GT40 (Mk I / Mk II / Mk III / Mk IV)

Lola, Slough and a Purchase That Did Not Happen Ford's programme began with a deal that fell through. Henry Ford II wanted Le Mans, Ferrari would not be bought, and the fastest route to a mid-engined prototype was to acquire someone else's. Eric Broadley had shown the Lola Mk6 GT at the London Racing Car Show in January 1963: a monocoque car carrying a Ford Fairlane-derived V8 as a fully stressed member, three years before Formula 1 adopted the idea, with a Colotti four-speed behind it. Broadley drove it to Le Mans himself, arrived after scrutineering had closed and was admitted anyway; Hobbs and Attwood ran well until the transmission failed at five in the morning. Three Mk6s were built. Ford took two as rolling test beds, signed Broadley to a two-year contract and set him to work under Roy Lunn at Ford Advanced Vehicles in Slough, with John Wyer running the operation. Broadley lasted a year. He wanted an aluminium chassis and Lunn insisted on steel for cost and repairability; Broadley left with the prototype and the workshop building, which had been his to begin with.

From Small Block to Big Block The first cars were quick and fragile. Three were entered at Le Mans in 1964 and all three retired, one on transmission, one on fire, Phil Hill's running third at dawn before it stopped. Racing was taken away from Broadley and Wyer and handed to Carroll Shelby. Ford's own account credits Roy Lunn's Dearborn team with the 427-engined GT40X experiment, which Ken Miles tested at Romeo at 210 mph before saying it was the car he wanted at Le Mans. Seven-litre cars were entered in 1965 and retired, leaving a customer Ferrari 250 LM to win. The 1966 Mk II settled it, with three cars crossing the line together. The finish is still argued over: the ACO's response to Ford's plan for a dead heat gave the victory to Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon and denied Ken Miles the Daytona, Sebring and Le Mans treble in one season.

The J-Car and the Honeycomb Tub The Mk IV was a different car under the skin and the only GT40 built in America. Kar Kraft constructed the chassis and body using aircraft practice: a honeycomb aluminium main structure reinforced with riveted aluminium L-sections, skinned in bonded and riveted aluminium and cured in an autoclave. Wikipedia records the resulting tub at 39 kg and the complete car at 1,207 kg, some 136 kg below the Mk II. Kar Kraft assembled the cars and passed them to Shelby American and Holman-Moody for race preparation. Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt won Le Mans in 1967 four laps clear of the Ferrari P4; the sister car of Andretti and Bianchi was running second when a front pad was refitted the wrong way round and let go at the Esses. The programme ended almost immediately afterwards, when the FIA capped prototype capacity at 305 cu in for 1968.

Gulf, 1075 and the Second Act The rule change should have finished the GT40 and instead handed it two more wins. J.W. Automotive ran 5.0-litre Mk Is in Gulf colours, and chassis GT40P/1075 won in 1968 with Pedro Rodriguez and Lucien Bianchi by five clear laps, then won again in 1969 with Jacky Ickx and Jackie Oliver after a last-lap pass at the White House by about a hundred yards. One car, two victories, five years after the model's first Le Mans humiliation.

The Road Cars Road GT40s came in two forms. Thirty-one Mk Is were specified for the road, twenty of them destined for Ford's Mk I Promotion and Disposal Program. The Mk III was the deliberate attempt: eight inches longer in the tail with somewhere to put luggage, twin headlamps raised to legal height, softer damping, a central gearchange for left-hand drive, 306 bhp. Ford asked $18,500 against $16,500 for a racing Mk I, built seven and sold three. Denis Jenkinson, testing a road car for Motor Sport in December 1966 at £7,253 including purchase tax, called the steering unbelievably accurate and the ride superb, then noted that he could not carry a toothbrush in it.

The steel semi-monocoque is the recurring structural issue. Superformance, building under licence, substitutes zinc-coated steel precisely because the original material rusted, and substitutes aluminium for magnesium in several locations where the period castings degrade. Corrosion in the sills is compounded by the fuel installation: the period car carried Goodyear bag cells in the sill boxes, twenty Imperial gallons across two tanks, and perished bags are both a running problem and a fire risk. Transmissions are the other constraint. The Colotti four-speed of the earliest cars was replaced by the ZF 5DS-25 because the Colotti was not durable, and ZF units and their internals are scarce; the Mk II and Mk IV used the Kar Kraft T-44 instead, which is scarcer still. Brakes are unassisted Girling discs and wear quickly when the car is used as intended. Period criticism of the driving experience has aged into ownership reality: Motor Sport in 1966 found entry and exit difficult for taller drivers, three-quarter rear vision poor, road dirt swirling onto the rear lamps and number plate, and driveline wind-up on lazy gearchanges, alongside 13.7 mpg driven hard. The Mk III attracted specific complaint over its central linkage, noticeably heavier than the Mk I's right-hand change, and over build quality generally.

The first question on any GT40 is which car is actually being offered, because most cars sold under the name were built after 1980. Safir Engineering completed forty Mk V continuations between April 1981 and September 2000 using unfilled blocks inside the original series - GT40P-1090 to 1100, 1115 to 1125 and 1128 to 1145 - and Superformance has built cars under Safir licence since 2000 that also carry GT40P numbers continuing the original sequence and are registry-eligible on that basis. Safir's own statement is that it has licensed roughly two-thirds of all GT40s ever produced. Beyond the licensed cars sits an unlicensed replica trade large enough that Safir registered the trademark in 1985 specifically to police it. A GT40P chassis number therefore dates nothing on its own. What separates a 1960s car is documentation of the tub: period race records, continuity of ownership and the research of recognised marque historians, which recent consignments have cited as part of the file. Period competition cars were rebuilt, rebodied and renumbered as a matter of routine, and at least one, P/1033, was converted for road use by Sbarro before being rebuilt again. Original steel monocoques rust, so a car that has been re-tubbed is a different proposition to one that has not, and the paperwork is where that shows. On road cars, whether the car left Slough in road trim or was converted later is a material distinction, as is which of the seven Mk IIIs is on offer and how it is driven.

As of August 2026, classic.com tracks a thin but very high public record for original GT40s: an average sale of $8,531,667 across the results it holds, with a low of $4,405,000 for a 1967 car on 2 March 2024 and a high of $12,375,000 for a 1966 Mk II factory lightweight on 16 January 2026, and a single car listed for sale. That sample is small enough that individual results move it, and it does not capture everything: RM Sotheby's sold Mk II chassis P/1032, a Holman-Moody 1966 Le Mans entrant and 1966 Sebring runner-up, for $13,205,000 at its Miami sale in 2025. Road cars trade below competition cars but not by as much as might be expected. Mecum sold Mk I road car P/1034, described as the first of the thirty-one road cars delivered to a private customer, for $7,040,000 including premium at Kissimmee in January 2025, against $6,930,000 for the GT40 sold there in 2024. Not everything clears: RM Sotheby's offered road-specification P/1058 at Miami in 2026 against a $6,500,000 to $8,000,000 estimate and it did not sell. Mk IVs have carried lower published estimates than either, Gooding pitching J-10 at $2,500,000 to $3,000,000 at Pebble Beach in 2018. All figures are as of August 2026 and as reported by the houses concerned.