2023 Ford GT supercar price

Ford has been building special edition send-offs for its exotic GT all year, and now Dearborn has taken the wraps off the car’s swan song, the 2022 Ford GT LM Edition. Only 20 of the Liquid Silver-hued supercars will be built, but they’ll mark the end of a highly successful run that began with a splashy 2015 introduction and a competition version of the car winning the LM GTE (Le Mans Grand Touring Endurance) class at the 2016 24 Hours of LeMans.

The GT’s long association with LeMans goes back to the “total performance” era at Ford, made famous in Ford v Ferrari, and the original Ford GT40’s 1-2-3 finish at the 1966 race and domination of the event until 1969. 

There was a bit of that old rivalry at work in 2016 as the modern GT finished just ahead of Ferrari’s LM GTE entry, the 488 GTE. The driving team of Sébastien Bourdais, Joey Hand and Dirk Müller took the lead for the final time after 20 hours of dicing it up with the Italians. A second GT came in third in class.

Production of roadgoing GTs commenced a few months after the race, and the GT LM will wrap up the run of 1,350 cars. 

Far removed even from other high-performance Fords like the Mustang, Focus RS and F-150 Raptor, the GT is a genuine supercar like those from McLaren or Ferrari. It costs half a million dollars, you have to be an “approved” customer to get one, and it’s hand-made by subcontractor Multimatic, Inc. in Markham, Ontario. Multimatic has also built components and chassis for Porsche-tuner Ruf and for Aston-Martin. 

This, however, is entirely consistent with the car’s history, and the GT LM is a fitting sendoff.

GT40 to Ford GT

Ford first revived the famous GT40 as a retro concept car in 2002, following on the heels of its popular retro Thunderbird and Forty-Nine concepts. The idea proved so popular that then CEO and COO William Clay Ford decided to put the car into production. A team led by Ford veteran Camilo Pardo wrapped the entirely modern chassis and mechanical pieces in a body that, from even 20 feet away, looked exactly like the late 1960s original. 

Ford no longer controlled the GT40 name so the new car became the GT, with its low-volume production to be handled by specialty builder Saleen. 4,038 of the supercars were made from 2004 to 2006, each one an instant collector car.

Unlike the high-profile concept-turned-production car of the first generation, the current GT’s development process was kept largely a secret until it broke cover at the 2015 Detroit show. It reinterpreted the lines of the classic GT40, but it was designed primarily with aerodynamics, and winning another round at Le Mans, in mind.

According to lead designer Chris Svensson, only a dozen people had access to the design studio during the development process. Jamal Hameedi, head of Ford Performance’s chief engineer at the time, oversaw the mechanical development of the car with all-out performance in mind.

Unlike the V8-powered GT40 and first-generation GT, the current car is powered by a 660-horsepower version of Ford’s 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6 related to the one in the F-150 Raptor. More compact than potential V8 or V12 engines, the EcoBoost gave the designers more freedom when designing both the car’s structure and aerodynamics. 

The process produced a vehicle that was capable of three-second zero-to-60 sprints and eleven-second quarter mile times and 216 mph flat out—but also relatively easy to drive around town, like the Acura NSX. The team also created a design that bore a resemblance to the past and avoided falling into the stale hypercar tropes of the late 2010s while being capable of winning races, which was the goal all along.

Special Editions and the GT LM

Originally, Ford planned to build 1,000 GTs, but the run was extended to an additional 350 cars in 2018. GT owners are an exclusive club, but even within this tiny production plan there have been nine special editions since 2017, four of them bowing this year. Prior to the GT LM, Ford dropped a trio of Heritage Editions: the ‘64 Prototype (27 built), the Alan Mann (30 built) and the Holman-Moody (21 built), each recalling major personalities or moments from the 1960s originals.

The GT LM is meant to recall the amazing reality of Ford winning a Le Mans class in a new car’s first serious race on the 50th anniversary of its first win at Circuit de la Sarthe. 

In looking for ways to commemorate that win, Ford’s production team decided to put a little bit of the actual racers into each GT LM. They found the mothballed crankshaft from 2016’s third-place car (its engine was disassembled and stored after the win), ground it into a powder and used it to create special 3D-printed instrument panel badges. 

Taking its cues from the red-white-and-blue livery of the racers, the GT LM will offer buyers unique blue or red carbon fiber trim, exposed gloss carbon fiber 20-inch wheels with corresponding red or blue inner-barrel accents, plus titanium lug nuts and Brembo brake calipers lacquered in black. Inside, the seating material and carbon fiber inserts will be color-matched in red or blue. There’s also a special 3D-printed titanium exhaust system.

Only 20 GT LMs will be built before production ends, and the cessation of GT builds will also mean the conclusion of GT Mk II production. That track-only version of the car is aimed at racers, and only 45 units will have been built.

There don’t seem to be any public plans for a successor, but it’s entirely possible Ford designers are working away in a back room on an EV GT for the future, just as several other EV Supercars seem to be in the works, including an NSX follow-up from Acura.

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