Q&A: Bill and Will Ford on the company’s motorsports ambitions

Posted by Talbot Payne on February 16, 2025

Charlotte, North Carolina — Ford Motor Co. Executive Chairman Bill Ford and his son Will, Ford Performance general manager, are leading a company assault on international motorsports not seen since the 1960s.

Then, Henry Ford II took the Blue Oval to the racing summit with wins at Le Mans, Daytona 500, Baja 1000, and in Formula One. Today, with a new generation of Ford gearheads at the helm, the company is going back to war at Le Mans, NASCAR, Baja, F1 — and beyond.

Detroit News Auto Critic Henry Payne sat down with the Fords on Jan. 30 at the second annual Ford Performance Season Launch to talk about their vision.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

At the 2025 Ford Performance season launch in Charlotte, N.C., Chairman Bill Ford, Jr. (left) and Will Ford, GM Ford Performance, talk about Ford racing plans. Behind them is the Ford Raptor T1+ Dakar Rally race car.

At the 2025 Ford Performance season launch in Charlotte, N.C., Chairman Bill Ford, Jr. (left) and Will Ford, GM Ford Performance, talk about Ford racing plans. Behind them is the Ford Raptor T1+ Dakar Rally race car. Ford

Question: Bill, some exciting news you are dropping here about future race plans.

Bill Ford: Yeah, it’s really big news. We’re going into prototype racing with LMDh. That will allow us to go after the overall win at Le Mans. We’ve done very well in our (GT) classes, but we haven’t been able to go for the overall win because we didn’t have an LMDh car; we will now.

Q: Will, I know this is exciting for you. You are the general manager of Ford Performance. But you don’t know how exciting this is to 60-year-old guys like your father and I. The 1960s is when racing really started — it’s Porsche and Ferrari, it’s Ford v Ferrari, it’s the touchstone of racing, and you guys are launching a second Golden Age in the hybrid era.

Will Ford: It was the right time for us to do this. I think I do have a little bit of a sense of how exciting this is for you guys (laughing). I didn’t get to live through it and see it firsthand in the ‘60s, but I’m obviously very familiar with — and love — the history. I was there in 2016 when we got the class win with the (mid-engine Ford) GT and last year when the GT3 Mustang got its first podium at Le Mans.

This was the natural next step for us to take where we are entering a new golden age of Ford Performance. Everything we are doing in motorsport right now is not for vanity or nostalgia — this is an indication of where we are going as a company and with our products. It’s going to be awesome to compete for the overall (win) over there.

Q: Racing is in this company’s DNA. Ford Motor Company was launched at a track with Henry Ford attracting investors. How do you keep that DNA going over 100 years?

BF: It was 1901 when (Henry Ford) first raced and won on the track to raise the money. It’s been something that has been part of us certainly for my lifetime. It’s not hard to keep that going. It’s the passion of — anytime you are at a race, your adrenaline gets going. Ours certainly does, but also the fans. And this is great for the brand.

It’s one of the things that Will is so uniquely qualified to do in his job because he grew up with this. And it means something to him beyond the cars and the race. It is all tied to our family’s history, it’s who we are as a company, and it’s who we are as a family.

Q: The 2016 GT was an homage to the original GT40. What is happening right now in prototype racing that is recreating this second Golden Era?

BF: We are entering a new era, the hybrid era. We believe this is a great time for us to do it. The other thing that is happening is — if anyone out there is really paying attention, we are going all-in on racing all around the world in every kind of racing.

I think that is something that individual fans will take note of, but they may not see the totality of what we are doing. One of the things we’ve said is we want to own off-road. And so we are racing off-road. Will was just in Saudi Arabia for the Dakar (Rally) and Baja before that. And so we are racing off-road all around the world. We are racing in Australia; we are racing on all the circuits here. Mustang is now not only available for our factory racing, but — very importantly — for customer racing all the way through the various classes that a customer might want to be in. So this is very much who we are, and, as Will indicated, where we are headed.

WF: One of the exciting parts about tonight is — as my dad was saying — our breadth of racing is so wide that sometimes it’s hard for us to show that to customers and fans. To show how many different places we are racing, how many different vehicles we are racing. At the Ford Performance Season Launch, we have everything in one room.

We are the only OEM on earth that can bring all these drivers, team partners and technical partners together. That’s one of the coolest parts about tonight is seeing the off-road drivers meeting the WEC (World Endurance Racing) drivers meeting Aussie Supercar drivers.

Even though motorsports is in our DNA, we’ve sort of had a pattern in our company of having periods where we go all-in and then we lean out a little bit — and then we go all-in again, and then we lean out.

Right now, we are all-in again to an extent we never have been before and it’s not something we’re going to let up on anytime soon.

Q: That’s unusual for any brand. Porsche and Ferrari, for example, play in a very different market from Ford but they have committed to racing internationally. That was part of the breakthrough of Ford winning Le Mans in the 1960s — it put you on the international level with those brands. And it is striking today that you are doing this on a sports-car level but also off-road where you have really committed to taking brands like Mustang and Raptor international.

WF: Yes, sports car obviously. Mustang is racing everywhere, the elite global sports cars are winning top races like with our win at Rolex Daytona 24 last weekend.

But off-road is a really important space for us. It’s where we have a unique competitive advantage with our trucks and Bronco products, and we need to keep finding those toughest, harshest environments to race in — Baja 1000, King of the Hammers, Dakar Rally is the next, natural evolution of our off-road racing program.

We have an opportunity with our products and off-road racing brands and efforts to create that ecosystem that is analogous to what exists in sports-car and really be the only brand that owns that whole world.

Q: Bill, look back over the last 60 years from 1966 to your announcement today. Has the world gotten smaller? Is is easier for you to market these vehicles internationally now?

BF: In some ways, the world has gotten more complicated because there are so many more players now than back then. You have the Koreans, the Japanese, now the Chinese in big numbers. So the field we compete against around the world has gotten larger than it was in the 1960s. But that is where we are going to press our advantage. We are the only brand that can do what we are doing, and we are going to take on all comers and we are going to win.

WF: We want more brands in every series that we race. Down at the Baja 1000, we are the only OEM that is there consistently year-after-year for 15 years with our Raptor products. Occasionally, some other OEMs drop in and drop out.

But we would love for more to come down and compete against us there, because it’s good for the sport, it raises the overall presence of the sport — and we are still going to win.

Q: All the biggest names are there — Porsche, Lambo, Ferrari —– in the LMDh series. Speaking of big names, it’s hard not to talk about 1966 without talking about Henry the Deuce. The force of his personality in bringing that program to bear. Clearly, there is great Ford heritage here with the two of you. Talk about that relationship in the Ford family history having a father-son advancing the brand like this.

BF: We really have not had a father-son kind of relationship. Obviously, Henry the First and Edsel worked together and at times that was a little rocky. I think.

But it’s really fun . . . it’s fun for me to see Will and his younger brother, Nick, who is now working at the company. The one thing that I think they will both have that nobody they work with will have is a commitment to the brand that goes way beyond just the paycheck but also beyond the job.

It’s what they were born with, it’s their last name, it’s their family heritage and it’s going to be their future.

Q: Will, you’re a talented, educated guy. You’re a competitive hockey player, you’ve got a Princeton degree, there are a lot of things you could have done. The Danforth family that created the Purina Company, for example. … John Danforth was a senator, Bill Danforth ran a university. What attracted you to Ford Motor Company. Is it the Ford Performance piece?

WF: I’ve always had a feeling I was going to work at Ford one day. I didn’t know exactly what part of the company I was going to join or when it was going to happen.

My dad has always been very clear with me and my siblings that we needed to go work other places before we joined Ford. We need to go get experience other places and get graduate degrees and prove ourselves outside of the company. But I always knew I was going to probably end up here one day. Sports have been the other big part of my life. I’m an athlete, I’ve always been an athlete. I like to compete — mostly against my dad (laughing) — but I can’t say I always knew I was going to join the motorsports group when I came to Ford.

But the timing was perfect. I remember my dad and I were sitting on the beach one day a few months before I started in this role and it felt like the time was right for me to join the company and I knew everything that we were starting to build back up in the motorsports realm. Not just our racing but the efforts to tie everything that we do in motorsport and integrate it more directly into our products and into our brand identity.

It was an opportunity to be in the motorsports world — and in a highly competitive environment that I love and naturally gravitate to — with something that’s vitally important to our business.

Q: Bill, the timing seems right. You have a CEO in Jim Farley who is a racer and very committed to motorsport. Your son is at this point where it makes sense to him. This seems like a nice trifecta to carry this brand forward in motorsport.

BF: It really is. It’s building the brand, it’s proving to our own employees that we are the team to beat around the world. Our employees take great pride in that. Jim Farley is a racer, but I think importantly — and something that Will touched upon — it will bring what we learn in racing back to our vehicles. If all we did was race and forget about it, we’d have an adrenaline rush on the weekend — and that’s all we would have.

But if we can — and we are — bring back what we have learned in some of the world’s toughest endurance races both on track and off-road . . . if we bring that back into our passenger vehicles, that’s something our customers will love. And we are doing that.

Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or @HenryEPayne.

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