You’d think that Ford would have rested a bit after achieving their drubbing of Ferrari and bringing LeMans victory home. But whether it was just momentum or to silence critics that suggested that the GT40 was more Lola than Ford, FoMoCo decided to bring the design of the next iteration of the GT car more in-house. Keeping the mighty 7 liter of the previous generation, they sculpted a new shape around it in partnership with Kar Kraft. Getting those strings placed right to measure the wind movement over the shape helped refine the aerodynamics of the project that would eventually become the GT40 Mk IV.
More at The Magnetic Brain. Thanks for sending this in, Skeeters.
0 replies on “Factories at Work: In The Ford Wind Tunnel”
The pic from the tail looks more like the J-car.
Definitely the J-car. Ultimately it gave way to the GT40 mk IV, but these photos seem to be earlier in development, before the Ken Miles testing crash and the decision to move away from the bulky rear end bodywork.
Must be a big time gap then, as the two pics from the front are clearly the Mk IV.
I’m beginning to suspect that these photos were taken post Miles crash during the transition from J-car to GT40 IV; after modifying the front end but before abandoning the breadvan rear.
The two pics from the front clearly don’t have the breadvan butt and are clearly closer to the final Mk IV, so those two pics are clearly post-Miles.
2 separate cars on the same day perhaps? Those are the same engineers wearing the same outfits.
maybe it is the same car; in the thord photo they are mounting the breadvan back
third, not thord
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