The Ford GT is one of the most fascinating—and, with a sticker price of approximately $450,000, expensive—American cars ever made. Conceived in under two years, in the wake of the collapse of a failed Ford Mustang-based halo car program called Project Silver, the new Ford GT emerged from a top-secret basement skunkworks and was revealed to a shocked audience at the Detroit Auto Show in January of 2015.

It's not a normal supercar—if such a thing exists. The Ford GT is powered by a mid-engined, twin-turbo 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6 that produces 647-horsepower and 550 pound-feet of good ol' American twist. It supposedly goes 215 mph. And it's a V6. Made in Michigan. Most decidedly not normal. But the Ford GT also bears the burden of history, since it picks up the baton from one of the most important race cars in our nation's history: the original Ford GT that took on the mighty Ferrari at 24 Hours of Le Mans in the mid-1960s (a drama captured brilliantly by Editor-at-Large, A.J. Baime, in Go Like Hell).

The road-going and racing GT were designed and developed simultaneously by Ford Performance, a newish division within FoMoCo that was once run by a combination of Ford Racing and Ford SVT programs. That's a selling point for the few buyers who'll be granted the privilege of paying what Ford execs say is "in the mid $400,000 range" for a car. Ford expects to build and sell just 250 Ford GTs every year for the next four years. We predict they will have no trouble selling the car, despite the extraordinary cost and a few minor stumbles in the finished product (see point 6).

We also predict it's going to be awesome. Why?

1. Dude, this car is really expensive

In fact, it must be the most expensive production car ever produced in America. You know what costs $450,000? Not the McLaren 720S ($288,475), which is going to come out under $300,000. Not the Ferrari 488 ($200,000) or Ferrari 812 Superfast, the successor to the F12 ($319,000) that should go for around $320,000. Sure, the Ford GT is a limited production—at 250 a year for four years—and the cap of 1,000 cars is certainly part of the price calculation. But still: that's an expensive car.

2. The engine is an EcoBoost V6

Yep, the same basic block that fires the Ford Fusion also forms the core of the Ford GT. Well, not exactly. When Project Silver was abandoned and Ford's skunkworks team turned to the GT project, it had to find a fast solution to the powerplant problem. So it looked to the 3.5-Liter EcoBoost V6 that had been developed by Ganassi Racing in their Daytona Prototype program. By keeping the car's weight down to 3,000 pounds and designing a charged air anti-lag system that keeps the turbos spinning, it's managed to compensate for being a 6 in a world of 8s and 12s.