Legends are usually made up of years, or decades, of learning, practice, trial and error. Many, many mistakes. Before the Ford GT40 took its place in the auto hero hall, Ford’s Total Performance program had been busy building GT prototypes that suffered numerous failures and occasional success. From January 1964 to April 1965, the Ford Advanced Vehicles team in Slough, England built 12 racing prototypes, five of them with targa roof roadster. Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby drove one of the convertibles, the Competition Prototype Roadster GT / 103, to victory at the 1965 Daytona Continental. Later that year, the French Ford team led by Carroll Shelby entered the Competition Prototype Roadster GT. / 109 at Le Mans with Maurice Trintignant and Guy Ligier in driving service. While seven hardtop Ford GTs competed in Le Mans in 1964 and 1965, GT / 109 was the only GT convertible to compete, and succumbed to a gearbox problem on the 11th lap of the race. That race car is now for sale as part of the Mecum Indy 2020 auction, which will run from July 10 to 18.
As one of the engineering solution testers that would lead the GT40s to victory four years in a row, GT / 109 was the first to employ oil radiators mounted along the sides of the car, and modified adaptations of the winning GT / 103 from Daytona as a HiPo Cobra 289 engine, ZF five-speed manual transmission, corner air vents in front of the front wheels and a set of magnesium Halibrand rims. Other modifications to the race included a higher deck lid spoiler to counteract the effect of the front dams, an overflow water tank for coolant, and vents in the rear fascia to release trapped air below the wheel arches.
Dressed in white body Ford livery with a blue racing stripe and red trim, the GT / 109 is a three-owner car when Ford is included. Following her race career, Shelby American rebuilt the racer, then sent it to Kar Kraft to be used as a development mule for a GT40 evolution called the J-Car, as well as Ford’s four-cam Indianapolis engine and transmission. automatic from Kar Kraft. When testing was complete, GT / 109 returned to Shelby for another rebuild before being parked in a Ford warehouse. When California customizer and specialist Dean Jeffries stumbled upon GT / 109 during a visit to Ford in Detroit, he asked Ford Racing director Jacques Passino if he could buy it. Passino said, “No problem, you can have it. We are done with the GT Roadster program.”
Jeffries held on to the car until his death in 2013. Dana Mecum bought the GT / 109 from Jeffries’ son, sending the roadster for a three-year concours quality restoration to the original specifications at GTC Mirage Racing. The original HiPo Cobra 289 engine with Weber carbs and experimental transaxle that the car used at Le Mans is behind the cab, and the winning bidder gets the four-cam Indy Ford engine used by Kar Kraft. Other cool details are the Shelby-installed on / off brake light switch, and the new Ford GT Trico wiper blades. The car came second in the 2016 Pebble Beach Elegance Contest to GT40 that Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon led to victory in 1966.
Of the original five competitive prototype Roadsters, only GT / 108 and GT / 109 remain. RM Sotheby’s sold GT / 108 at auction in Monterey in 2014 for $ 6.93M, then again at the same auction in 2019 for $ 7.65M. Mecum put the GT / 109 up for auction in January 2019 in Kissimmee, but didn’t let the car go with a high bid of $ 10 million. The pre-sale estimate for GT / 109 this time ranges from $ 7.5 to $ 10 million. Although the Indy event doesn’t officially start for a few more days, as of this writing, the bid for the Ford was up to $ 400,000.
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The auctioned Ford GT / 109 Competition Roadster prototype originally appeared on Autoblog on Sunday, July 5, 2020 12:21:00 EDT. See our terms for the use of feeds.
Gallery: Jaguar I-PACE 2021 (engine1)
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