Inside Look At Designing The 2005 Ford GT - Jay Leno’s Garage

you're going to have to lift the entire back of the car, probably three quarters of an inch and I said, well, you know, that's it. I'm going to echo up to the door and say exactly what you need, where you need, do you know the height and why, so they said , well, it's probably right between these two lines and I said, well, let's do it like a dragster, you know? Let's put this lip there and tell me how high it has to be and it's not going to touch my body, so that was one, the venturis was another, nothing happened on the front, they needed bigger extractors, you know?

Extract more heat and get all that air running through the mouth and in there. For the first time in car design, I was told I needed wider tires. I thought I didn't have any problem. You know, that's funny. For someone like me, the newbie, it seemed like

designing

the marrows would be simple, but I imagine it takes a little time. a lot of work and effort too, isn't it? Yeah, well, mirrors have very strict functional requirements, it's a safety issue, they're a certain size now, the mirrors we had on the concept car were like your dream mirror, very low profile, right? you know, almost like and I call this like the diving mask, kind of

look

ing at the back now when they gave us the internal component, you know, to hold the mirror, you know, I had to try to wrap the body in it almost like the car but on a small scale now if you

look

at it you see how there's a little circle under the mirror which is the diameter of the actual mirror so what I did was I made a notch in it like that and I basically cheated the height okay Wow, and I'm still holding on to a carryover component, well it's just fantastic on the outside of the filler, yeah, I had a filler door stolen, a lot of GTS's had two fuel caps, you know, because they had fuel tanks on. on each side and obviously this has just one tank in the middle right, but I like the symmetry of, you know, two tops, it's like a girl wearing one earring, come on, yeah, give her two to fight and fight because of that thing that's actually under the Stamping is still ready to accept it because they removed it from the program.

We came so far. I almost got it, oh okay, and they asked me, what are you going to do with the extra fuel cap? and I said, oh God, how's the windshield wiper? liquid yes and that says well that's an interesting idea and then someone says well what happens if they put gasoline in there and then your windshield catches on fire? Yeah, oh, okay, that's not going to happen, yeah, it'll be fine, so uh and then, um, then I thought, hey. How about you use your trickle charger there instead of going over there and okay, this is a good idea and finally there was a very aggressive meeting, you know, with the engineers and them. won and jay said look camillo I think you're 98 a car choose your battles yes yes okay let's talk about the interior while we're in the car we'll go for a drive but we should show of course the famous four seat GT that I, which in last time i thought it was the coolest thing with all the rings to let the seat breathe obviously that was the same intention here the grommets yeah yeah yeah well you can imagine gurney and aj foyt sitting on this thing for 24 hours.

I know they're going to want that seat to breathe a little and back then they didn't use leather, it was all nylon you know, leather is a luxury, nothing was leather in the gts, it was a plastic dash, nylon seats and aluminum everywhere. the eyelets because they were so visual and graphic that it really gave it a modern look, so you know it was a very strong graphic, you know, the metal against the nylon, so it was visual and modern, so I wanted to include the eyelets in here in a much more contemporary way, simpler, bigger, modern and I wanted aluminum, we almost lost that fight and we went all the way because when it comes to engineering that does nothing right, there is a carbon fiber shell, so the seat does not move.

Breathing is totally aesthetic, it's probably difficult, I know it's also difficult to clean them, so an engineer took the job and, thank God, they gave it to him and he figured it out when everyone was telling me no, now if you want, there's an insert of the aftermarket, it appears right on its aluminum surface, oh that's right and it really adds a super graphic quality to it. Oh, I'll have my friends, yeah, check that out, yeah, well, let's go get Ryan, we'll discuss the inside of the car too so you can see, you can see, walk over here.

I have to bow my head. How long can you stay there? Look, look, yes, just like we're changing drivers. What machine. Oh, it's a great car. All these indicators are. from the automatic gauge, yeah right, you know they say okay, you can choose any caliber, any diameter, you can design the face, but that's it, you know the rest will carry over because there's no time to equip yourself now with the with the Steering wheel and steering column right there are trying to convince me to use one of those tiny little gauges for rpm and I thought there's no way rpm has to be as big a diameter as that, so I know I sketched it out and said : What if we used the same unit but just give me a new ring and I'll make it like a D and we'll trim the top and bottom?

Yes, yes, and you will never know. now you have a nice big diameter, yes I know it looks cool, that didn't cost them much, they just had to equip that little bezel, you must be thinking about the ball, you must come up with different paths because if not then they will give you the small one indicator, right? Say, hey, this is the only thing you can do and I always refuse. No, there has to be another way, so the first time you drove the car, you designed, what was that? like we drove the workhorse first, I mean it was ready to go, they were using it to test durability and all that, so there was a big jump between driving the concept car and then driving what the real workhorses are. , TRUE?

And the concept car was actually it was governed by going 30 miles per hour it was no longer dangerous it wasn't designed it was just an aesthetic queen it was a beautiful thing and it basically sold the project because it still started it sounded great I could go on stage and you know they all the doors in the clamshell would open so it's very dramatic and what was the total mileage of this car around 4 000 4 100 something like that is what they calculated it would be do you think it would be less? that you just got more orders or what happened, the goal was 4500.

Oh okay, we were going to do 1500 a year and we only built it two years, so they combined it, yeah, I mean, it felt good, yeah, ya You know, he was like us. Built 4000 of these things and I don't think any Ford has held its value like this one. It's something very interesting that we didn't predict. Would you say this is the most successful product of all the ones you have made? I have designed for sure, yes, definitely, the most successful, the most exciting, the most rewarding product, yes, so when they build the model of this car, like the Japanese model companies and some of the others, they also consult you on That, yes, when they built.

As small as they are, they had to come and digitize the vehicle. Borrow our mathematical data. I remember you know they took all the side views, front views, top views, photos, you know, the orthographic views. I definitely wanted this car to go racing. but I was very happy that we were on the road, right, we made it, you know, yeah, it's a world-class mid-engine car that sits on the shelf with all the vehicles that got me excited about being an automobile designer. the lamborghinis the p4 all those vehicles are the ones that when I was young made me want to get a car design I think this car is going to pass through time like a mirror the mirror looks beautiful today it was a beautiful car then the The lines are beautiful , now they will stand the test of time if you made other cars at the same time you do this or you dedicated yourself to this project just because we are running the svt studio, yes there was always something brewing in the In Lightning or SPT I also did the 2003 Mustang Cobra and 4 before making this car.

I wanted to wait until I found someone who was intimately involved with the car, and of course I was the chief designer. The man behind it is just great. I hope that by watching this you learned a few things, I certainly did and it's great, Camilo, thank you my friend, thank you very much, just make beautiful work now, if people want to see more of your work, where can they go? Where can you see it? simple simply camillopardo.com is my website and it is a little recent because in addition to being a stylist you are also an artist and I suppose something like a right engineer, first I am a good artist because my family is right and but when I study industrial design, that's the closest thing to engineering as far as the art department goes right cool we really enjoyed having you thanks for coming very fun yeah it was cool it's nice to go for a ride in the car with you yeah and I.

I think people learn a lot about this car that they didn't know before, so we'll see you there next week.