le mans


Would Lincoln Ever Challenge for Overall Le Mans Victory?

Lincoln_LE_MANS_6A day before the 2015 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Ford Motor Company executive chairman Bill Ford announced that the company bearing his family name would be partnering with Ganassi Racing to field four of its new GT supercars in the French enduro next year. Wall Street Journal auto critic Dan Neil wrote about this on the newspaper’s website on Sunday after the race. More interesting perhaps was what he wrote when he linked to his Journal piece on Facebook.

There he said that he felt the GT should be badged as a Lincoln rather than a Ford to help support the premium brand. I’d like to suggest a different strategy for what Ford might be thinking here. Full disclosure, when I left the Ford communications team in mid-2014, I was privy to some future product information which had not yet been revealed at the time including the Lincoln Continental, Ford GT, Focus RS and Shelby GT350. All of that information has now been publicly announced and what comes next is pure speculation on my part with no basis in fact.

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Ford GT Officially Heading Back to Le Mans in 2016

FORD_LE_MANS_14In early 1963, Ford Motor Company very nearly acquired Ferrari. Fortunately for automotive enthusiasts the world over, Enzo Ferrari rebuffed the offer from Henry Ford II at the last possible moment. There is no way of knowing what would have happened if the Dearborn automaker had succeeded in subsuming the then tiny Italian sports car manufacturer and racing team. However, we do know that the rejection spawned one of the greatest rivalries and some of the greatest cars of the past half century. The day before the 2015 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, starting with “We’re Back!” Henry Ford II’s nephew Bill announced the next stage in that rivalry with a 2016 return to Circuit de la Sarthe powered by the all-new GT.

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