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Ford father-son team leads automaker’s racing renaissance: ‘Let’s go like hell’
Posted by Talbot Payne on February 16, 2025
Charlotte, North Carolina — Henry Ford had a need for speed that helped launch Ford Motor Co. A century later, Bill and Will Ford are stepping on the gas.
In perhaps the closest father-son relationship in Ford’s storied family history, the Fords are leading the company into a new era of motorsports.
If Henry used racing success to attract investors and Henry Ford II used Le Mans and Formula One to prove that Ford could compete with the world’s best, then Bill and Will want to establish Ford as the premier performance manufacturer by competing in every aspect of motorsports from F1 to off-road racing to NASCAR to endurance sports cars.
“It was 1901 when (Henry Ford) first raced and won on the track to raise the money,” said Bill Ford, the company’s executive chairman, as he leaned forward on a couch next to his son on Jan. 30 at the Ford Performance Season Launch in Charlotte, where the company ramped up for this weekend’s Daytona 500 and a full 2025 racing calendar ahead.
Racing is “something that has been part of us, certainly for my lifetime,” Bill Ford said. “It’s 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 history; it’s who we are as a company, and it’s who we are as a family.”
On stage before a sea of Ford fans, drivers and race personnel, Bill Ford announced that, in 2027, the automaker would return to the pinnacle for prototype racing, something not seen since it dominated Le Mans with the legendary V8-powered GT40 from 1966-69. With Will as general manager of Ford Performance, father and son will be in the front seats of Ford’s racing renaissance.
“It was the right time for us to do this,” Will said. “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.”
His father’s excitement was palpable on this night when Ford brought its racing teams and drivers together to kick off the 2025 season. Bill Ford, 67, grew up in the 1960s when Ford blossomed as a performance manufacturer — introducing the wildly popular Mustang sports car at home and beating Ferrari, a racing demigod, at the summit of motorsports, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Not since Henry II — Hank the Deuce, immortalized in the Oscar-winning movie “Ford v Ferrari” — has a Ford brought this passion to the track. “We’re going back to Le Mans, back to win. This time to win it all . . . with a new prototype LMDh,” Bill Ford said on stage before a cheering crowd. “Let’s go like Hell.”
He drives the 1964 Indy 500 Mustang pace car, attends races and rubs shoulders with his drivers in the pits. And he has another Ford at his side.
“We really have not had a father-son kind of relationship,” Bill said. “Obviously, Henry the First and Edsel worked together, and at times, that was a little rocky, I think.”
Author A.J. Baime, who has chronicled the Ford family in two books, says the Bill & Will relationship represents a unique evolution of a family-owned company.
“Unlike automakers like General Motors or Chrysler, the founding family is still influential, and the Fords takes great pride in the company. That there is a desire among the Fords to return to the pinnacle of racing is incredibly exciting,” said Baime, whose book “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans,” was the basis for the “Ford v Ferrari” movie.
While GM over the years has nurtured generations of family talent (Chevrolet President William Knudsen and son Semon Knudsen, Pontiac general manager; GM President Lloyd Reuss and his son, Mark Reuss, current president of GM), Baime said that founding family relationships are rare and mostly associated with small European marques, not big, mainstream companies.
In the 1930s, for example, Bugatti founder Ettore Bugatti’s oldest son, Jean, designed the brand’s famed Royale Type 41 and the Type 57 models. After World War II, Ferdinand Porsche and his son, Ferry, launched their namesake company with the 356 model. And Dino Ferrari was a talented race engineer for his father, Enzo’s, company before his untimely death at the age of 24.
The close father-son bond is unique in Ford history. In his book “Arsenal of Democracy,” on Ford Motor’s efforts to manufacture airplanes during World War II, Baime describes the chilly, fraught relationship between the driven Ford founder and his more cosmopolitan and only son, Edsel. While Edsel commissioned several automobiles from Ford for his personal use, including the 1934 Model 40 Special Speedster, his passion was for boats — even competing in speedboat races.
The warm bond between Chairman Bill and GM Will is apparent. Both are car guys; both are competitive. While earning a history degree at Princeton University, Will, 32, also competed for four years on the varsity men’s hockey team.
“I’m an athlete. I’ve always been an athlete. I like to compete,” he said with a laugh, “mostly against my dad — but I can’t say I always knew I was going to join the motorsports group when I came to Ford. 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.”
That top-down passion was apparent to Red Bull Formula One CEO Christian Horner, who has partnered with Ford to make a hybrid drivetrain under F1’s 2026 hybrid-engine (so-called power unit) regulations, and who attended the Charlotte event.
“It’s something we’re very excited about because Ford has such a rich history in Formula One,” Horner said in an interview. “We felt that it was the right time to take control of our own destiny and produce our own power unit in-house. But to do that as an independent when you are going up against massive manufacturers (like Ferrari and Mercedes), we felt like we needed a partner. The enthusiasm of Bill Ford … was apparent and the deal was basically done within a couple of months.”
That family enthusiasm has been crucial to Ford’s racing success. “The impetus for Ford’s efforts in the 1960s had to come from within the family with Henry II, and now it’s happening again,” said author Baime.
Beginning in the 1960s, Ford and Formula One became synonymous, with the Blue Oval producing (in partnership with Cosworth) the most successful F1 powerplant of all time, winning 155 races from 1967 to 1983. Ford’s efforts would continue through multiple rule changes until it exited F1 in 2005. For 2026, Red Bull will assemble the 50-50 gas-electric hybrid powertrain while Ford provides battery/electric motor expertise.
“It’s the first time in 50 years that F1 has introduced, coterminous, different engine and chassis regs,” Horner said. “(Ford has) so much experience in the EV sector of the market now, and that puts us on even keel with some of our other competitors.”
The feeling is mutual, as the tech transfer from racing to production is crucial for Ford as it builds and markets a new generation of internal combustion and electrified production vehicles around the world.
“(Racing) will bring what we learn in racing back to our vehicles,” Bill said. “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 — bringing back what we have learned in some of the world’s toughest endurance races both on track and off-road … into our passenger vehicles, that’s something our customers will love.”
The Formula One and Le Mans LMDh prototype class both run hybrid drivetrains at the very limits of material and heat tolerances — limits that inform the development of hybrid and battery drivetrains in production cars from hybrid Maverick trucks to Mustang Mach-E EVs.
But, as in the ‘60s when Ford won the Baja 1000 in the deserts of Mexico in addition to high-profile Le Mans and NASCAR victories, the company is expanding its reach off-road to carry the flags of F-150 truck and Bronco SUV models that are the company’s biggest profit drivers.
Christopher Mies, Frederic Vervisch and Dennis Olsen piloted the #65 Ford Multimatic Motorsports Mustang GT3 to first place in the GTD Pro class at the 2025 Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona. Jake Galstad, Courtesy Of IMSA
“Off-road is a really important space for us,” said Bill. “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. We have an opportunity … to create that ecosystem that is analogous to what exists in sportscars and really be the only brand that owns that whole world.”
While Ford’s Mustang GT3 race car was beating Porsche, Ferrari and Mercedes around the high-bank ovals of Daytona in the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in January, it was also competing in the remote desert of Saudi Arabia in the Dakar Rally, finishing third with its maiden Raptor entry. All told, Ford will compete off-road with Raptors this year in Dakar, Baja and the U.S. King of the Hammers series.
“Our breadth of racing is so wide that sometimes it’s hard for us to show that to customers and fans,” said Will, who spent the evening in Charlotte mingling with drivers, team owners and fans at numerous race car displays. “We are the only (manufacturer) on earth that can bring all these drivers, team partners and technical partners together.”
Such commitment has waxed and waned over the decades in a cyclical industry. Fiery Hank the Deuce made motorsports a priority beginning in the 1960s and the father-son team has rekindled it along with Ford Performance chief Mark Rushbrook and CEO Jim Farley, himself an accomplished amateur racer.
“Having the company CEO architecting this is crucial,” Baime said. “The commitment to racing couldn’t happen if Farley didn’t see eye-to-eye with the family.”
At the Ford Performance event, the company announced the integration of the Ford Performance Racing division with production to better align its racing and production learnings.
“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,” said Will. “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.”
Racing also aids the bottom line with customer programs that parallel factory team efforts. Ford has long sold Mustangs to private teams in the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge GT4 race series and is expanding that effort to international GT3 racing. It’s also forged a track-focused Mustang Dark Horse R for customers to race in the Mustang Challenge. The series will cross the pond to Le Mans this June.
“(Mustang) is 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,” said Bill. “So this is very much who we are and . . . where we are headed.”
Next year, 2026, is the 125th anniversary of Henry Ford’s 1901 Sweepstakes victory that attracted the investor seed money for Ford Motor Co. It will also be the 60th anniversary of Ford’s historic Le Mans win. In its second century, the Ford family — and its racing DNA — is still at the heart of the company.
“In some ways, the world has gotten more complicated because there are so many more players now than” in the 1960s,” Bill said. “You have the Koreans, the Japanese, now the Chinese in big numbers. But . . . we are the only brand that can do what we are doing, and we are going to take on all comers.”
And with a new generation of Fords by his side. His daughter Alexandra is on the automaker’s board of directors, and his youngest son, Nick, has joined the company as director of corporate strategy. Will joined Ford Performance in 2023.
“My Dad has always been very clear with me and my siblings that we needed . . . to experience other places and get graduate degrees and prove ourselves outside of the company,” said Will, who, after earning an MBA from MIT, spent a decade in the finance world. “But I always knew I was going to probably end up here one day. The timing was perfect.”
Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or @HenryEPayne.