Working in Ford’s Advanced Design centre, Hope took the word ‘advanced’ literally, producing stark, hard-edged renderings that jarred with the familiar Aero approach. “I was told that, early on, if I was going to follow this angular design direction, was I really working for the right company,” Hope said years later. 

Hope’s GT90 proposal didn’t make the cut. It wasn’t put up for consideration, ditched in favour of – you guessed it – more predictable, Aero-style designs. “Top leadership came in for a review,” Hope said. “And they were like, ‘No, we don’t want to see this anymore. You’ve been doing the same thing for 15 years, let’s do something new’.”


The design team needed something, fast. That ‘something new’ was Hope’s straight edged, angular design that was now thrust into contention. Instead of soft edges, Hope’s GT90 was a showcase for setsquares over French curves: a triangle-dominated, ground-hugging supercar with a droopy nose, slim horizontal headlights and a nod to the GT40 in two large hood openings – split by that recurring triangle theme. It won out – Aero was bunk.

“When those guys designed and sketched this thing, they just nailed it!,” says Brent Hajek, who decades on, now owns the one-and-only 1995 GT90 Concept that he keeps at the Hajek Motorsport Museum in Oklahoma, USA. “They didn’t go too much on the retro thing and they didn’t go overboard on the futuristic things. That’s what makes this car quite possibly the most valuable Ford that was ever built,” he adds. 


Hajek, who calls Edsel Ford a close friend, acquired the GT90 from the car maker following Ford’s 100th anniversary back in 2003. He was drawn to the fact that it stood out markedly from everything else he’d seen. He’s not wrong. The side of the car alone is enough to frighten a production line manager: deep carbonfibre panels with a sharp, angular beltline rebelliously rising from the bottom of the front wheel and rising remarkably beyond the rear wheel. The front arch itself literally goes off on a tangent – like many a corporate meeting – while that waistline is criss-crossed with another ‘cut’ in the opposite direction, the tinted glasshouse ‘floating’ atop the crisp white panel work. 


At the rear, the triangle-shaped taillights and playfulness are clear: a large triangle hosts four smaller triangles, one for each exhaust outlet. To pop open the doors to clamber into the 45-inch high GT90, there’s a yellow… triangle. The doors themselves integrate into a triangle-themed roof, forming a canopy style cockpit drenched in bright blue trim and triangles with chrome detailing. It’s melodramatic at any angle. 

While there are curves over the wheels, the only completed soft edges are on the Ford badges themselves. Without them, who’d think this was car from Detroit in the mid 1990s? “People look at it and they think it’s obviously some contemporary car from overseas,” Hajek says. “No, this is a Ford, a damn near 30-year-old Ford folks – that’s nuts!”. Back then, it made contemporary rivals look decidedly old-fashioned: the Bugatti EB110 looks almost agricultural, the Lamborghini Diablo cool but conservative, while even the smooth-edged Ferrari F50 instantly dated next to the futuristic Ford. 

The GT90 Concept, a successor and celebration of the original GT40, was the first step for ‘New Edge’. “It was shocking and offensive to some people at Ford,” said Hope. Was it polarising? “Absolutely, and internally in the company as well. A lot of people were really against it … I had some people, friends of mine, tell me how ugly that car was at the time in very blunt terms.”

Under that controversial skin was a Jaguar XJ220 aluminium chassis. Ford owned Jaguar at the time, which made up its Premier Auto Group with Aston Martin, Jaguar-Land Rover and Volvo. The XJ220 – so named for its target 220mph (354km/h) top speed to knock off the Ferrari F40 and Bugatti EB110 as the world’s fastest car. The GT90, though, was made to take the title back from the McLaren F1 (231mph), with a claimed top-speed of 253mph – 407km/h – the very speed that the Bugatti Veyron would reach a decade later as the world’s fastest production car. The GT90 was staggeringly ambitious inside and out. 

Return on investment at such high speed diminishes greatly, so for the GT90 to reach such dizzying heights, the XJ220’s 3.5-litre twin-turbo V6 was ditched for a fresh Roush engine. Roush, legendary in Ford motorsport circles for its NASCAR powertrains for many decades, fabricated the GT90’s mid-mounted engine using two modular 4.6-litre V8s from the Lincoln Town Car, each with a pair of cylinders removed and de-stroked from 90mm to 77.3mm to create a single 5.9-litre (362ci) 90-degree V12. That wasn’t enough: a quartet – yes, <four> Garrett T02 turbochargers – were fitted for a 720bhp and 660pd/ft output running up to 8psi of boost, which easily could reach 900hp if the boost was increased. The punch was fed through the XJ220’s FFD-Ricardo five-speed manual to the rear wheels.

“This is the fastest, baddest Ford GT that was ever built,” Hajek says. “If you look at it, the GT40s, what they had done, I mean, they had the 427s in them – they were bad-ass, don’t get me wrong – but they didn’t have four turbochargers and 12 cylinders! If you look at the new GT today, it’s half what this one is – it only had two turbos!,” he jokes.

The stories surrounding the GT90 from media – who drove it with the wastegates intentionally jammed open to somewhat lessen its ferocity – vary. Most famously, Jeremy Clarkson raved about the road-going stealth while driving it appropriately around La Sarthe at Le Mans, saying, “This could be the cleverest, most exciting car ever … America’s first supercar, and they’ve nailed it”.

Hajek is one of the few mortals beyond that select media group to have actually driven it, and as part of even smaller number in its ultimate guise with fully functioning wastegates. “I’ll tell you what, when it starts spooling up – hang on! Man, that thing… there’s a lot of stories about it saying it wasn’t that bad-ass, but it is. I’ve got seven-second drag cars, and we’ve set Land Speed Records, we know what’s bad-ass – and that thing’s bad-ass.” 


On the Detroit stand in January 1995 – where it was lucky to be after being damaged in shipping only days before, and then failed to start up when it was supposed to be driven onto the stand during its reveal – Ford was vague on whether the GT90 would go into production. Still, it suggested an estimated $USD150,000 price – the price you’ll see it on <Gran Turismo II> and <Need4Speed II> as the GT90’s polarising looks saw it become a gaming legend and 90s pin-up.


For Ford, it would be a huge risk to apply such a dramatically different look to critical volume products such as the Focus, yet the GT90 paved the way for its New Edge design and successful brand reinvention. “The GT90 started out and always remained basically a study,” says Hope. “One of the main reasons was to test a new design language. You test the market reaction, and you get people used to it – the shock or new direction change starts to get adapted and accepted.” 


No one at Ford ever asked James Hope if he was working in the right place again. From his controversial sketches, the GT90 set the design direction of one of the world’s largest car companies for the 15 years. From a single concept – the GT90 – to millions of sales, New Edge had arrived in showrooms and driveways across the world. Sadly, the GT90 itself did not. 



Words Damion Smy
 
It was to be America’s first supercar. Ford had been designing vehicles based on its ‘Aero’ language since the 1980s, when the original Taurus saved the company from the increasingly confident – and better built – competition. By the mid-90s, Aero was standard operating procedure at the Ford design department – if it ain’t broke…

The design team were readying the proposals for senior management at Dearborn. James Hope, a young designer who’d started at the Detroit car maker less than two years earlier, didn’t expect his model would make the cut. See, Hope had missed the Aero memo. Or more so, ignored it. 
The young designer was instead inspired by sharper designs such as the F-117 stealth fighter, a radar-defying US military secret until 1988, which saw acute angles and hard edges prioritised to fly undetected into enemy skies. 


1995 Ford GT90 - White Noise

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