The Big Boss Of Ford Performance Talks GT, Race Cars, And His Love For Mustang

Yesterday I attended the Chip Ganassi Racing Ford GT WEC driver announcement. After the initial press conference, I got the chance to chat to Ford Performance global director Dave Pericak about what the company is up to right now. With the promise of 12 performance cars by 2020, he’s got a lot of work on his hands.

Alongside Dave was Jay Ward, Product Communications Director for Ford of Europe, who pitched in occasionally with some interesting nuggets, such as confirming that a Fiesta RS is not in the works. Here’s what they had to say:

Darren Cassey: Hi Dave, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. I guess we should start by asking what it’s been like working on this new project, bringing a new Ford GT to reality?

Dave Pericak: Boring! No, really, it’s been an honour to work on a project like this. It’s also a heck of a responsibility, because there’s a lot of expectation out there. I mean, the GT40 has a cult-like following and everybody knows it, so the expectation levels are very high. We’re running under compressed timing, so the pressures are pretty immense because we don’t have time to delay. So while it’s exciting, you almost don’t even have time to enjoy that excitement because of all the work that you have to do, but obviously it’s an honour and extremely exciting to work on.

DC: You mentioned the GT40… that had a V8 engine as did its successor, so when you went with the V6 what was the thinking behind that? And what would you say to people who say it should have a V8?

DP: Well the thinking behind it was that we have a lot of belief in our EcoBoost brand, and we’re using the GT to message all of those things we think are great at Ford Motor Company. One of those things is the EcoBoost brand, so to show the commitment that we have, to put the EcoBoost in the supercar, says that we believe in our own product. And then we went out and proved to the world that that can compete with any V8 that’s out there, and beat them, because we’ve been racing that engine for two years. We’ve won the Rolex 24, we’ve won the 12 hours of Sebring, we’ve run some pretty prestigious races, proving the durability of that engine and the power of it.

DC: So you mentioned you’ve already won with the engine, and you said in the press conference earlier that you reckon you have the capability to run at the front, do you expect to be able to do that right away, or will it take time?

DP: I expect that we will be absolutely able to compete, and absolutely be able to run at the front. There’s no doubt. Now, is that a declaration we’re gonna win the race? No. It’s a 24 hour race and there are a lot of things we can’t control, but do I believe we’ll be extremely competitive with this product? Absolutely.

DC: We’ve seen the engine come down from motorsport and now it’s in the Ford GT, what else have you been able to bring into road cars from your motorsport efforts?

DP: I don’t want to get into specifics, but just at a high level, a really good understanding of aerodynamics, braking - there are a lot of things to learn from going out on the track and pushing the boundaries, you know. Even fuel economy with the EcoBoost engines… there are things we’ve learned on the race track. The great thing about racing is it makes you - in a very high pressured environment - find every little bit, because everybody has gotten so good, and the technology is so great, that it takes little improvements everywhere in order to win. And in order to find those little improvements it takes a lot of effort, so what happens is you end up learning more than you even thought you would.

The great thing here is that translation from the track, to the product development, is very solid and very quick, because it’s all under one group now, under product development. So when we learn something, it immediately goes into our product development community. So, like I said, I don’t want to give specifics away, but we’ve learned a lot for braking and fuel economy and aerodynamics, all of that.

DC: How long do you expect to be racing this car?

DP: Well we’ve committed to two years, so it’s a factory effort right now, and will be a factory effort for two years.

DC: So the race car and road car were developed alongside each other, but what are the differences between the car that’ll enter Le Mans and the car that’ll sit on someone’s driveway?

DP: I think it’s unique that somebody gets to develop a machine like this at the same time, I don’t know anybody that actually has been able to do it at the exact same time, so they’re very, very, very similar. You know, there are things that you have to change to race, because there’s homologation that happens, so you have a fixed wing on this car that you don’t have [on the road car] and there are other elements in the engine and with the calibration and so on, but they are one and the same, and that’s what’s really cool about it.

This is what we call a ‘zero waiver car’, which means we didn’t have to go and apply for any deviation of any kind. And the only way you can do that is because anything we needed for this race car, we were able to put into the road car. So that’s the benefit of doing them at the same time, but you also have the challenge and the downside if you’re doing two cars at once, so it’s quite a drain on your resources, and if you look at it this way, we’re racing this thing before the production car is even gonna be out, so the speed at which we are going - determined by the race schedule - means that we had to even speed up the development of the road car, because again, anything we wanted here we had to put in the road car. So it’s a blessing and a curse, all at the same time.

DC: On the subject of the Mustang, I know you’re a huge fan [Pericak has owned multiple ‘Stangs in the past, and at this point Jay Ward laughs and says “just a bit!”], so I’m interested to know what it was about the old cars that you felt had to stay in the new one, while still modernising it for the world markets.

DP: Well the Mustang’s heritage is one of the strongest out there, so there’s not a lack of things to celebrate, so the goal was to ask “how do you reach a young generation?” How do you say “this is not your dad’s Mustang”? But yet, still have that love for the machine and not change in essence what the machine is. So our team went through a lot of back and forth to figure out what elements we had to carry through that made it uniquely and unmistakably a Mustang, but yet push the boundaries on the areas where you could find some flexibility on the current customers, making it more relevant, and more youthful, and more forward looking. So I think we found the right balance, and we tested it with some customers early on, and they confirmed that they thought we had the right balance, and we went for it.

We don’t do market research with Mustang - with all our other cars we test designs et cetera - but we know what a Mustang is and we know what our customers want. But what we did do, is once we got done with the design, we took all the badges off, and we put it in a room, and we said we’re gonna bring some customers in, and we’re going to ask really quick “what is it?” And if they can’t answer Mustang within seconds, we missed it. I’ll tell you what, it was amazing. Customers came in the door and they went “Wow!” and we said “What is it?” And they said “That’s a Mustang!” So we knew we had it, but we also knew we pushed the boundaries in some areas, and we thought that was the right balance.

DC: In the UK, the first sales were predominantly V8. Is that still the case, and do you expect it to stay that way?

DP: I think long-term, the EcoBoost will be a very solid engine that many customers will end up buying. There’s no doubt there’s been pent up demand, and there are a lot of people out there who want that V8.

Jay Ward: So the sales we’ve got right now, we’re around 10,000 orders for Europe, which is phenomenal… without giving away numbers it’s more than we have to sell, which is a nice problem to have! But right now, as Dave said, it is unequally balanced. We’ve got it around 78 per cent V8, and obviously the rest are EcoBoost. Our long-term prediction is that it’ll be 50/50, because obviously there are some markets where it’s very difficult to sell V8s; in place like Belgium, Netherlands and all the Nordic markets, the taxation on V8s is horrific.

DC: So we know the Mustang is now a ‘world car’ as you’re trying to reach all those new markets, is the EcoBoost offering there to appeal to wider markets while the V8 is targeted at enthusiasts?

DP: Yeah the EcoBoost will make it appeal to more markets, for sure, it also helped us with fuel economy, and at the end of the day we believe in that EcoBoost brand. So we put it in the Mustang and prove to everybody what this technology is. And I’ll tell you, we’ve gotten great results, and great feedback from the EcoBoost in the Mustang, people love it and think it performs well, and it definitely opened up the ability to enter more markets, for sure.

JW: I mean, it’s 320bhp, so don’t think of it as some poor relation, this thing is still severely rapid versus most things on the road.

DP: Yeah, I always tell everybody, if you go back to 2010, 340bhp was the V8. This is putting out 320bhp and it’s a four-cylinder EcoBoost. The performance is there, the power is there, and it does help us sell it to more markets for sure.

DC: So, one last question before you’re whisked away… by far the most popular question when we asked our readers what they wanted to know was this: What’s happening with the Fiesta RS?

DP: [Laughs] I can’t comment on that…

JW: Well we can probably be a little bit more clear on this one… while we don’t talk about future plans, we can say categorically that we are not working on a Fiesta RS at this time. Where that speculation came from, no one quite knows, but at no point was it fed by us. I totally get the enthusiasm for it, I mean wouldn’t it be great, but right now it’s not.