#FordGT

If there’s about $450,000 burning a hole in your pocket, Ford wants you to get in line for the new GT.

The application process for the 2017 and 2018 model years of the carbon fiber supercar kicked off today, and along with it, a very selective customer screening process.

Ford will sell a limited number of GTs each year, produced by Canadian firm Multimatic, so it could be a long wait if you don’t make the cut this time around. Ford anticipates first deliveries will begin late this year, with applications ending on May 12. Oh, and Russia? You can’t order a Ford GT, unless you have a friend buy it for you in an eligible country — like, say, China.

Ford Motor Company has announced that, in partnership with the Corning glass works, the new Ford GT supercar will have a windshield and engine cover made of what they call Gorilla Glass Hybrid.

In case you don’t know, Gorilla Glass is Corning’s brand name for the ion-exchange-strengthened glass used in smartphones and tablets. Instead of two sheets of annealed glass laminated with a middle sheet of clear polymer — as in conventional safety glass — Gorilla Glass Hybrid replaces the inner layer with Gorilla Glass.

Ford is out at Sebring testing their newest toy — the Ford GT LM GTE — in preparation for the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship. Thankfully, someone was on location and captured a few laps on video.

I’d like to personally thank this intrepid track video reporter. The car sounds like a four-wheeled warzone, completely with six turbocharged AK-47-esque cylinders.

Ford’s plans for the Mustang may include their 10-speed automatic transmission, jointly developed with General Motors, and a Mach 1 version, according to Automotive News (via Motor Authority).

The amazingly engineered 10-speed, which will make an appearance on the new Ford F-150 Raptor, may be mated to Ford’s four-cylinder EcoBoost engine in the Mustang in the U.S. — and only in the Mustang — which feels weird.

But Mach 1(!)

After some success in connection with the Pebble Beach car festivities, the producers of the Auto Moto Film Festival decided to bring the show to Detroit’s Fillmore auditorium for the weekend of the Chevrolet Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix. I hope to have something about the festival and the outstanding movies and personalities therein up on TTAC sometime later, but there was actually some automotive news generated at the event.

Well, sorta.

Ford Motor Company’s head of product development coyly avoided denying company plans to campaign the new Ford GT at the 24 hour LeMans race next year. The designer of the previous Ford GT, an homage to the LeMans conquering Ford GT40, also acknowledged he’s been working on a successor to another iconic 1960s sports car.

The Viper ACR will be able to take on other track-ready specials for thousands less.

Photo courtesy of Cars In Depth

If pressed, I’m pretty sure that I could come up with at least a half dozen different posts on the connection between automobiles and popular music, particularly rock ‘n roll and blues. There are songs like Terraplane Blues, Little Red Corvette and Baby You Can Drive My Car. You could probably do a series of coffee table books just on the car collections of rock stars like Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, J. Geils, Jeff Beck, Billy Gibbons and many others. “Stars & Cars” or “Cars & Guitars” has been used as a display or exhibit theme by museums devoted to both automobiles and musical instruments. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people who love both cars and guitars have managed to join those interests, at the enthusiast level, with licensing deals, and at the advanced design studio level.

Sure, why not?

Jeremy writes:

Hi Sajeev,

Greetings (again) from Australia. I’ve got a question regarding converting from left- to right-hand-drive. No idea if you’re the right person to send this to (you could do worse – SM) but I’ll send it anyway.

A Ford engineer responds to our last piece on the Ford GT.

In “Ur-Turn: The Hater’s Guide to the Ford GT”, we get a glimpse into the Ford product development cycle for high-volume vehicles. The authors, who humbly claim that it was a broad overview, give a rather complete account of the roles, responsibilities, and procedures behind nearly every Ford product that comes to market. It’s a fascinating process, and it occurs every day at virtually every OEM and supplier. But what happens when a particular design or system defies convention? How do you validate something that is unlike anything your company has ever produced? What happens when you push the product development envelope so far, that you enter a completely new and unfamiliar design space? This is where we’ll find the Ford GT.

TTAC and the Blue Oval have a wonderful back channel that bears all kinds of fruit. Information on the new Mustang, the F-150’s aluminum construction, the subsequent delays in manufacturing aluminum bodies and the Raptor’s upcoming EcoBoost engine were just some of the scoops we’ve obtained via our sources. We also blew it when we called BS on the new Ford GT.

As it turned out, the car is real. But it’s being done outside of normal channels, and this could have potential negative consequences for buyers of this very exclusive, very expensive supercar. A few of our sources penned this editorial to help shed some light on the matter. They are drawing on their collective experience in various functions to help illustrate how the GT was developed, and why the secret, skunkworks nature of the project could be negative.

If you’ve read any media outlet (automotive or otherwise), you’ll know that the new Ford performance group will be releasing 12 performance inspired vehicles coming before 2020. The star of the show is the Ford GT, with its carbon fiber construction and mid-mounted EcoBoost V6 engine. The reception from the press could not have been any more enthusiastic. The last thing we need is to throw more lube on the collective media hand job for this car.

TRIGGER WARNING: The following editorial might be offensive to Ford fanboys, supercar geeks and those who aren’t acquainted with the way things work inside Ford. You have been warned.

We thought this wouldn’t happen, but here it is: The Ford GT has returned.

Bob Lutz is not the only one who is “often wrong, never in doubt”. When I penned my Ford GT editorial, I had a pretty sound case for believing that the latest reports of a successor to Ford’s supercar were little more than clickbait. By usually reliable sources inside the Blue Oval seemed to concur. And then I got a phone call from someone who is placed highly enough to know.

None of you could ever accuse me of having a particularly thick skin, but there is one accusation that does get to me. Cries of “clickbait” are often doled out in these pages. They seem to occur when somebody disagrees with the conclusions reached in the article, or when too much negative light is shed on the reader’s pet brand. Cognitive lapses aside, these accusations get under my skin for a couple of reasons

1. TTAC has never been under a mandate to increase our click count, and as long as I am at the helm, it will not be. Unlike other competitors, who tie everything from their editorial schedule to the compensation of their writers to “clicks”, we are allowed to sacrifice quantity in favor of quality and editorial independence. This means that in exchange for our freedom, we don’t get certain things, like unfettered press car access, or the budget to hire a copy editor. But our owners at VerticalScope have consistently understood and respected our need to liberate this site from the shackles of tyranny: in this case, click-based reporting, compensation structures etc. It comes at a significant cost, in terms of budget and salaries, but the end result is a website that can bring you The Truth About Cars, rather than baseless rumors, photos of celebrity genitalia and other unseemly editorial topics designed to juice our stats.
2. In terms of ROI, a 1000 word essay on the topic of automobiles is hardly the stuff that clickbait is made of. Slide shows, listicles and the like are far better instruments to cheaply generate clicks, and they’ve never appeared on this site. Not agreeing with a point of view does not equal clickbait.

That’s not to say that all clickbait appears in the form of a Buzzfeed-esque “YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THESE 25 ADORABLE BABY DIESEL WAGONS DID NEXT” piece of “content”. Sometimes, you get it in the blind repetition of totally baseless rumors that are, at best, wish-fulfillment for poorly trained, poorly paid bloggers and at worst, inaccurate information posted out of a reckless disregard for the realities of what it takes to bring a new vehicle to market.

While I personally find the Ford GT based GTR1 that Galpin Auto Sports will be selling for a million dollars rather inoffensive, a number of the Best and Brightest expressed some distaste for styling of the 1,000+ horsepower, twin turbo 225 MPH (estimated) supercar. Even some of those that didn’t necessarily dislike the GTR1 said they still preferred the looks of the GT. I happen to agree. As a matter of fact, this is going to sound like heresy to some folks, but I think the Ford GT is even a better looking car than the original Ford GT40.