A day on the track with the ridiculous 2017 Ford GT supercar

Comment

Image Credits:

A few weeks back, Ford invited us out to Salt Lake City to spend an afternoon in the 2017 Ford GT supercar. They’re only making 250 of these things per year, and they’ll go for around $500,000 each. Needless to say, I mulled it over for about 9 milliseconds before buying myself a plane ticket and heading for Utah.

Before we dive in, a bit of backstory: back in 1963, Henry Ford II set out to buy Ferrari. The deal fell through in its final stages, leaving Ford with something of a grudge.

He set out to build a car that could beat Ferrari at Le Mans, the (even then!) legendary 24-hour endurance race that Ferrari had dominated for years.

It took a few years of defeat — but by 1966, Ford had cracked the code. They’d built a car they dubbed the GT40 MkII — and with it they swept the podium at Le Mans, their three cars walking away with first, second, and third place. Then they won again for good measure in 1967, 68, and 69.

50 years later, they’re celebrating the anniversary by reimagining the GT40 for the modern day. Thus, the 2017 Ford GT.

Now, I only got to spend a total of a few hours behind the wheel — if we’re going to do an in-depth review of a car, we need to spend at least a week in it. But I did walk away with some impressions.

This car drives the way every teenager who grew up with a poster of the GT40 plastered above their bed dreamed it might. You think, GT does. I tried pushing this car to its limits, and didn’t even get close. In a game of chicken between Greg and the GT, the GT won.

For the sake of maintaining an aerodynamic profile, Ford shaved just about as much space out of the interior as they could. I’m 6′ tall on the dot — and, to my surprise, I could sit inside the GT comfortably. Once in a track harness and helmet, however, I had to slouch a bit to keep from rubbing the roof; if you’re on the taller end and planning on track days, expect as much.

There’s not much in the center console in terms of gadgetry that you won’t find in more standard cars — these days, there’s just not much technology that can exist on the touchcreen of a $450,000 car that can’t exist elsewhere. Most of the tech goes into what you don’t see, like the fully carbon-fiber tub you’re sitting in and the 647 horsepower engine under the hood.

But speaking of technology: Ford is launching a Performance racing companion app, and it’ll be exclusive to the GT at first. You pop open the app on your phone, plug it into the car via USB, and it acts as a super purpose-focused GoPro. It records video, all while pulling speed, gear, and GPS data straight from the engine. At the end of your laps, it dumps it all out in a straight-to-Facebook-ready video, complete with lap times and a video game-style map of your realtime position as you blast around the track. Ford’s not the only one doing this (Chevy has something in a similar vein with their Performance Data Recorder), but it’s a nice touch and hopefully it trickles down to their other vehicles quickly. Here’s a screenshot from one of the videos:

Now, to be clear, if it somehow isn’t already: this is not a car you buy as your everyday driver — even if you might have $450,000 to burn, and even if you somehow manage to nab one of the 250 of these Ford will make per year. It’s a race car that happens to be street legal; practicality is not the point. The trunk is the size of a large shoebox, and the interior is just big enough for two medium-sized people to sit side-by-side assuming they’re pretty good friends and don’t mind rubbing elbows all day. If you just want a car that’ll destroy most cars at stop lights but you also need something to take the kids to school in, there are other options.

But if you are in the position to put something like this in your garage and have already worked your way onto the list: don’t worry. I think you’ll be happy with your decision. And I’m super jealous.

More TechCrunch

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

17 hours ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

18 hours ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android