What was the biggest challenge faced by the Ford GT team?
Hannemann: I’ll answer by saying timing. Trying to do all of the design in a small amount of time. One of the biggest design challenges was the window. Getting the window to roll down and make it look good. We were into brainstorming and doing out-of-the-box processes. Even Chris Theodore [Ford’s vice president of advanced product creation], he’d come in with sketches, he’d wake up at like four in the morning thinking about it. We had all these ideas about how it could move around in different ways and we finally decided, look, let’s just make the window roll down. What does it take to just make it go down, and the guys put together a concept that worked. Ewing: We had to design a car where the outside was developed concurrently with the interior and the mechanical package. It was very much more of an outside-in proposition, so it demanded a lot of very creative engineering solutions to not compromise the occupant package, to not compromise the dynamics of the car and still keep that s
