With its half-million ticket price and invitation-only purchase opportunity, the regular production Ford GT is special all on its own. However, as the automaker’s figurehead, the model carries the historic dimensions of the brand just as it carries the implicit dreams it desires to sell. And it’s been the accumulating series of historically specific special edition variations of the model that have to a greater degree defined it, just as the model has come to define the aspirations and design capabilities of 21st-century Ford.
So it seems only fitting that the third generation of the GT will be ushered out through a limited-edition version called the 2022 GT LM, what the company’s marketing department has subtitled the ‘Final Special Edition’. Given a red or blue accent in reference to Ford’s 2016 1-3-4 Le Mans victory, the GT LM represents the dominance of Ford in contemporary competitive racing, and by extension in the present tense of the industry. The variant will appear and vanish again in the fourth quarter of this year.
The more interesting feature of the GT LM merges the historical with the technological. The car comes with 3D-printed parts, including an instrument panel badge fabricated from the engine crankshaft of the actual third place-winning car from 2016. Additionally, the car features a unique and metonymic exterior color — ‘Liquid Silver’ — as well as gloss carbon fiber 20-inch wheels, a 3D titanium printed dual exhaust, and an interior with an ‘asymmetrical’ theme. Above the exhaust pipes, a titanium badge declares the edition name.
All told, 1,350 GT examples will be produced in the third edition of the model. Will a fourth-generation GT be forthcoming? The question hasn’t yet been definitively answered by Ford. The company did reveal that another special version, the GT Mk II, will also be produced in quick ‘liquid silver’ fashion: 45 examples of the track-only limited-edition, which will be past tense by this NYE.
