My car is in for a paint protection film refresh, but I run with friends who always keep a passenger seat open for anyone who wants to go for a drive but doesn’t have their own car available. On Saturday, I rode shotgun through the back roads west of Houston in a Lotus Emira, an Alfa Romeo Stelvio, and a 2005 Ford GT. We were accompanied by another friend in his beautiful Aqua Blue 991 Porsche 911. These runs are our version of therapy and a great way to spend the short and valuable time we have on weekends. Every one of these drives is special in its own way, but this one was especially fulfilling since I was able to check a box off on my automotive bucket list; experiencing the Ford GT as it’s meant to be experienced.
The Ford GT was the one I’d been waiting on since the concept debuted in 2002. Rick’s car is a four-option build: McIntosh stereo, forged BBS wheels, painted racing stripes, red-painted brake calipers. Ford built 4,038 GTs across the 2005 and 2006 model years and priced the base car at $139,995, with all four options pushing the sticker toward $153,000. First-gen GTs now average $480,333 at auction according to Classic.com, and a 2005 sold at Mecum’s Indy sale this past May for $616,000.
The supercharged 5.4-liter fired up behind our heads and made every one of those dollars quickly earn their worth. The Ford GT is mechanical in a way nothing modern is, more machine than computers. Ford rated it at 550 horsepower and a 0-to-60 time under 3.5 seconds, and both feel honest from the passenger seat with the windows down on FM 1155 outside Washington-on-the-Brazos.
There’s no lane keep assist nudging the wheel, no adaptive cruise deciding your following distance, no drive mode dial pretending to know the road better than Rick does. There’s a clutch pedal, a shifter, and a mid-mounted V8 that demands your attention. Cars built in the last five years spend most of their engineering budget protecting you from your own inputs.
Rick pointed out the window switches, lifted straight from a Ford Focus parts bin, and we both laughed at a car worth half a million dollars today running door switches from a compact economy car. Ford’s priority was never the switchgear. It was staying true to the GT40 that won Le Mans in 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1969, and building a road car that could win again if it had to: the dry-sump V8 built to survive track abuse, the double wishbone suspension tuned by the same team running Ford’s racing programs, doors that cut up into the roofline exactly like the original did four decades earlier.
We ran the loop through Brenham and stopped at Chappell Hill Bakery, three very different cars parked in a row outside a small-town bakery in the middle of a Texas summer, before finishing at Blue Bell Creamery ten minutes down the road, because you don’t pass through the source in June without stopping.
The GT has a supercharger whine, a shifter with real mechanical resistance, and a driving position that puts you eight inches off the pavement, close enough to feel every seam in the road under the tires. There’s no touchscreen and no drive mode dial standing between you and what the car is actually doing.
Ford could not build something this uncompromising today. Between crash and pedestrian safety mandates, emissions rules, and the driver-assist tech now required or expected on nearly every new car, the regulatory environment that allowed a raw, analog supercar like the GT has all but disappeared, and the money follows the scarcity. Ford stopped making the GT in 2006, the supply is fixed at 4,038 cars, and every collector who wants one has to outbid whoever is willing to sell.
Riding shotgun was enough. Watching Rick live inside a dream he’d chased for twenty years was its own kind of joy, and getting handed a seat in it for an afternoon was better still: the sound of that supercharger, the ice cream at Blue Bell, backroads through Washington County with three friends and three cars that don’t get built anymore. Good friends make good days, and this was one of the best.
You must be logged in to post a comment.