Jim Farley, president and CEO of Ford, has just qualified 13th.
It’s 2pm and we’re at the 81st Goodwood Members’ Meeting, where the Ford Mustang 289 V8 that Farley is sharing with Britain’s Steve Soper, the former BTCC ace, has finished in the top half of a stellar 30-car field in qualifying for the inaugural Ken Miles Cup.
It’s a special one-make event staged to mark the 60th anniversary of the Mustang’s launch.
Farley’s lap times are a second or so behind Soper’s and he isn’t pleased, despite the fact that this is actually prodigious performance. At 62, Farley is driving an unfamiliar and very potent car on a very fast track that he has tackled only once before. And although he loves racing, Farley really doesn’t have much time for it, given that his day job is to steer a £180 billion Detroit-based company whose 177,000 employees build 4.4 million cars a year.
The following day, in a 50-minute, two-driver race, the Farley/Soper car will cross the line in 13th place in a congested and action-packed contest full of current and former greats, without a single mark on its gleaming blue bodywork, even though most of the notchback Mustangs around it have had some kind of ‘tap’. Again, it’s a creditable performance.
Today, however, sitting behind the pits in a folding chair, comfortable in his driving gear, Farley’s mind is very much on the Mustang’s commercial aspects and especially its future.
He is deeply proud of the fact that the model has been such a backbone of Ford progress (“not many things in this industry last 60 years”) and especially of the fact that a risky decision to globalise Mustang sales, made around 2015 at the start of Farley’s own two-year stint as president of Ford of Europe, has resulted in much more prominence and success for the traditionally American pony car.
Despite the fact that Ford has many big-volume electric car programmes under way, ranging from the massive American F-150 Lightning pick-up truck to Europe’s compact Explorer crossover, which will soon be launched, Farley wants to stress the importance of the Mustang, which in future will appear in a variety of new iterations – potentially including a four-door model – but all of them with the same “performance and attitude” of existing versions.
Farley notes that Ford now makes the best-selling coupé in the world and says it’s protective of that: “[Other firms] haven’t had anything like the same consistency: they get in and then they get out again. They don’t sell many, but they still think periodically ‘let’s do another one’ and launch something else. Those models are like a tax on the company.”
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