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Posts Tagged: Ford GT

This widebody 1973 De Tomaso Pantera hides a serious trick under its flared fenders: a Ford GT front end grafted onto an Italian mid-engine body, backed by a 351 Cleveland V8 and a ZF five-speed transaxle. Ford sold the Pantera through Lincoln-Mercury dealers for just a few years before an oil crisis and warranty headaches ended the partnership. Read on to find out what it took to merge two very different Fords into one genuinely double-take build.

A twin-turbo, supercharged, nitrous Ford GT pushing an estimated 1200 horsepower lined up against a supercharged, nitrous Dodge Viper putting down roughly 1050 — and the race came down to who left the line clean, not who had the bigger number. High Tech Corvette caught the whole exchange, reaction-time jokes and all. Watch to see whether raw horsepower or a perfect launch wins the day.

Ford built its most hyped modern supercar around a V6, and asked buyers to trust the engineering. At Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale, Lou Costabile caught one of the first production 2017 Ford GTs alongside Ford’s own performance marketing manager, who calls it the ultimate expression of form following function. The comments don’t fully agree, and one viewer even makes a detailed case for a 900-hp handmade rival that costs a fraction as much. Who’s right depends on what you think a supercar is actually for.

A driver takes a 2017 Camaro ZL1 out for their first-ever laps on track, sharing the session with a Ford GT — one of the most exclusive supercars Ford has built in decades. With a supercharged 650-horsepower LT4 V8 and a chassis engineered specifically for road-course work, the ZL1 was built for exactly this moment. Watch how a first-timer handles a car with this much capability.

Carroll Shelby’s heart condition ended his racing career, but it never slowed down the second act that followed. From founding Shelby American in 1962 to shaping the Cobra, the Shelby Mustang, and later Dodge’s Viper program under Lee Iacocca and Bob Lutz, Shelby left his fingerprints on two rival American automakers at once. Read on to find out how one man’s name ended up on performance cars from both Ford and Dodge.

Somewhere between the Ford GT40 and the much-mocked Pontiac Fiero sits a 1965 Chevrolet Corvair that owner Chuck Rust turned into a mid-engine V8 sports car using the little-known “Crown” conversion kit. Builders who attempted this exact swap decades ago describe cracked differentials, hand-fabricated input shafts, and a kit that solved only the easy part of the problem. With a claimed pedigree that traces back to Smokey Yunick’s praise for a properly sorted Corvair, this homebuilt project asks what America’s mid-engine sports car could have been.

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 has only built two generations of its GT supercar, and Kelley Blue Book’s Karl Brauer — who owns one himself — puts the 2005 original against the 2017 successor to see exactly how far the engineering moved in twelve years. From a supercharged V8 to a twin-turbo V6 and an all-new carbon monocoque, the changes go well beyond styling. Owning one shapes how Brauer sees both cars, and it shows throughout the comparison. Watch how differently a decade of engineering plays out.

Randy Smalley has owned his white-and-blue 2005 Ford GT since it was new, a Le Mans-inspired supercar he still drives through the Phoenix suburbs rather than storing away. Viewers have called its value trajectory ‘appreciating faster than it could even drive,’ a fitting line for a car built to answer Ford’s own GT40 legacy. Nearly twenty years later, the debate over whether the original supercharged V8 beats the modern turbocharged GT is still going strong. See what makes this one worth the ride.

A red Ford GT and a police cruiser share the same stretch of road, and only one of them is built for what happens next. Pulled from the “Super Speeders” DVD series, this early chase clip has racked up over twenty-one million views on the strength of a single downshift that still gets quoted in the comments today. It is loud, it is reckless, and it has not aged in the years since. Watch to see whether the GT’s biggest advantage turns out to be its downfall.

Ford spent months teasing the next Shelby GT500 in camouflage and speculation before confirming it for the 2020 model year. Spy shots revealed a wider front track, massive Brembo brakes, and a supercharged version of the GT350’s 5.2-liter V8, while rumors pointed toward horsepower figures that dwarfed the outgoing GT500’s 662. Read on to find out how close the leaked details actually came to the car Ford eventually built.

In 2005, Dodge, Ford, and Chevrolet all had their absolute best on dealer lots at the same time — a 500-horsepower Viper, a 550-horsepower Ford GT built to honor Le Mans, and a Corvette C6 that undercut both on price without giving up much performance. Nobody realized how specific that moment was until all three became collectibles. Read on to find out what a head-to-head comparison test revealed about each car’s real character.

In 1970, Plymouth’s marketing team illustrated a Hemi Cuda wrapped in all 25 colors the brand offered that year, beating Ford’s 15-color Mustang palette and Chevy’s 18-color Camaro lineup. The car in the ad was never built. Decades later, one collector’s memory of that image and a numbers-matching Cuda found untouched in a New Orleans warehouse changed that. Read on for why the finished car looks completely different depending on which side you approach from.

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.

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