While the French do a healthy business in shrugs and even, when equipped, mustache twirls, they are for the most part an undemonstrative people. Yet the Ford GT’s abrupt transition to its Track mode—the car dropping two inches as hydraulic actuators compress its supplemental coil springs, the rear wing rising with an equal suddenness—is impressive enough to coax a collective sigh of appreciation from the group of Le Mans corner workers and other informed spectators watching as the car readies itself to head onto the famous circuit.

Although we’ve brought the new GT back to the site of its most celebrated racing win, the 2016 class victory taken in its first entry to the 24-hour race, this is not an exploration of what the car is capable of on a track. Our photographic use of Le Mans’s short Bugatti circuit happens during a lunch break, and even though in France that equates to two hours, access is on the condition that we drive gently enough not to trip the noise meters.



The bigger question, and the one we haven’t been able to answer so far, is how the GT deals with the real world or, at least, the approximation of that given to us by France. For that, we’d need to take the car on public roads, and it just so happens that some of the ones we choose are actually part of the classic enduro’s circuit.

View Photos The GT's minimalist interior is cramped, but so are most Le Mans cars'. Fun fact: The dashboard's main beam is structural. GREG PAJO

The yellow car you see here lives in Europe but boasts full U.S. spec, complete with red rear turn signals and a navigation system that refuses to acknowledge the existence of anything east of Maine. Up close, the GT also reveals the patina of a life lived hard, with swirling galaxies of stone chips on those parts of the lower bodywork not protected by helicopter tape. The odometer admits to just 6500 miles, but the technicians who delivered the car to France and who are present to keep it in tune say the vast majority of those were accumulated on racetracks. (For reference, the No. 68 car that took class honors at Le Mans in 2016 covered 2880 miles in 24 hours.)

Beyond France, we also extracted a full set of performance numbers from another GT in Michigan and later took that car to Virginia International Raceway to see how its lap time compared with some of the harder chargers. With production limited to just 250 units a year, that means a respectable percentage of the existing fleet has been employed to bring you this story.

Let’s start with the sticky subject of the numbers. Because while the GT is hugely fast, its raw figures are not as inspirational as they should be considering the price premium the car carries over blue-chip rivals. We know it is churlish to criticize any car capable of breaking 60 mph from a standstill in three seconds flat and turning in a sub-11-second quarter; yet the brutal truth is that those times are only sufficient to put the GT below the median of its insanely rapid segment. Both the Lamborghini Huracán Performante and the McLaren 720S are significantly quicker, and each is more than $150,000 cheaper.

View Photos GREG PAJO

But then, those cars are practically mass produced when compared with the GT, which will leave Multimatic’s assembly plant in Markham, Ontario, at the rate of no more than one a day. The Ford’s twin-turbo V-6 was also chosen for reasons beyond mere horsepower, with GTE Pro regulations using a Byzantine balance of performance calculation to wind back challengers with too much firepower. The heavily reworked 3.5-liter EcoBoost gives the GT a tangential link to the lower reaches of the Ford range and is also compact enough to fit within the GT’s dramatically tapered bodywork—a design dictated by the racing variant’s aerodynamic requirements.

The GT is certainly not lacking for theater. Our base in the Pays de la Loire is the appropriately named Hôtel de France in La Chartre-sur-le-Loir, around 30 miles from the circuit and previously the encampment of the original Ford GT40 works effort in the ’60s. Since then, it has become a magnet for race fans. Its rooms are named after famous drivers, making it possible to have an excellent three-course dinner with wine and then charge it to Derek Bell. Yet while the local population has grown used to seeing all manner of exotica parked in the square outside, the GT is still special enough to draw spectators as it is unloaded from the transporter and warms up just after dawn.



While many supercars have been tucked and tweaked to spawn competition variants, the Ford GT is a race car that has been legalized for road use. The lack of practicality struck us when we first drove it briefly on a track, and two days of frequent ingress and egress make the point more clearly. The GT is a masterpiece of minimalism; apart from the infotainment system, the cockpit contains nothing that is not either functional or necessary. At first, the cabin feels basic and frankly cheap, but we soon came to appreciate the simplicity and lack of distraction, from the rotary climate controls that would barely have passed muster in a rental-grade Taurus 15 years ago to a digital dashboard that is a model of clarity and concision.

View Photos GREG PAJO

Getting in is an acquired skill, one earned at the cost of a few bruises. The easiest technique is to sit on the fat sill and then effectively fall backward into the seat; there’s enough clearance from the A-pillar to allow legs to be swung inboard. The seats don’t move fore or aft. Indeed, they are little more than strategically padded carbon shells, and driver and co-pilot sit close enough to trade STDs. The tiny luggage space behind the engine under the rear cover is practically filled by the two high-visibility vests that French law requires we carry. If a GT owner wants to take something on a trip, he will need to either wear it, strap it to the roof, or send it ahead via FedEx.

Just leaving La Chartre-sur-le-Loir provides some early thrills. The GT’s low-speed manners are fine, but its width and radically inboard driving position turn narrow French roads and oncoming traffic into a palm-prickling adventure. While our support team has no shortage of tires, it carries no replacement body panels. From the cockpit, visibility is limited by the shallow glassline and low windshield—as you would expect in a car just 43.7 inches tall—so the apexes of shallow right-hand corners have to be spotted from around the rearview mirror. The wind tunnel dictated the narrow cabin and its compromises as much as the designers did. The radical front-to-rear taper of the cockpit keeps airflow attached to the body, rather than roiling over the carbon-fiber panels with drag-raising turbulence.



The mighty 647-hp V-6 is the GT’s defining feature. It is its heart, its soul, and its tinnitus-inducing entertainment system—the feeble efforts of the four-speaker factory audio are drowned out as soon as the car starts to move. It’s a constant reminder of the GT’s racing pedigree, idling with a brooding tone and, although tractable under gentle use, occasionally stuttering and snuffling as it tries to clear its throat. There’s plenty of turbo lag, replaced in short order by the rapidly swelling sensation of arriving boost. Keep accelerating, and the noises passing through the rear bulkhead get angrier and darker. Dulcet, melodious, and tuneful are just three of the adjectives that will never be applied to the GT’s soundtrack. Taster’s notes included chain saws, Africanized bees, and hints of hurricane, with noise trapped and reverberating in the tight-fitting carbon-fiber box that is the cabin.

View Photos Deux chevaux? Non, six cent quarante-sept chevaux, bub! The boosted 3.5-liter V-6 is big on lag, small on refinement. But that's hardly the point. GREG PAJO

Yet the GT’s sensory overload makes it thrilling in a way that most modern-breed house-trained supercars rarely are, and it more than offsets any on-paper performance deficit. We had rain for much of our time in France, which put the track-biased Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires in an appropriately Gallic state of existential angst. Any car that tries to spin its rear wheels at 4000 rpm in third gear on half throttle is not short on thrills. But the GT didn’t feel scary even in proximity to its weather-reduced limits; it is one of those cars that pretty much always shouts encouragement at the driver to try harder. On drier roads, the LED upshift lights integrated into the top of the steering wheel goad one on, and getting even the first green one to flare feels like an accomplishment. The blue lights at the far end of the LED window might warn of the modest 7000-rpm redline, but getting them illuminated feels positively daring.



Although our time on the closed parts of the circuit is constrained, we have free rein of the sizable section of the 24-hour course that consists of public roads, most famous of which is the 3.7-mile-long Mulsanne straight, part of Route Départementale D338. The straight is now curtailed by two chicanes during the race but, in the event’s heyday, was once the scene of some of the highest speeds ever witnessed in racing; in 1988, a Group C Peugeot prototype set a Le Mans speed-trap record of 252 mph.

There is no chance of a record today, or indeed of breaking the normal 90-km/h speed limit by any significant degree, thanks to traffic, much of which is oncoming. Yes, the GT can be driven at an everyday pace without drama, but it does not like to do so. Every part of the car has been designed for higher speeds and higher loadings. The carbon-ceramic brakes grouch out their protest when cold, and the pedal is light and hard to modulate under gentle pressure, the brakes needing heat to work properly. The dual-clutch automatic doesn’t change ratios with the snap and precision of, say, Porsche’s PDK, and manual mode is selected by a fiddly button at the center of the rotary transmission controller.

View Photos GREG PAJO

Yet while the GT’s powertrain feels no less aggressive on the road than it does on track, the chassis has a gentler side, a sense of lightness and delicacy in contrast to the brutality of the power delivery. Ride is firm in any of the drive modes, but both Normal and the slightly stiffer Sport give damping compliance to cope with surfaces that look as if they could shake the car to pieces. Credit goes largely to Multimatic’s spool-valve dampers, fitted here with an electronically adjustable element. Ford’s use of both a traditional coil and a torsion-bar spring at each corner allows the GT to assume a stiffer spring rate when it crouches down two inches into its lowered ride height. The same hydraulic actuators that compress and lock out the coil springs in Track—a mode we are expressly forbidden to select on-road—operate a nose-lifting system that deploys in approximately one second, faster than pretty much any other. It pops the front of the car up, rather than drawing out the ballet. It’s effective, too: During two days and nearly 300 miles, we don’t grind the nose on any of the many speed bumps we encounter. And it would be impossible to grow bored with the steering, gregarious and alive with unfiltered feedback rather than merely chatty. The fat-rimmed wheel relays bumps and camber changes and even slight alterations in surface texture. The GT feels like it can be placed with an accuracy of well under an inch. With a fixed-ratio steering rack and an electrohydraulic pump providing the power assist, responses are fast but not darty, and it’s easy to keep the front end under control as the rear considers slipping.

Then there’s the small matter of downforce. The GT isn’t the first road car to offer a significant quantity of this, of course, but the hand-of-God effect is obvious even at a rapid road pace, pressing the car ever more firmly into the asphalt as speed rises, increasing both driver confidence and indicating its presence through a weightier steering load. The wing pops up at 71 mph in Sport mode, wiping out a fair percentage of rear visibility when it does; it also slews downward to become an air brake under hard braking. Speeds on the public roads of the Le Mans circuit are limited by both traffic and the likelihood of prosecution, but a full-throttle exploration on a dry and empty patch of France’s high-speed toll highways leaves absolutely no doubt as to the GT’s ability to hit its claimed 216-mph top speed.

View Photos GREG PAJO

For those without much supercar experience, the GT is a hell of a place to start in this segment. And if you’re expecting a vehicle capable of doing normal carlike things, then you are sure to be disappointed. The GT makes a McLaren 675LT and a Ferrari 458 Speciale feel plush and a bit tame; to own the Ford without plans for regular track work would be like owning a Gibson Les Paul Custom and leaving it hung on the wall.

So even if the GT can’t beat its obvious rivals on manners, performance, or value, it scores a decisive win on excitement.

GREG PAJO

Circuit de la Duff

The circuit at Le Mans is divided between normally public roads (white) and a permanent track (orange) that includes the Porsche Curves, the front straight, and the Dunlop Curve. Part of the track section is included in the shorter Bugatti Circuit, which is used throughout the year except, ironically, during the 24 Hours, when it is used for truck parking. Local amenities include a KFC and mini golf.

GREG PAJO

Competitors

GREG PAJO

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