| The Guys Behind The Ford GT | ||
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by Robert Lewis (08 Jul 03) Hannemann is typical of the enthusiastic types at the top end of the GT project, and he has a tenuous connection with Ford's one-two-three victory at Le Mans in 1966, when Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon in a seven-litre Ford scored the company's first-ever victory in the 24-Hour Race. He was an eight year-old, living at Evreux in France, where his father was on an Air Force posting, when word came through of the American car's win. Like a surprising number of people who eventually joined Ford, Hannemann has a degree in mechanical engineering from the General Motors Institute. His first job, though, was with the third of the American Big Three, when he worked on the Dodge Viper road car and the Viper GTS-R which won its class at Le Mans. He's raced himself, in cars from a Fiat X1/9 to a Dodge Charger, and he moved to the Ford GT job from being chief engineer of another race project, the Saleen S7.
Would you believe that the Ford GT supercar started out in life as the Petunia? That was the name of the project for the mid-engined sports car which developed into the GT concept as displayed at the 2002 Detroit Show. Bill Ford asked Neil Ressler, not long semi-retired from his involvement with Stewart Grand Prix, Jaguar Racing and Cosworth Racing, to investigate turning the GT from a design study into the real thing. Back in the mid 1980s, Ressler had been involved in yet another of Ford's sports car project, the still-born GN34, which was considered, rather ambitiously, as a possible rival to the Ferrari 308. Among The Other Suspects John Coletti, director of Ford's Special Vehicle Team, was the engineer given the task of developing the SVT Mustang Cobra as well as the American-market SVT Focus. Fred Goodnow was numbered off to create the detailed blueprint - including not just the engineering and development time scale, but also the business model - of the car which became the GT. He'd previously worked on niche and concept vehicles, including the spectacular Indigo design study which raised hopes at motor shows in the 1990s but was never intended production. When he was a student, Bill Clarke did a cutaway drawing of a Le Mans Ford Mark II, and it's still on his office wall as he supervises the body engineering of its 21st-century successor. Curt Hill, in charge of powertrain engineering, can trace his interest in engines and transmissions to his schoolboy work on the tractors and combines at the family farm in Illinois. Kip Ewing is one of the project's obsessives, as the supervisor of packaging, the prototype and the launch programme. He'd previously worked on the Aston Martin Virage, and as a designer at Bentley, and it went against his grain that some people within Ford were happy for the first prototype of the GT, known as "Workhorse Number One", to be painted in dull old black. By the time his team had finished with it, it was turned out in red livery like that of the Shelby American Ford which Dan Gurney and A J Foyt drove to win at Le Mans in 1967. Vehicle engineering manager Tom Reichenbach has worked in Formula 1, Trans Am racing and the Winston Cup NASCAR series. Chassis design supervisor Hubert Mees was involved with the Jaguar S-Type and - a long time before that - with a one-off 1971 Chevrolet Monte Carlo which he personally attacked with a power saw to make it into the only Monte Carlo convertible on the road. Drawn Breaths At The Wind Tunnel It's well known that the Ford GT team wanted to improve on the aerodynamic performance of the original Le Mans cars, but they didn't appreciate just how hairy those '60s machines had been. In the early days of the project, Kent Harrison supervised the wind tunnel testing of the configuration of the car with which the two Jacks - Ickx and Oliver - won the 1969 race. As the drag and lift statistics showed up on the screen, Harrison and his team realised the 1969 car had so much front-end lift at 180mph that the drivers must have had "minimal steering control" on the Mulsanne Straight, a fact which, if it had been known at the time, would have been quite scary, not just for themselves but also for the drivers of the other cars they were blasting past.
Chief designer Camilo Pardo has made sure that as many as possible of the styling cues from the concept car have gone into the production versions. And chief tester Mark McGowan had an early benchmark for the kind of handling he wanted to experience in the GT: the tuned-up Lotus Europa he used for commuting to college during the week, and for winning autocrosses at the weekends. What with one thing and another, it looks as if the GT is in good hands, Petunia. |
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The fact that Neil Hannemann managed to draw the long straw for the job of driving the first production Ford GT to be seen in Europe, at the hillclimb event during the Goodwood Festival of Speed, shouldn't provoke any envious questions of the "who he?" persuasion. He's the chief programme engineer for the GT, that's who.
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