Fifty years after breaking Ferrari six-year stranglehold on Le Mans, Ford is putting that victory back on the road with a heritage-liveried GT. This gloss red, red-stitched special edition ties back to one of the greatest underdog wins in racing history. See how Ford turned a decades-old Le Mans triumph into a modern tribute.
The zenith of that era occurred in 1967 when Ford‘s GT beat Ferrari NVÂ at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Now 50 years later, Ford is introducing a special edition GT that should look familiar to racing fans who know its history.
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The car features a gloss finish race red exterior and leather trimming with red accent stitching on the interior.
Fifty years is a long time to wait to say I told you so, but that is basically what Ford did with this one. Back in the 1960s, Ferrari dominated the 24 Hours of Le Mans for six years straight, until an American manufacturer showed up and ended the streak in the most emphatic way possible. Now Ford is bringing that story back with a special edition that wears the same racing colors as the cars that made history. This is not just a paint scheme. It is a callback to one of the greatest underdog stories in racing.
The Win That Started It All
Ford built the GT40 specifically to dethrone Ferrari, who had owned Le Mans for six straight years by 1965. In 1966, three 427-powered Mk.II GT40s crossed the finish line together, breaking Ferrari streak and making Ford the first American manufacturer to win a major European road race since Jimmy Murphy Duesenberg back in 1921. Ford was not done. In 1967 the Mk.IV took the win again, and this time it was the only car in Le Mans history built entirely in the United States, chassis and engine both, to take overall victory.
How Ford Brought the Story Back
Ford has rolled out several Heritage Edition liveries across the modern GT production run, from a tribute to the original 1964 prototype to a black-and-silver package honoring the 1966 win. A gloss race red exterior with red-stitched leather inside reads like a nod to the red-and-white GT40 Mk.IV that closed out the job at Le Mans in 1967. Whichever year it is paying tribute to, wrapping a brand new GT in genuine racing colors ties the car directly back to the track where Ford actually earned the bragging rights.
A Modern Supercar Built to Honor an Old Legend
The second-generation Ford GT that carries these heritage liveries is nothing like the raw, purpose-built GT40 racers that actually won at Le Mans. It is a carbon-fiber, twin-turbo V6 supercar built in extremely limited numbers, with Ford handpicking buyers rather than simply selling to whoever showed up with a checkbook. That exclusivity only adds weight to a heritage-liveried example. It is not just a tribute color, it is one of a very small number of modern GTs built specifically to keep the Le Mans story alive for a new generation of enthusiasts.
The GT40’s Legacy Didn’t End in 1967
Ford’s Le Mans dominance actually stretched a full four years, not just the two most people remember — after the 1966 and 1967 overall wins, GT40s continued racing competitively into 1968 and 1969, with a Mk.I taking overall victory again in 1969 in one of the closest finishes in the race’s history. That extended run cemented the GT40 not as a one-off underdog story but as a genuinely dominant race car across multiple seasons, which is part of why Ford keeps returning to this specific era whenever it wants to tell its most famous racing story.
Why Heritage Liveries Matter to Collectors
A heritage-liveried car occupies an unusual space in the collector market — it’s not a genuine race car with period history of its own, but it’s also not a blank canvas the way a standard-color example would be, since the livery ties it directly to a specific documented moment in the manufacturer’s own racing past. That connection tends to make heritage editions more desirable on the resale market than standard colorways of the same car, especially once the specific anniversary or milestone being honored becomes historically significant in its own right rather than simply a marketing exercise.
How Limited the Modern GT Really Is
Ford’s second-generation GT program was never about volume — the company handpicked buyers through an application process rather than simply selling to whoever placed an order first, prioritizing owners with a genuine connection to the brand or a track record of properly caring for and showing performance cars. That selection process, combined with a production run measured in the hundreds per year rather than thousands, means even a standard-color modern GT is already a rare sight, and a Heritage Edition within that already-small population is rarer still.
The Twin-Turbo V6 That Surprised Everyone
Ford’s decision to power the second-generation GT with a twin-turbocharged V6 rather than a traditional V8 raised eyebrows when it was first announced, since American supercars had leaned on big-displacement V8s for decades. The choice made more sense once the car proved itself on track, drawing directly on Ford’s endurance-racing EcoBoost program rather than treating the V6 as a cost-saving measure, and it’s since become one of the more debated but ultimately vindicated engineering decisions in the modern GT’s history.
A Modern Callback That Still Works
It would have been easy for Ford to treat the Le Mans anniversary as a simple paint-scheme afterthought, but tying an actual limited-production model to that history instead gives enthusiasts something more substantial to chase than a sticker package — a real, driveable connection to a race the company is still clearly proud of more than fifty years later.
Why This Story Keeps Getting Retold
Ford has returned to the GT40-versus-Ferrari story again and again, across documentaries, a major feature film, and now multiple generations of heritage liveries, because it remains one of the few moments in American automotive history where an underdog manufacturer beat a dominant European rival at its own game, on its own turf, using cars built specifically for that purpose.
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