This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, it's Bobby from the Bobby Bone Show. I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio Music Festival and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there. How did Ashes come together, Diplo? I pulled up real quick.
He was about to leave on tour. You're about to jump in your tour bus, and we had like three hours. It was really cool. He literally just like randomly showed up to my house. I'm like, oh, hey, Diplo, what are you doing?
He's like, I have a song that I want to show you. And I was like, okay. You can listen to the full episode out now wherever you get your podcast. And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. At a blast, cruising around the festival weekend in the all-new Palisade Hybrid.
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And we continue with our American stories. And up next, a 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.
Here's John. That's the unmistakable sound of American V8 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 RPM V eights is new. And the introduction came from many with the Hollywood hit film Ford vs. Ferrari.
That movie tells the story of how, in the mid-1960s, Ford Motor Company decided to get into racing with one goal. Beat Ferrari. Goliath of endurance racing. In 1964, Ford set a goal of beating Ferrari in the most famous endurance race, the 24 Hours of Lamas. It took a few tries, but after three years of racing with the Ford GT, Ford did win, and they would continue to win, beating Ferrari for the next three years at Lamas.
And how did they do it? They built a supercar called the Ford GT40. In 2003, 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 Jr., chairman of the Ford Motor Company, announcing the return of the Ford GT at the 2002 Detroit Auto Show.
Ladies and gentlemen. I give you the return of the GT40. Ford had decided to build a show car For the 2002 Detroit Auto Show, the thing was an absolute hit. It was really a hit. That's Neil Ressler.
and at Ford he's a legend. He's worked with Ford Performance Cars since the 60s, holding just about any job you can think of at the company that involves cars going fast. Neal became a vice president at Ford in 1994, and then he retired in 2001, but he continued to do work with Ford on special projects. And one day while at the Ford headquarters, he bumped into Bill Ford Jr. I felt some hands on my shoulder and I looked up and it was Bill Ford Jr., who was the chairman at the time.
And he said, so we got this show car and the detour 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. You might be thinking, why was that even a question?
But the thing about a show car is, they aren't really road ready. The show car was really a three-dimensional picture. It made a lot of noise, but you wouldn't have driven it more than five miles an hour. It looked great, but it wasn't a car. Bill Ford Jr.
could think of a lot of reasons to not put the Ford GT into production. This project would be 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 sporty Mustang, but the Ford GT was something entirely different. In spite of that, Ford had one very big reason to build this car. they were about to celebrate an anniversary. Finally tonight here, Made in America, the Ford Factory celebrating its 100th birthday.
Celebrating 100 years at Ford's Rouge factory means looking at the past while keeping your eyes on the future. Looking at the past while keeping your eyes on the future. That's what the Ford G T project was all about. And that's why Bill Ford decided to go ahead with production of the Ford G T. And according to Neil Ressler, there was another reason Ford needed a project like this.
We need a duh. We need something to talk about. We were a little bit light on product at the time. 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 the blue oval. It had 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. Bill Ford Jr. asked Neil Ressler 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. We had to have a finished car In June of 2003, because that was going to be the Ford's centennial celebration, which was a major blowout, 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 20th century America. During that century Ford had invented the consumer car in the form of the Model T. Then during World War II they quit making cars and built airplanes, tanks and jeeps which were vital to winning the war.
After the war, Ford reimagined the sports car for the post-war 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 1960s with the Ford GT40. 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 Ford GT in 2003 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. 16 months. That's the amount of time the team had to build a car.
basically from scratch. We had less than two years from the start To get the finished cars ready, get 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. Given his background in racing, Neil knew exactly what he would need on this team to make it work. We would obviously have to form a very small core team. And I was interested in having guys who'd been involved in motor racing. And the reason for that is that But if you're an engineer in motor racing, And most of all, you're 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.
So Neil started to assemble a team made up of a lot of people who came out of professional racing. Primarily I would always tell people, What I do is help make the cars go fast through the corners. That's the voice of Scott Allman. 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.
He was in my motorsports department, and he had spent, I think, two years. with Bobby Rahol's team down in Ohio. Indianapolis 500 champion, Bobby Rayhall. Rayhall was very impressed with Scott, as I was too. My Vehicle Dynamics role at Team Rayhall was to help figure out the best setup for our elite drivers at some of the fastest racetracks in the world.
Neil asked Scott to be part of the design team. For Scott, there were a lot of good reasons to take this job. The GT40 was Scott's favorite car. He loved this car so much that before the program started, the Ford GT40 was his screensaver. And don't tell anybody this, but all of Scott's passwords include a GT40 in some way.
But despite his love for the GT, Scott knew this was going to be nearly impossible. The normal program would be like three years with almost three times the amount of people versus our 14 months with one-third of the people. 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 car. And that car, actually, just the style of the car, the beauty of the car. It was my favorite car in the world. But it wasn't gonna be easy.
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. And when he was introduced to a guy named John Coletti, the director of engineering, he told Scott the score. He said to me, well, We have no time, no budget, no people, no choice.
Welcome to the team, Allman. All of that was. Absolutely right on. And timing wasn't the only problem. At the beginning, all we had was the body.
Anything underneath was not done. We had to start from scratch. In the early days of the program, Scott didn't think this job could get done. Even with my experience of working 70 to 100 hours a week, Deadlines every single week in racing in IndyCar and then in NASCAR. This seemed This seemed really insurmountable.
impossible. But Ford didn't see it that way. The eyes of the company were on us. And they were expecting us to succeed. failure, it's just not going to work.
And you've been listening to this story of the making of the updated version. of the four GT celebrating, of course, not just the hundredth anniversary, Afford itself. But remembering the remarkable feat Of producing one of the great race cars of all time, the Ford GT40. When we come back. The story of the Ford G T 2.0 continued.
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Yeah. This is Buzz Knight from Taking a Walk. Lexis believes in the importance of standards. What are my standards? I never want to be late.
I always want to show up on time. For Lexus, the standard is simple. Experience amazing. Their benchmarks aren't stats or specs. They're feelings.
Exhilaration. Joy. That sense your car was designed just for you. Machines built to make you feel more human. Because a car that doesn't make you feel something is a car that stops short of amazing.
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Here again. is John Helfner. The Ford Motor Company had its 100th anniversary coming up in July of 2003. And to mark the occasion, they wanted to do the impossible. They wanted to build a supercar in the image of the Ford GT40 that beat Ferrari in the 1960s Le Mans races.
And they didn't just want this car to look good, they wanted this car to beat Ferrari just like they had 30 years earlier. Here again is Neil Ressler, the project's director. We pick as our image cards a Ferrari 360. After nearly 30 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 1963. And Neil's decision to pick people who'd been involved in professional racing, was essential to completing this project. Here again is Scott Allman, one of the chief engineers on the project. What we would say in racing is you have to unload fast.
Basically, the 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, same mindset, the same. importance on the 4GG program because we didn't have time to iterate. We had to get it right the first time. And according to Scott, a lot of people within Ford didn't even think this project would be a success.
so they backed away. I mean there was almost no one who thought that we would achieve the performance at the cost we were supposed to achieve it at and within the timing. 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.
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. Every element of design, every part of the timeline. We didn't have this tracking and checking. That allowed the team to operate more like a racing team. The Ford Centennial in June of 2003 was our race day.
We had to have three production-level cars ready for the Centennial. By viewing the Forged Centennial as a race day, all these engineers with racing experience really became comfortable with the process. No, there wasn't going to be any real race. but they saw the Ford Centennial as the starting line. When you do racing, you can't show up late.
That's Mark McGowan, and he was the test driver for the program. It's like you have to get it done. and show up at the start line. Nobody's gonna wait for you. If you can't make it, They're gonna leave without you.
and Neil Ressler felt the same way. We were only going to have time for one design iteration. Th there was definitely not going to be time to go back and fix things.
So they had to work the first time. And that meant there would be plenty of long nights in this program.
So my first all-nighter on the program was two weeks in. I think he was working on the tire design. We all went home. You know, seven o'clock at night. Get home.
Of course, we come back in at seven in the morning and there's still Scott. because Scott needs to get this thing done. And I'd 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? And that became the mentality of the 30-person team. They worked for the next 14 months getting that car ready, quickly. And out of that, the team developed a motto, no churning. No churning came from our director, John Coletti, 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 4GT. But once a decision was made, it was not revisited unless there was really a major issue. It was like racing. We had raced a, we couldn't push back that deadline. Because Neil Wrestler had put together a team that was used to the pressures of a deadline, they did get their cars built.
And in a few months, the first prototype was ready to test drive. Fortunately, our first drive. by our ride and handling development guys. In the first prototypes, they were really quite happy with how the car behaved. Right out of the box, this car was an eye-opener.
It doesn't take long to realize that. This car is going to be good. Making the car an extension of the driver was the goal. You knew the car was so good. Because you didn't think about it.
The car would just go where your mind put it. And it was like your brain was hardwired. to the vehicle. It just did what your brain said. To do, and it was so effortless.
They were just excited about the car, and it was just so different than what they had experienced before at first-level prototypes. After one lap, we knew this was going to be really a good car. It didn't have any problems, nothing, it just worked. It's just so rewarding. It's actually intoxicating.
It's almost like a drug. It exceeded what they had experienced in the past by far. This thing is going to be something and it's going to be something very special. The 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.
I really was insisting that that the top speed start with a 2. I wasn't interested in anything that was going to go 199. We had to have something that would go over 200. We couldn't do that anywhere in America. The only place we could go was Narda.
I think it's like an eight-mile oval or something. 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 Ford GT to its limits there. He was flat foot the whole time. Here again is test driver Mark McGowan.
and he was going to drive the Ford GT to its limits. The first time we ever got one of these cars over 205 miles an hour, was in Italy. at a track called Nardo. I can still hear the distinctive Tink. of the accelerator 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 15 minutes now. And of course after 15 minutes you're out of gasoline.
You go through 18 gallons of gas in 16 minutes, by the way. The testing at the Nardo ring was an extraordinary success. McGowan drove that car around the eight-mile ring at 212 miles an hour. The team knew what they had in the Ford GT. and they were excited to get some of the automotive magazines to review the car.
We're pretty much at the end of the program. We're at a track on Western Michigan called Gingerman. Car and driver was invited to come out and drive the car. After all that work, production and testing, The day of reckoning had arrived. They show up with a Ferrari 360 Stradalia.
Hold on a second, the Stradale was the race version of the 360 Modena. This wasn't the car that they were trying to beat. This was the much faster card that Ferrari produced. That car was specifically meant for running at the racetrack. For 14 months, all of the targets had been based on the Modena.
Nathistradali.
So how would the Ford GT compare to this Stradale? We didn't know. We didn't have one of those to compare against, and so we, you know, we weren't sure. 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?
First place, Ford GT. It wasn't even a contest. If we had wanted to make this a real challenge, we would have had to go way up the supercar price ladder. The GT narrowly edged the Ferrari in the lane change and track lapping test. Two second per lap advantage over a Ferrari.
Far more downforce than the Ferrari Modena. Much easier to drive hard than the Ferrari 360. The Ford was the quickest in a straight line in every measured test. Ferrari 360 Modena, a wonderful car that the GT should be able to leave in its dust. Turn of the Ferrari Slayer.
The Ford GT passed its test with flying colors. It had beaten Ferrari. There was still one thing waiting for them. Race day. Fort Centennial.
And 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. Introducing the first time. This is the one.
The Pace Car. for an entire company. In fact, Neil gave a speech to the entire team at the celebration just before the car was introduced. I said, you know, I'm at the end of my career. For me, This will likely be The highlight of my career.
But you guys, you will remember until the day you leave Ford, and even after that. Being my dream car, and this is all I wanted to do, it was an incredible program, see it from start to finish. For sure, it was, you know, I mean, there was a lot that. Cut me there. What other job would anybody else want?
It was the car to work on. It was definitely a pinnacle. It was the highlight of my career. As far as I can tell, Everyone who is on the program regards it as the highlight of their career. And I regard it that way myself.
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.
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 Ford GT, the updated version, the improved version. That story here. on our American story. Hey, it's Bobby from the Bobby Bones Show.
I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio Music Festival and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there. How did Ashes come together, Diplo? I pulled up real quick. He was about to leave on tour. You're about to jump in your tour bus and we had like three hours.
It was really cool. He literally just like randomly showed up to my house. I'm like, oh, hey, Diplo, what are you doing? He's like, I have a song that I want to show you. And I was like, okay.
You can listen to the full episode out now wherever you get your podcast. And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. Had a blast, cruising around the festival weekend in the all-new Palisade Hybrid. It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month. LifeLock is here with tips to help protect your identity, use strong passwords, set up multi-factor authentication, report scams, and update your software.
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