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Where Is the 2017 Ford GT?

You should never look a gift horse in the mouth, and the upcoming 2017 Ford GT is certainly an unexpected gift for lovers of all things fast and cool. Apart from missing a couple of cylinders, it seems to tick all the right boxes, but I can't help but feel a little more than anxious about its arrival, and not necessarily in a good way.
2017 Ford GT 1 photo
Photo: Image edited by autoevolution
Quite a decent number of jaws were dropped at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show, when the Blue Oval came out of nowhere with the GT supercar and stole the continuously delayed 2016 2017 Acura NSX's thunder. Even though Ford's marketing didn't quite acknowledge it, the blue GT revival was a pretty well-made concept car, but a concept car nonetheless.

An almost rogue team of designers and engineers worked in complete secrecy for no less 14 months to bring the project to life. The story behind the secret supercar that Ford was cooking for that time is so convoluted that it would probably work as a script for a spy movie with just a couple of modifications and someone like Ron Howard in the director's chair.

Apparently, the project was started by a skunk works team of six designers and about a dozen engineers collaborating on a Ford GT and GT40 revival behind Ford's back. The last part may not be entirely correct, obviously, but it still makes for an excellent story.

Eventually, Ford execs caught wind of the whole thing and instead of pulling the plug gave it the green light, along with the order of keeping it as secretive as possible. The development was relocated to a vast and unused storage room in a basement, and only the folks part of the project received access to the place.

How on Earth does a carmaker keep such a car, even in prototype form, out of public view for over a year, I hear you ask? Surely the people in charge of the project would have had actually to ride in the thing to see if it works and a bunch of engineering mules should have been snapped by spy photographers long before the 2015 NAIAS reveal, right?

Well, this is where my first concern arose, so let's get back to the thunder-stealing blue supercar that Ford exhibited at last year's Detroit Auto Show. If some of you remember and paid extra attention at the time, the first unveiling of the car left a couple journalists, including me, perplexed by the fact that it didn't have mirrors. The press photos and subsequent appearances of the blue supercar showed it with mirrors, albeit a pair of tiny ones.

This was the first clue that it was just a rolling concept, not a close-to-production model as Ford keeps telling us. It seems that the Blue Oval wants us to believe that it created a concept car in 14 months (in complete secrecy and all that), and will transform it into a production supercar that will spank Ferraris both on the track and on the road in another 18 months or so.

Something is definitely fishy in the timeline promised for the car, but I sincerely hope that my opinion is dead wrong 

Ford has already struck a deal with a Canadian company, which will build the entire batch of production GTs in Markham, Ontario. Called Multimatic and specialized in carbon fiber, the company is not at its first rodeo with Ford, and the limited edition supercar will allegedly start rolling off the production line by the end of 2016.

Not exactly a coincidence, but 2016 is also the 50th anniversary of the Ford GT40 spanking Ferrari's bottom by placing 1-2-3 at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. In fact, getting the 2017 GT ready for launch this year is a make-it-or-break-it moment regarding marketing. This is especially so since the GT race car has already been unveiled and will participate at this year's edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The road car, on the other hand, and by that I mean the model that should actually bring both money and fame to Ford is nowhere to be seen and we're only two months away from the race. Sure, a bunch of funky looking pre-production prototypes have been spied testing on the road in the last year or so. The latest one was spotted just a couple of weeks ago around Ford's Michigan headquarters.

That said, my anxiety surrounding the reveal of the model has continuously increased, especially since Ford refused to bring the final car at either of this year's auto shows. You can tell me to take off my tin foil hat how many times you want, but I'm slowly starting to believe that the 2017 Ford GT will be delayed not unlike the Acura NSX that got its glory stolen by that blue concept last year.

A rather special application process was supposed to start at the end of February 2016, but we're already in April and there is still no news of it. I'm not calling it vaporware, far from it, but I'm beginning to doubt that the car will be ready this year. This would result in a mildly large blow to Ford's marketing unless a time machine is invented, since a 50th anniversary only comes once, after all.

We don't know the exact specifications, its performance figures, heck, not even the car's final design and options, yet it should already go into production by the end of 2016 and be unveiled in road-going spec by June at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Is Ford pulling an NSX on us?
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About the author: Alex Oagana
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Alex handled his first real steering wheel at the age of five (on a field) and started practicing "Scandinavian Flicks" at 14 (on non-public gravel roads). Following his time at the University of Journalism, he landed his first real job at the local franchise of Top Gear magazine a few years before Mircea (Panait). Not long after, Alex entered the New Media realm with the autoevolution.com project.
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