Ford GT Attacks Arctic Circle Raceway in Norway

Despite being a Le Mans racer with number plates, it’s a damn good road car. 

Until seeing this video, we’d held a bit of a cautiousness about Ford’s not-quite-hyper car called simply ‘The GT’. It isn’t particularly exotic in its construction, using a turbocharged V6 truck engine, for example. It isn’t particularly pretty, either.

[Editor’s Note: The Ford GT is striking, Brad has, once again, lost his mind.]

Then again, it was engineered simply to win at Le Mans, and essentially nothing else. In 2016 it accomplished that task, taking on the best of the world’s street-car-based racers and winning. This video from EVO on YouTube changed our opinion of the car.

Usually when cars are built to go racing, they’re quite terrible at doing normal road car things. You wouldn’t want to go on a road trip in a Formula 1 car, suppose. Somehow, with active suspension, active aero, and active everything else, Ford seems to have built the kind of car that can drive hundreds of miles to the track, set a fresh track record at the hands of Ford’s factory racer Stefan Mucke, and then drive hundreds of miles back home at the end of the day. That’s an impressive feat, and one we didn’t really expect to see. The road car, as mentioned in the video, has a good bit more power than the racing version, and might be even faster than the racer in a straight line.

This video is gorgeously shot and edited. The scenery used here, the wilds of Norway, is spectacular from beginning to end. The bright yellow streak of a machine looks strange when compared to the serene backdrop, but then again it would, wouldn’t it? This car is a modern feat of engineering, and it’s likely the guys who built it have never even seen Norway. This is Detroit’s best effort yet at building a world class sports car. They succeeded.