Ford Racing’s new Hypercar broke cover in a blue-and-white camouflage wrap at Circuit Paul Ricard in southern France last week. By the time the team wrapped three full days of running on top of an initial shakedown, the car had covered more than 1,000 kilometers. That’s the headline number. The more interesting part is everything Ford did before it ever fired the car up in anger.
A Six-Decade Wait, Finally Over
Ford hasn’t fielded a factory entry fighting for the overall win in sports car racing since the GT40 ended Ferrari’s run of six straight Le Mans victories across 1966 to 1969. The Ford GT that raced GTE Pro from 2016 to 2019 was a genuinely good program, but it was never built to win outright. The Hypercar set to join the WEC grid in 2027 is Ford’s first real shot at that since the GT40 era, and Paul Ricard was the first time anyone outside the team got to hear what the comeback actually sounds like. Ford Racing Global Director Mark Rushbrook called the test “a huge moment for the team,” a fairly modest way to describe closing a gap that’s lasted six decades.
Why an ORECA Chassis Instead of a Clean-Sheet Design
Ford built its car under LMDh rules rather than the bespoke Le Mans Hypercar regulations used by Toyota, Ferrari and Peugeot. LMDh allows a manufacturer to buy a homologated rolling chassis from one of four approved suppliers – Dallara, Ligier, Multimatic or ORECA – fit a spec hybrid system, and design its own bodywork and engine around it. Ford went with ORECA, the same base chassis underneath Alpine’s A424 and Acura’s ARX-06. It’s a trade-off: less bespoke aero development, but a program that’s meaningfully cheaper to build and easier to keep under the class cost cap, which matters for a manufacturer also funding Mustang GT3 and GT4 racing, a Formula 1 powertrain partnership with Red Bull, and full NASCAR and Supercars programs at the same time.
The engine is a 5.4-liter, naturally aspirated V8 built from the Coyote family – the same core architecture found under the hood of the road-going Mustang GT, just larger and race-prepped. It was fired up for the first time at ORECA’s facility in early July, barely a month before it turned its first laps in France.
The Real Work Happened on a Dyno in Dearborn
Ford’s powertrain group didn’t wait for track time to start learning. Months before Paul Ricard, a team led by Powertrain Chief Engineer Christian Hertrich programmed Ford’s dyno cell in Dearborn to replicate a full lap of the 13.626-kilometer Circuit de la Sarthe – every braking zone, gearchange and full-throttle run – so the V8 was already seeing Le Mans-representative loads before it left Michigan. Combine that with months of simulator work by Ford’s six contracted drivers at the company’s Technology Center in North Carolina, and the Paul Ricard test looks less like a debut and more like a confirmation that the virtual prep actually matched reality.
Six Drivers, and One Already Racing for Ford in WEC
Matt Campbell, Mike Rockenfeller and Tom Blomqvist handled the initial shakedown work, with Campbell and Logan Sargeant sharing the car for the first full test day and Blomqvist joining shortly after. Sebastian Priaulx and Nick Yelloly round out Ford’s six-driver Hypercar roster and spent the week at the track gathering feedback ahead of their own turns behind the wheel. Sargeant’s involvement is worth a second look: the former Williams F1 driver already races a Ford Mustang GT3 in the WEC’s LMGT3 class for customer team Proton Competition, making him one of the few people on the entry list who will have raced for Ford in two different classes before the Hypercar has even made its championship debut.
What’s Left Before Qatar
Paul Ricard is one stop on a long list. Ford’s next step is three days of simulator correlation work back in North Carolina, followed by a test at Portimao in early September. From there the program moves through Silverstone, Monza, Imola and MotorLand Aragon before closing out the year with sessions at Circuit of the Americas and Sebring. All of it builds toward a 2027 season opener currently slated for Qatar on March 27 – a date that, like everything else in a pre-homologation testing program, remains subject to change.
A Grid That Keeps Getting More Crowded
Ford isn’t arriving to an empty class. McLaren is also joining Hypercar in 2027 after rolling out its MCL-HY back in May, joining a manufacturer list that already includes Toyota, Ferrari, Porsche, Cadillac, BMW, Peugeot, Alpine and Aston Martin. It’s part of a broader endurance racing boom that stretches well beyond the WEC’s top class – the same growth shows up in feeder categories where grids have nearly quadrupled in a decade, and in manufacturer-backed TCR programs fighting over multiple championships at once. With this many manufacturers chasing outright wins under a shared cost cap, the programs that arrive already knowing their car tend to be the ones fighting at the front once the season actually starts.
The Bottom Line for Fans
Nobody released lap times, and nobody should read too much into a shakedown week. What Paul Ricard actually confirmed is that Ford’s systems worked, its drivers logged real mileage, and the car is healthy enough to stay on schedule – which, for a Hypercar seven months from its championship debut, is genuinely all you can ask for at this stage. The bigger tell comes at Portimao and through the European test swing, when we’ll start to see whether Ford’s dyno-and-simulator head start translates into actual pace. Ford’s other motorsport programs are already delivering on track, and that success is only going to raise the internal pressure on this one to eventually do the same at Le Mans.
About the Author
