strad wrote:BTW..They don't call any of the ones from 2005 on GT 40s because they are not.
I understood that Ford did not, in fact, own the trademark to "GT40" and the owners of said copyright wanted too much for it.
Not trusting memory... I checked our friend wikipedia...
"A British company, Safir Engineering, who made continuation GT40s in the 1980s owned the GT40 trademark at that time, and when they completed production, they sold the excess parts, tooling, design, and trademark to a small American company called Safir GT40 Spares based in Ohio. Safir GT40 Spares licensed the use of the GT40 trademark to Ford for the initial 2002 show car, but when Ford decided to make the production vehicle, negotiations between the two failed, and as a result the new Ford GT does not wear the badge GT40. Safir GT40 Spares asked $40 million for the rights, which Ford declined.[17][18] Bob Wood, one of three partners who own Safir GT40 Spares, said: "When we talked with Ford, they asked what we wanted. We said that Ford owns Beanstalk in New York, the company that licenses the Blue Oval for Ford on such things as T-shirts. Since Beanstalk gets 7.5 percent of the retail cost of the item for licensing the name, we suggested 7.5 percent on each GT40 sold."[19] At the then-estimated $125,000 per copy, 7.5% of 4,500 vehicles would have totalled approximately $42,187,500.[19] Later models or prototypes have also been called the Ford GT but have had different numbering on them such as the Ford GT90 or the Ford GT70. The GT40 name is currently licensed to Hi-Tech Automotive in South Africa, the manufacturer who builds Superformance."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_GT40
More than we wanted to know, lol...
