This Is Jay Leno’s Brand New Ford GT

Ford received more than 6,800 applications for exactly 500 build slots on the new GT, and it hand-picked every buyer who made the cut. Getting an allocation was never about writing the biggest check. Jay Leno’s decade-plus history with the original 2005 GT gave him a case most applicants could not match, and when his car arrived in Shadow Black with Competition Orange stripes, he skipped the press junket entirely and pointed his own camera at it. Read on for what that application process actually required.

Ford received 6,506 completed applications for exactly 500 build slots, and it hand-picked every single buyer who made the cut. Getting an allocation for the new Ford GT was never about writing the biggest check or standing first in line at a dealership. It was about proving, in writing, that you actually deserved one, which is an extraordinary thing for a manufacturer to demand of people trying to hand over half a million dollars. When his car finally arrived, Jay Leno did not wait for a press junket or an embargo date to show it off. He pointed a camera at it himself, mid-walkaround in his own restoration shop, and let the internet see exactly what a successful application actually bought.

6,506 Applications, 500 Cars

Ford built 500 examples of the new GT in its initial run, with just 250 allocated to the 2017 model year, and the flood of applications meant the company could afford to be extremely selective. That ratio, roughly thirteen applicants for every car, gave Ford something manufacturers almost never have: complete control over who ended up owning its halo product. Most limited-production supercars go to existing customers with long purchase histories at a particular dealer. Ford chose to run an open application process instead and then judge the applicants itself, which annoyed a number of wealthy people considerably.

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Ford Was Not Selling to the Highest Bidder

The criteria were not published as a formal scoring rubric, but the shape of them became clear quickly. Ford wanted owners who would drive the car, be seen in it, talk about it publicly, and treat it as something other than a sealed investment vehicle. Social media reach counted. Existing relationships with the brand counted. Track experience counted. Willingness to appear at events counted. It was, in effect, a marketing selection process dressed as a sales process, and it worked exactly as intended, since the resulting owner group generated far more visible content than a randomly selected set of buyers would have.

Leno’s 2005 GT Was the Real Application

Leno’s application was close to unbeatable on those terms. He had owned a red 2005 Ford GT with white racing stripes for well over a decade, driven it regularly rather than storing it, and featured it repeatedly on a car show with an enormous audience. That combination gave him credibility as a genuine Ford enthusiast rather than simply a wealthy buyer chasing an allocation, and that distinction reportedly mattered a great deal in how Ford evaluated the pool. It is difficult to imagine a stronger case file than a decade of documented, public, enthusiastic ownership of the car’s direct predecessor.

Shadow Black and Competition Orange

His allocation arrived finished in Shadow Black with Competition Orange stripes, paired with a matching black and orange Launch Control interior and a set of orange brake calipers to complete the theme. It is a restrained specification by supercar standards and an unusually coherent one, with the orange used as an accent rather than a statement. The color combination also reads as a deliberate nod to Ford’s racing history without resorting to the Gulf livery that every other GT owner seemed to be ordering at the time, which is a fairly Leno decision.

What Is Actually Under the Rear Glass

Under the rear glass sits the specification that caused the most argument when the car was announced: a 3.5-liter twin-turbocharged EcoBoost V6 producing 647 horsepower, mounted in a carbon fiber monocoque with pushrod suspension and active aerodynamics including a deployable rear wing. The car weighs remarkably little for something in this class, and the entire package was engineered around aerodynamic efficiency rather than raw displacement, with a teardrop cabin and flying buttresses channeling air to the rear wing. The result is a road car that is essentially a homologated race car, which is exactly what Ford intended.

Why a V6 in Ford’s Halo Car

The V6 decision was genuinely contentious among people who felt a Ford halo car needed a V8 on principle, particularly given that the original 2005 GT used a supercharged 5.4-liter V8 and the Le Mans-winning GT40 used a V8 before that. Ford’s answer was that the GT program existed to win Le Mans in the GTE class, that the EcoBoost V6 was the engine the racing program was built around, and that the road car followed the race car rather than the other way round. The program did win Le Mans in its class in 2016, fifty years after the GT40’s overall victory, which settled the argument fairly decisively.

The Resale Clause Nobody Expected

The most talked-about condition of ownership was the contractual restriction on resale, which required buyers to keep the car for a set period before selling it. Ford’s stated aim was to prevent immediate speculative flipping, and the company pursued the matter publicly when at least one high-profile owner sold early. It was an unusual assertion of control over a private asset after sale, and it drew genuine criticism, but it was consistent with everything else about the program. Ford had decided who deserved these cars and was not inclined to let the secondary market overrule it.

The YouTube Reveal That Beat the Press

Leno introducing the car through his own YouTube channel during a routine shop walkaround, rather than through a coordinated press event, is a small detail that says a lot about how supercar coverage had changed by then. He did not go into deep technical detail and promised a full review once he had spent real time with it, but the reveal reached an audience that no press embargo could have organized. For a program built explicitly around owners who would put their cars in front of people, that was precisely the outcome Ford had been selecting for, and it arrived without the company spending a dollar or scheduling a single press car. The application process had done the marketing work years before the first GT was ever delivered, which is a lesson a good many manufacturers have quietly studied since.

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