Inside Ford's Top-Secret Campaign to Remake the Iconic GT Supercar

It isn't often that one car completely dominates the conversation at a major international auto show. And it isn't often that one car so completely symbolizes a company's return from the brink of ruin. But that exact confluence happened in January 2015 in Detroit, at the North American International Auto Show, the biggest car show of them all. The unveiling of Ford's new GT supercar was the culmination of a year of tantalizing rumors, which had begun to take shape in the fall of 2014 and then built momentum. The speculation went something like this: with 2016 right around the corner, the Ford Motor Company was seriously contemplating a return to what practically everyone in racing considers the automaker's moment of purest glory on the track, Le Mans in '66. Everyone did the math: 2016 minus 1966 was fifty years.