g T forty that beat Ferrari in the nineteen
sixties Lemon races. And they didn't just want this car
to look good. They wanted this car to beat Ferrari,
just like they had thirty years earlier. Here again is
(10:12):
Neil Wrestler, the project's director.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
We picked as our image cars a Ferrari three sixty.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
After nearly thirty 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 nineteen sixty three, and
(10:41):
Neil's decision to pick people who'd been involved in professional
racing was essential to completing this project. Here again it is
Scott Alman, one of the chief engineers on the project.
Speaker 5 (10:49):
What we would say in racing is you have to
unload fast. Basically, a 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 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 time.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
And according to Scott, a lot of people within Ford
didn't even think this project would be a success, so
they backed away.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
That allowed the team to operate more like a racing team.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
The Ford Centennial in June of two thousand and three
was our race day. We had to have three production
level cars ready for the centennial.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
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.
Speaker 6 (12:15):
When you do racing, you can't show up late.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
That's Mark McGowan and he was the test driver for
the program.
Speaker 6 (12:22):
It's like, you have to get it done and show
up at the start line.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Nobody's gonna wait for you.
Speaker 6 (12:29):
If you can't make it, they're gonna leave without you.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And Neil Wrestler felt the same way.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
And that meant there would be plenty of long nights
in this program.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
So my first all nighter on the program was two
weeks in.
Speaker 6 (12:49):
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 Scott because Scott needs to get this thing done.
Speaker 5 (13:03):
And I had spent an all nighter and I was
wearing the same clothes the next morning when 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?
Speaker 2 (13:21):
And that became the mentality of the thirty person team.
They worked for the next fourteen months getting that car
ready quickly, and out of that the team developed a motto,
no churning.
Speaker 5 (13:31):
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 because.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:03):
Fortually a first drive by Rydin Handling development guys. In
the first prototypes, they were really quite happy with how
the car behaved.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Right out of the box.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
This car was an eye opener. It doesn't take long
to realize that this car is going to be good.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
Making the car an extension of the driver was the goal.
Speaker 6 (14:24):
You knew the car was so good because you didn't
think about it.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
The car would just go where your mind put it,
and it was like your brain was hardwired to the vehicle.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
It just did what your brain said to do, and
it was so efforless.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
They were just excited about the car, and it was
just it was so different than what they had experienced before.
At first level prototypes.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
After one lap, we knew this was going to be
really a good car. It didn't have any problems nothing,
It just worked.
Speaker 6 (14:53):
It's just so rewarding, it's actually intoxicating. It's almost almost
like a drug.
Speaker 5 (14:58):
It exceeded what they had experienced in the past by far.
Speaker 6 (15:02):
This thing is going to be something, and it's going
to be something very special.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
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.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
I really was insisting that the top speed start with
a two. I wasn't interested in anything that was going
to go one ninety nine. We had to have something
that would go over two hundred. 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.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
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.
Speaker 6 (15:43):
It was flat foot the whole time.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Here again is test driver Mark McGowan, and he was
going to drive the four GT to its limits.
Speaker 6 (15:51):
The first time we ever got one of these cars
over two hundred and five miles an hour was in
Italy at a track called Nardo.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
I can still hear.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
This stink, the tink of theccelerator 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 fifteen minutes now,
And of course after fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
You're out of gasoline.
Speaker 6 (16:18):
You go through eighteen gallons of gas in sixteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
By the way, the testing at the Nardo Ring was
an extraordinary success. McGowan drove that car around the eight
mile ring at two hundred and twelve miles an hour.
The team knew what they had in the four GT
and they were excited to get some of the automotive
magazines to review the car.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
But pretty much at the end of the program, we're
at a track on a western Michigan called gingermin Car
and driver was invited to come out and drive the car.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And for all that work production and testing, the day
of reckoning had arrived. They show up.
Speaker 6 (16:53):
With a Ferrari three sixty Stradhalia.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Hold on a second. The Stradali was the race version
of the three to sixty Modena. This wasn't the car
that they were trying to beat. This was the much
faster car that Ferrari produced.
Speaker 5 (17:06):
That car was specifically mont for running out of the racetrack.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
For fourteen months. All of the targets had been based
on the Modana, not the Stradali. So how would the
Ford GT compare to this Stradali.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
We didn't know. We didn't have one of those to
compare against, and so we you know, we weren't sure.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
But they tested it anyway against the Ford GT. And
what did car and driver and motor trend and road
and track have to say?
Speaker 6 (17:31):
First place Ford GT.
Speaker 5 (17:34):
It wasn't even a contest.
Speaker 7 (17:35):
And if we had wanted to make this a real challenge,
we would have had to go way up the supercar
price ladder.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
GT narrowly edged the Ferrari, and the lane change and
track lapping tests.
Speaker 5 (17:46):
The second per lap in vantage over Ferrari. Far more
downforced than the Ferrari Modena, much easier to drive hard
than the Ferrari three to six. The Ford was the
quickest in a straight line in every measured test FORRI
three to sixty Modena a wonderful car that the GT
should be able to leave.
Speaker 6 (18:02):
And it's done the turn of the Ferrari Slayer.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Ford GT passed its test with flying colors. It had
beaten Ferrari. There was still one thing waiting for them
race day, the Ford Centennial. Did they make it? You
bet they did. Ford was so excited about this car
that they bought a Super Bowl commercial to brag about it.
Speaker 7 (18:23):
Introducing the Ford GT. This is the one the pace
car for an entire company.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
In fact, Neil gave a speech to the entire team
at the celebration just before the car was introduced.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
I said, you know, I'm at the end of my career.
For me, this will likely be the highlight of my
career that you guys you will remember until the day
you leave Ford and even after that.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
Being my dream car and this is all I wanted
to do. Was an incredible program see it from start
to finish. For sure, it was you know, I mean
there was a lot that couty there.
Speaker 6 (19:02):
What other job would anybody else want?
Speaker 2 (19:04):
It was the car to work on.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
It was definitely a pinnacle.
Speaker 6 (19:07):
It was the highlight of my career.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
As far as I can tell, everyone who was on
the program regards it as the highlight of their career,
and I regard it that way myself.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
They've done it. They delivered a car to the starting
line for the Ford Centennial celebration. They'd beaten Ferrari, and
by treating the project like a race team, they didn't
just recast history. They ended up creating a modern day
classic that became for Ford Motor Company, a pace car
for a new generation.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
And a special thanks to John Elfner for digging in
on that story. And it's a classic, an American classic,
and my goodness, we got to hear from test driver
Mark McGowan, Scott Allman, and Neil Wrestler, legends in the business.
A great American car story. The second version of the
(20:02):
four GT, the updated version, the improved version, that story
here on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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