The fastest Ford the world never saw

[Wretched]

It was billed as Ford vs Ferrari: Round Two, with a new Detroit supercar to take on Maranello’s finest. So what happened to GN34, the secret prototype that could have wowed the world? Steve Saxty, a former Ford product designer and author of Secret Fords, takes you inside the hidden world of the cancelled supercar.

The Ford GT40 might have crushed Ferrari on the track in the Sixties but twenty years later Ferrari and Porsche were winning the sales race for highly profitable sports cars – and Ford had no answer.

Or at least, that was the perceived wisdom. Behind the scenes at Ford, a crack team of product planners and engineers were putting their heads together in response to growing numbers of buyers with money to burn on sports cars and luxury models, which were bursting with profit if you played your cards right.

Since the start of the ‘80s, Ford had been pondering how it could enter the sports car market with a Ferrari rival costing Corvette money. By the end of October 1983, some of the brightest brains in the company had pulled together a strategic paper that set out the case for a world-class supercar and tackled the thorny issue of how to circumvent the company’s corporate culture that was tuned to conceptualising and building mass market, everyday cars. At the time, even the Mustang was limping along on just four cylinders.....

https://www.hagerty.co.uk/articles/a...rld-never-saw/