Bred for endurance: Ford GT race car driven on track

Today, I’m going to try to find it. The race car you see here, chassis number 005, took a class podium in 10 of the 26 races it entered, winning four of them, with its best Le Mans finish a second place in 2017. But Ford’s official GT race programme is now drawing to an end, so the car’s for sale. It’s time to let some clowns with readers drive it.

I’m at Virginia International Raceway, a narrow, fast, heavily sloped and cambered 3.3-mile race track I’d never seen until a week previously when I watched it on YouTube, and yesterday when I drove round it in a simulator at Ford’s performance car headquarters (‘Simulation theory’, 6 November).

In reality it looks narrower and steeper still. Some of the corners are very, very fast and, in the spirit of the curious American approach to health and safety that lets you buy a rifle but not a Kinder Surprise, none of the corners have gravel traps. It’s just grass and then barrier, sometimes at a distance, sometimes not. If I was going to let strangers drive my race car along a 170mph straight, it wouldn’t be this one, but here we are.

I get in. It’s more snug even than the road car, owing to an FIA roll-cage within the carbonfibre tub, and while in the road-going GT you sit against the bulkhead and the pedals adjust, in here there’s a tight Sparco race seat with broad head bolsters and restraining nets either side of that. A rectangular steering wheel pokes far towards your chest and there’s bare carbonfibre where the instrument panel would be, with only gearshift lights there: a small LED pane on the wheel provides other info. There’s an array of bright, clear switches on the dashboard centre and, while there are the vestigial remains of passenger space, in reality the right side of the cabin is filled with battery, electrical hardware and a pump to charge the gearshift pneumatics, which whirs loudly, like a tyre compressor, for a few seconds every few seconds.

The GT uses a 3.5-litre twin-turbocharged V6 engine, to which the Balance of Performance regulations are unkind because the GT is so small and fast. In North American ‘IMSA’ race tune, it develops less than 500bhp. The road car makes 647bhp. I start with less than 500bhp, then, but am told a dial on the steering wheel will give 600bhp should I want it. This is somebody else’s racing car on cold slick tyres and a track like a faster, narrower Cadwell Park, so I’m sure I won’t.

Two laps later I have, and would turn it further if I could. It’s no wonder this car wins races: it’s so easy to sit in and drive as fast as you’re able.

It seems weird to talk ride comfort in a race car but VIR isn’t the smoothest track, and the GT absorbs and surfs bumps without a hint of harshness. The pedals are brilliantly weighted and spaced, the brake pedal particularly firm but retardation and modulation among the best I’ve ever felt, so you can lean on them hard without the merest suggestion of locking. Once rolling you can forget the clutch, brake with either foot, and gearshifts flapped through by wheel-mounted paddles are delivered immaculately every time, each downshift brapped to perfection.

The steering is quite heavy for a race car’s, but millimetre precise with it. It gives you oodles of feel, and there’s loads of self-centring, which makes the GT a formidably stable car. That’s the aero at work, I imagine. Trailing the brakes into a corner helps the car turn but there’s a lovely balance anyway – hints of entry understeer and exit oversteer if you look for them, but otherwise flat, fast and neutral. If I had to pick a road car it felt like – GT excepted, obviously – I’d say a Lotus Exige given how well it talks to you.

Even visibility is good. The windscreen is low, it’s true, yet it’s broad and you can use the side windows in slower, tighter corners to spot exit points. And while the engine, sometimes criticised in the road car for not having more than six cylinders, works magically here. It’s a doddle to smoothly dole out power, albeit traction control and the sheer capability mean any throttle application is just ‘flat’ before long. And sure, it’s less sonorous than it would be with more cylinders, but if you were in here for two hours at a time, that’d be no bad thing.

And you can be, if you have the requisite millions. Approach Ford with a World Endurance Championship programme in mind and you’ll be offered a better deal than if you plan to put it into a collection. Ford would like the GT to keep racing. Good. Having tried both road and race cars, that is what it’s best at.