Holy heck, you can now buy a 1,200bhp road-legal version of the Ford GT GT1 racecar

Back in the late 2000s, Brian Wolfe – then boss of Ford North America Motorsports – gave his blessing for Swiss racing team Matech Concepts to build an epic GT1 variant of the reborn Ford GT.

Matech had already won the FIA GT3 European Team Championship with its initial take on the GT, but the GT1 was to be a different animal. It used a 5.3-litre Roush Yates V8 that was limited to around 600bhp, a six-speed Xtrac sequential gearbox, Multimatic shocks, AP Racing brakes and of course that glorious carbon fibre body with insane aero addenda. At the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2010, the GT1 held the class lead for eight hours before retiring with a mechanical failure. Sounded pretty good, too.

So, what do you do if you want to experience that car on the road? Well, you can now buy a $1.7m recreation from Lynx Motors, which has teamed up with Graham Rahal Performance to build 28 road-legal versions of the car originally created by Fred Calero and his company GT1.

We’re told that Texas-based Lynx (no relation to the firm that built the excellent Lynx Eventer, we think) has acquired the original continuation chassis and the Matech body moulds that Calero was previously using.

And now, you’ll be able to blow the actual GT1 cars out of the water, because these road-legal cars get a twin-turbo Ford V8 that sends over 1,200bhp to the rear wheels through a Ricardo six-speed manual gearbox. Yikes. Has there ever been a more bonkers road car?