Dream Machine!

Zoomin' With The Ford GT

By Bill Moore   Photos by the Author

Maybe you saw the Ford GT commercial a few years back. There it was, a bright red sports car with bold white Le Mans stripes, wailing around the Thunderhill Park racecourse in Willows, California.

The camera brings you inside for a look. We hear the mid-mounted 5.4-liter, supercharged, 550-horsepower V-8 engine pulsing behind the driver. At each shift, we see the lever moved and we hear these words: "In what gear do you . . . realize that a car is everything that it is supposed to be?"

Then, at the next shift: "In what gear do you know that nothing can catch you?"

And, finally: "In what gear do you know it is the one?"

One! One of just 4,038 Ford GTs built. If you could have afforded it, you should have bought yourself one -- for the sheer thrill of going 0-60 in 3.8 seconds, 0-100 in 8.8 seconds or doing the quarter-mile in 11.6 seconds at 128 mph. Or, for it's electronically regulated top speed of 205 mph (but it has been clocked at 212 in the right hands). Or, maybe you bought one of these rare cars for the investment potential . . .. How long will it take you to double your initial investment of between $155,000 and $169,000 -- especially since there were people who bought the first few for $100,000 over the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price.

This car belongs to Michael Tancreti of Nashua, New Hampshire, who runs Ashwood Development Companies. But more than being a real estate tycoon, Michael is a car guy -- and not just someone who poses beside a hot car like the Ford GT. He's a guy who built high-performance engines when he decided that becoming a dentist wasn't for him, and he started working full-time for New England engine guru Ted Wingate of Precision Engine Rebuilder in Hudson, N.H.

"I went to him and told him I'd come in and work for free," says Michael who stuck around for six years building engines with Wingate. "Then," he says, "I wandered off into the real estate business," where he's done very well. "I can't complain," he says.

Michael is now 54, and he realizes that life is not eternal, so he went back to his roots in cars even though he continues working his full-time job at Ashwood Developments. Now, instead of doing the work himself, Tancreti has gone to a number of people who get things done in the professional way he likes, and that includes Tommy Jenkins who has restored a number of cars for Michael.

Jenkins had nothing, though, to do with the car featured here -- that awe-inspiring Ford GT. Michael, found the Ford GT because . . . well, he says it best: "I'm not a small person." And, he needed a roomy zoomy car, and the GT fit the bill. He found this early 2005 car at a dealership in Londonderry, N.H., and then had $20,000 worth of mods made to it at Tasca Ford in Cranston, Rhode Island. Thanks to better breathing, the horsepower rose from 550 to 700!

"It's the coolest damned thing," says Tancreti. "It sounds like an Indy Car."

Ironically, as a wealthy car guy, he had bids on several cars . . . and he got not only the Ford GT, but at the same time a new Corvette Z06 and a Mercedes 700. Which helps explain why Michael suddenly finds himself owning about 30 cars.

Fortunately, Tommy Jenkins gave us a tour of several of the buildings where Michael  keeps his cars stored away, and in coming issues of SpeedMachines we'll be showing you a few of them . . . and if you have something special that you'd like to see featured, get ahold of us and we'll see what we can do. Try us at www.editorial@speedmachinesmagazine.com.

Tancreti's first car was a '57 Chevy Nomad. "I bought it from my cousin," he says, "when I was 16." But, even before that, when he was a little kid, there were some H.O. scale model GT40s that he put down on his slot car layout and shot them down a fast straightaway and into a Daytona banking, time after time. "That GT40 is one of the cars that stuck in my brain," says Michael.

Now of course, he has the latest version of it in his own Ford GT, a car with enormous performance. "One hundred comes up . . . in first gear," he says. "It goes from here to there in the blink of an eye."

And while he admits to taking the car to about 100 miles an hour, you can imagine him thinking about the New Hampshire turnpikes with ever-vigilant state troopers behind every bush, and he says, "There's really no place around to buzz it!"

Ah . . . the agony -- especially if you've seen that early Ford GT commercial and you know that this car is . . . the one!