Ford GT

The Ford GT was unveiled as a concept car at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January 2002. It was the centerpiece of Ford's aggressive product onslaught in answer to a challenging period for the company. Weeks later, Ford Chairman Bill Ford announced that the Ford GT would go into production, and he challenged the team to have the first three production cars ready not in the usual four or five-year timeframe, but for the Ford Centennial celebration scheduled just 15 months later.

The team met the chairman's challenge. Three Ford GTs - one of them driven by Bill Ford himself - were in the Centennial parade. The Ford GT delivers 550 horsepower and a certified 205-mph top track speed rating, with styling inspired by the historic racecars and a comfortable and contemporary interior, all for a base price of under $140,000.

Camillo Pardo the head of Ford's "Living Legends" studio is credited as the chief designer of the GT and worked under the guidance of Jay Mays. The designers drew inspiration from Ford's classic GT40 race cars of the 1960s and the GT is sometimes mistaken for its 1960s counterpart.Positive response on the auto show circuit in 2002 helped persuade the company to produce the car in limited quantities, and the first production versions appeared in 2003 . It is a very high-performance, two-seater vehicle with a strong styling resemblance to its racing ancestor and performance to match.

An ultra high-performance two-seat sports car, the Ford GT is built on an aluminum spaceframe chassis with super-plastic-formed aluminum body panels and an aluminum-over-carbon engine cover.
A mid-mounted supercharged 5.4-liter V-8 delivers 500 pound-feet of torque. Power flows to the rear wheels through a six-speed manual transaxle. Independent suspension, large Brembo brakes and Goodyear Eagle F1 Supercar tires on 18-inch front and 19-inch rear wheels all are standard equipment.

Just a few months after the car's introduction, Car & Driver magazine in its January 2004 cover story "Judgment Day!" clocked the Ford GT's 0-60 mile-per-hour acceleration at 3.3 seconds and quarter-mile performance at 11.6 seconds at 128 mph. In the same test, Ferrari's $193,000 Challenge Stradale took four seconds to reach 60 mph and was 0.8 seconds and 13 mph slower through the quarter-mile. Other tests, even with much more expensive exotic sports cars, have shown similar results.