Pretty Sick

After more than two years turning on auto-show stands, the 2017 Ford GT finally shows us what it can do to our internal organs when it turns a wheel under its own power.

- Eric Tingwall

Lap after lap, Scott Maxwell gnaws deeper into the curbing. By drawing a straighter line through a shallow chicane on the road course that lies in the shadow of Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the Canadian pro driver with class wins at Sebring, Daytona, and Le Mans is searching for—and finding—more speed. What started as a nibble is now a chomp as he rides to the top of the red-and-white candy cane on his fourth lap. The 2017 Ford GT he’s piloting, the car in which I’m riding shotgun, swallows it whole.

The GT skates over the pavement, clearing it by just 2.8 inches in its ground-sucking track mode, when the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires are sunk into the wheel wells and the GT looks as if it has all the suspension travel of a bobsled. Yet this carbon-­fiber dart from Dear born never threatens to lose traction, to pitch left, or to unsettle as it leaps off the curbs. It soaks up the input gracefully, presses rubber into earth, and rockets ahead. “I kept expecting that curb to launchus,”Maxwell says during the cool-down lap. “But the car just takes it.”

Back in the pits, Jamal Hameedi, the chief engineer of Ford Performance, wants my feedback. “Howwas it?Did you feel something more visceral than in a McLaren?”

No amount of poise can neutralize the effects of cornering, braking, and acceleration with that kind of intensity. I feel as if my gut has been run through a Vitamix and is now sweating out through my palms. So, yeah, the GT stirred something inside me.