Aston Martin GT3 Driver to Attempt 200mph Run in Restored, 40-Year Old Concept Car

This is the discussion thread for a recent post on GTPlanet:

This article was published by Andrew Evans (@Famine) on January 8th, 2021 in the Automotive News category.

 

I remember when the Bulldog came out. It was the perfect new wave wedge-shaped fantasy car of the early ‘80s. Glad to see it’s still around and getting used as intended.

 

Someone call ford and tell them to take the ford gt90 from whatever warehouse they're storing it and put it on a track

 

Those headlamps, just wow. Nice colour though.

 

The front end of the car, with all those lights, reminds me of a spider.

 

The design makes it look like it should be able to drive underwater,a more extreme version of the Lotus Esprit from 007

 

Cyberpunk 2077 DLC looks good.

 

The GT90 is gonna be the mother of all "barn finds" someday. Hopefully I live to find see it.

As for the Bulldog, it's awesome. I remember first learning of this car on this old (but still updated) website when I was really young. Glad to see its still around, and being used as intended

 

Last reported, she's sitting in some middle of nowhere town called Ames, Oklahoma at the Hajek Motorsports Museum.
https://imgur.com/gallery/WJbzb

 

Oh nice! last I heard it had disappeared from the world after being pulled from an auction in 2010 or so. I wonder why its there of all places.

 

If I were Ford, I would try to reacquire the GT90 and put it into the Henry Ford Museum to prevent it from becoming a barn find at all. (unless I'm mistaken) I'm surprised the car is even out of their hands in the first place.

 

It's so confusing how car companies let their cars slip away from them especially rare items like the gt90

 

So, from what I gathered, the car was sold to John Vermeersch in the early 2000's who seems to be a highly respected, yet understated name in the Ford community. A couple isolated posts said the car was stored in SVT HQ's warehouse & the car was sold along side other pieces for cheap. In 2009, someone on FordGTForum reportedly owned the car, but shortly after, the car was shown to be going up for auction through RM at their Jan. 2010 sale in Arizona. The sale was pulled last minute. John remarked in Jan. 2015 that he still owned the car & it had been placed "back in the barn" in 2010, adding that he wanted to get some things fixed & then place it in a museum. It seemed at the time, the GT90 was still in Detroit at RCR Superlite cars.
https://www.fordfe.com/viewtopic.php?f=76346&t=159024&p=940727&hilit=GT90#p940727

Sometime between then & Feb. 2016, it appears the car made it's way into Hajek's hands down in Oklahoma, even making an appearance at the OKC auto show that year. Trail seems to dry up between then & now, but it's reported Hajek still has it in an article shared Feb. last year.

 

Honestly, it makes sense. Concept cars are primarily marketing fodder with a very short shelf life. The GT-90 was a bit different since it was a running performance concept that got particularly famous, but even then once the marketing value dries up (like when Ford moved away from the New Edge car design when J Mays introduced his radical styling direction of "just making stuff from the 1960s again" that he brought from Volkswagen) the money it takes to keep those cars around and have them maintained in museums or whatever also dries up. At that point they either crush them (like Chrysler usually does) or auction them off.

 

Just to back this up, there are a couple former Ford designers who were present during the GT90's creation that have said the concept was a design study and nothing more, that the concept was placed on an old XJ220 chassis. Don't know if the Ford/Jaguar partnership was present at that time, but it would make sense if so.