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Here's Jon. 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 V8s 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, the Goliath of endurance racing. In 1964, Ford set a goal of beating Ferrari in the most famous endurance race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. 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 Le Mans.
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. Neil 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, 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.
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 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 Ressler, there was another reason Ford needed a project like this. We needed something to talk about. We were a little bit light on product at the time. Building a modern version of the Ford GT40 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 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 re-imagined 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 looked 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 re-issue 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. Sixteen 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 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. 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 guides, 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 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 faster 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.
He had spent, I think, two years with Bobby Rahal's team down in Ohio. Rahal was very impressed with Scott, as I was too. My vehicle dynamics role at Team Rahal was to help figure out the best setup for our lead 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 included 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, was my favorite car in the world. But it wasn't going to 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, he said, 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 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, and failure is just not going to work. And you've been listening to this story of the making of the updated version of the Ford GT, celebrating, of course, not just the 100th anniversary of Ford 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 GT 2.0 continues. In 2026, supporting possibilities turned into achievements on the biggest stage.
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Watch coverage of the 2024 presidential election Tuesday, November 5th on MSNBC. And we're back with our American stories, and we're continuing with the story of the Ford GT and its reincarnation. Here again is Jon 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 same thing as the Ford Motor Company.
The Ford Motor Company, which was the first American company to do the same thing as the Ford Motor Company, 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 picked as our image cars 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, the same mindset, the same importance on the Ford GT 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. 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 of every element of design, every part of the timeline, we didn't have this tracking and checking. And 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 Ford 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 going to wait for you.
If you can't make it, they're going to leave without you. And Neil Ressler felt the same way. We were only going to have time for one design iteration. 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, 7 o'clock at night, head home. Of course, we come back in at 7 in the morning, and there's still Scott, because Scott needs to get this thing done. 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? 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 the motto, no churning.
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 Ford GT, but once a 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 Neil Ressler 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 and 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 hard-wired 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 so different than what they had experienced before our 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. 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 the top speeds 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 Nardo. I think it's something like an 8-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.
It 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 8-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 Stradaglia.
Now hold on a second. The Stradaglia was the race version of the 360 Modena. This wasn't the car that they were trying to beat. This was the much faster car 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, not the Stradaglia. So how would the Ford GT compare to the Stradaglia? We didn't know. We didn't have one of those to compare against, and so 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. And 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. The 360 Modena, a wonderful car that the GT should be able to leave in its dust. Third of the Ferrari slayer. The Ford GT passed its test with flying colors. It had beaten Ferrari.
But 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. Introducing the Ford GT.
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. That 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 to see it from start to finish, for sure. It was, you know, I mean there was a lot that kept 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 was on the program regards it as the highlight of their career.
And I regard it that way myself. They'd 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 Ressler, 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. This is Tonya Rad from scrubbing in with Becca Tilly and Tonya Rad. This is what you do when you've just found that statement handbag on eBay and you want to build an entire wardrobe around it. You start selling to keep buying. Yep, on eBay. Over that all black everything phase, list it and buy all the color. Feeling more vintage than ever? It's out with the new and in with the pre-loved. Next thing you know, you refresh your wardrobe basically without spending a dime. Yeah, eBay, the place to buy and sell new pre-loved vintage and rare fashion eBay things people love. Hey, it's Lance Bass from frosted tips.
Thanks to Hyundai. I recently took a road trip to Vegas for this year's I heart radio music festival. I was joined by my friend and fellow boy bander A.J. McLean and we got to explore some pretty cool spots along the way.
And we even recorded a special episode for you guys. Here's a sneak peek. What are your must have road trip snacks? The original spree size sweet tarts. But the original sweet tarts, not the little chewy ones. Those are not sweet tarts. Oh, I like the chewy ones.
Here are my go tos. Reese's peanut butter cups. They have to be the holiday versions.
They have to be either an Easter egg or a Christmas tree. They do a pumpkin now. They got a pumpkin now. I'm a peanut butter guy.
This episode is presented by Hyundai. Hear that? Pumpkin. That's fall calling. And the pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks from that first sweater to late autumn weather. It's all a fall in just one sip. Order ahead on the Starbucks app. That would be great. Check out Bose dot com for more.
