Ford built roughly 1,350 examples of its modern GT, and this one, build number H043, in white with blue racing stripes, has had a single owner since new. Randy Smalley sat down with My Car Story host Lou Costabile in Florida to talk through the 650-horsepower V6 twin-turbo under the hood and why he actually drives it.
Ford ultimately built 1,350 GTs total across the car’s full 2016-2022 production run, with only a few hundred wearing 2017 date codes like this one — each hand-built and individually numbered — and finding one on camera with an owner willing to talk specs, history, and everything in between is rarer still. This particular car carries build number H043, and the man who has owned it since day one has a story that goes well past the horsepower figure.
The Number That Makes This Car Traceable
Every 2017-and-later Ford GT carries an individual build number, and this one is H043, a detail that instantly separates it from a generic supercar review, because collectors and Ford GT registries can track that number back to its exact production slot. Owner Randy Smalley, who spoke with host Lou Costabile in Florida on a shoot dated March 27, 2018, has had the car since new, meaning every mile and every modification, or lack of one, on this particular chassis has a single, documented owner behind it.
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What Is Actually Powering This Car
Ford’s decision to power its flagship supercar with a twin-turbocharged V6 rather than a V8 or V10 was controversial when the car launched, and it is still the detail most people ask about first. This example is described in the video as making 650 horsepower, in line with the factory-rated 647-horsepower output of the 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6, a genuinely small displacement figure for a car that can run into the mid-two-second range to 60 mph. The white paint with blue stripes on this particular GT nods to Ford’s Le Mans-winning racing liveries from the 1960s, tying the modern hypercar visually back to the GT40 legacy it is named for.
Why Owners Like Randy Talk to Lou Costabile
Costabile’s channel, My Car Story, has built its reputation on exactly this kind of access, owners of rare, valuable, and often intensely private collector cars agreeing to sit down on camera and talk through the details most car media never gets close to. The channel runs on Patreon support rather than big-budget production, and that grassroots model appears to be part of why owners like Smalley are willing to open up: it reads less like a corporate review and more like two people at a car show talking shop, with a camera happening to be there.
The Comment That Says the Most About This Video
One comment on the video cuts straight to what makes this particular GT stand out from a lot of supercar content: a viewer wrote that it was nice to see a Ford GT that had actually been driven on the road, and offered their respect to the owner for it. It is a small line, but it points at a real tension in the collector-car world, where six-figure and seven-figure cars often spend their lives under a cover instead of on pavement. Smalley’s willingness to talk about actually using the car, not just owning it, is a big part of why the video resonates with viewers who would rather see these machines driven than displayed.
How Rare Is a Ford GT, Really
Ford built roughly 1,350 units of the modern GT across its production run, and getting one was not as simple as writing a check. Buyers went through an application process that weighed factors like their history with the brand and their intended use for the car, specifically to filter out flippers looking to resell at a markup. That process is part of why an owner like Smalley, who has held onto his GT since new rather than cashing in on the secondary market, represents exactly the kind of buyer Ford was hoping to find when it built the car in the first place.
A Companion Ride-Along Video Worth Knowing About
The video’s description points viewers to a companion piece, a ride-along in the same car, giving a look at how the GT behaves in motion rather than parked for a static walkaround. Between the two videos, viewers get a rare combination: the owner’s full history and specs on camera, plus footage of the car actually being driven, a more complete picture than either video offers on its own.
What This Video Represents Beyond One Car
Videos like this one function as a kind of informal archive, a documented, dated snapshot of one specific Ford GT, its owner, and its story, at a moment in time that will only become more valuable as these cars age into full collector status. Years from now, footage like this may be one of the more reliable records of who owned build H043 and what shape it was in when it still had its original owner behind the wheel.
How the Modern GT Connects Back to the Original GT40
Ford’s decision to revive the GT name in 2005 and again in 2017 was always about more than just building a fast car, it was about trading on one of the most storied results in racing history, Ford’s GT40 sweeping the top three spots at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans after Ford failed to buy Ferrari outright. The white-and-blue livery on this particular 2017 GT directly echoes the colors campaigned by Ford’s factory racing effort in the mid-1960s, a deliberate choice by owners who spec their cars this way specifically to connect a modern hypercar to that racing lineage rather than treating it as just another exotic on the showroom floor. It is a detail casual viewers might miss entirely, but one that carries real weight among Ford GT owners and collectors who track exactly which liveries echo which historic racing colors, and it is part of why this particular build stands out even among a already rare production run.
What Makes a Documented Owner Interview Valuable Long-Term
As Ford GTs from this generation continue to appreciate and change hands over the coming decades, videos like this one become reference material in their own right, dated, on-record testimony from an original owner about a specific chassis. That kind of documentation is difficult to fabricate after the fact, which is exactly why collectors and registries place real value on interviews like this one alongside the paperwork and service records that typically accompany a car of this caliber, especially for a numbered build like H043 that can be tracked across ownership changes going forward.
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