At Ford’s recent cars and coffee at Greenfield Labs, we spent some time with Ford CEO Jim Farley, who had high performance on the brain, clearly inspired by an ultra-rare, rally-car-for-street, M-sport R5 sitting just a few feet away. This is a rally-bred Ford Fiesta ST, built in limited quantities by M-Sport, Ford Performance’s rally partner in the World Rally Championship, and is the rarest of the rare (and was never sold in the U.S. ). Think of it as a WRC-homologation special, dressed in full rally “kit,” as the Brit’s say, with mud flaps, a roof intake scoop, a stripped and caged interior, composite side windows, carbon fiber door cards and a 1.6-liter turbocharged engine, sending approximately 280 hp and 350 lb-ft of torque to all four wheels, through a 5-speed sequential gearbox.
With this rally beastie in his eyeline, Jim started musing about what a purpose-built, high performance supercar, built for gravel stages and tarmac blasts, could look like. Not like the M-Sport R5, which, like all WRC cars, must be based off a high-volume production vehicle, traditionally a compact sedan or hatchback, but way beyond.
But when asked whether Ford was considering a similar vehicle, say, an offroad version of a next-generation Ford GT (Raptor?), Farley was quick to squash that rumor. “No! What I’m saying is, I’m always looking for what’s next …” And in his mind, he’s not imagining a supercar converted to going offroad, ala Porsche and Lambo, but a full clean-sheet design. What would like look like? Farley offered a little bit of direction in the way of Dakar racers, from the legendary torture of Paris-Dakar rally.
With all of this in mind, we prompted our favorite AI image generator, Midjourney, to do a little imagining and rendering of its own. Click through the gallery above to see what we came up with.
Read the full article here