The Ford GT40 is the car that Ford built to end the Ferrari domination of the Le Mans 24hr and it succeeded in doing that, in the process Ford developed the GT40 into one of the most awesome vehicles I have sat behind the wheel of. Every time I got out of the GT40 I had a grin from ear to ear it just does everything right. It has loads of grunt, goes around corners like it is on rails, stops better than any other car I have driven and the noise it made was something special.

Dave Brown of Classic Car Developments built this GT40 for an Australian customer while I was working for him and it was quite a large undertaking. Space frame chassis are reasonably quick to build, a couple of people can have one finished in around two weeks but a monocoque has a lot more work involved, it's a bit like a big three dimension jigsaw puzzle that you have to build the bits to accurately fit into. A monocoque is very strong and is a lot more rigid than a space frame so for a racing car the extra performance advantage is worth the extra work.

Dave's dedication to building accurate replica's is evident in the exhaust system on this car, it is the only replica I have seen that has a cross over exhaust (this means two cylinders from each engine bank feed into one collector and vice versa). The originals were like this and it gives the car a very distinctive sound. It is the attention to detail that sets any car built in Dave's workshop apart from the crowd, as we say in my marketing lectures "point of difference is important" and the point of difference is a dedication to quality.

Being a boy from Southland and having grown up driving V8's. This is the one car, of all the cars I have worked on, that I would want the most. All I need to do is talk to whoever sorts those balls out at Lotto.