A 37-mile Ford GT is currently bidding for $1.13 million. Its sticker was $630,500.

Good morning.

Every story this morning is about hardware built for one job doing another. The Ford GT runs a race-developed version of the EcoBoost V6 family Ford also puts in the F-150. Bentley's first EV rides on a platform Porsche paid to develop. VW wrapped a subcompact's drivetrain in a body that set a drag record. And GM is pouring and machining missile parts on equipment built for cars.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Let’s roll.

This morning's car is one of 50. Ford built the '68 Heritage Edition to honor GT40 chassis P/1075, the Gulf-liveried car that won Le Mans in 1968 and again in 1969, and this example wears the full uniform: Heritage Blue with Competition Orange stripes, the $20,000 Heritage Roundel Graphics Package, and the number 9 on the carbon-fiber door panels. It has 37 miles. It closes on Bring a Trailer this afternoon at 1:20 PM Eastern, offered by a dealer on behalf of the original owner, who bought it new through Bill Pierre Ford in Seattle. Bidding stood at $1,130,250 Thursday, and it is a reserve auction.

The spec is the second-generation GT as Ford intended it. A carbon-fiber monocoque bolts to aluminum front and rear subframes that work as stressed members, carrying the hydraulically adjustable pushrod suspension we covered in #16. Power comes from a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6 rated at 647 hp and 550 lb-ft, sent to the rear wheels through a Getrag seven-speed dual-clutch transaxle. Brakes are Brembo carbon-ceramics, 15.5 inches up front and 14.1 inches in back. The car also has the Akrapovič titanium exhaust, the fixed Sparco seat with an adjustable pedal box, factory harness anchors, and paint protection film. It comes with the ordering kit, window sticker, and a clean Carfax. Total MSRP on the sticker: $630,500.

Multimatic built these cars in Markham, Ontario, starting in December 2016. Markham is about four hours up the 401 from Windsor, where I grew up, and I still get a small provincial pride every time one of these comes up for sale. Ford vetted buyers through an application process and asked them to agree not to resell for two years, precisely to stop cars like this one from becoming garage ornaments. Seven years later, the odometer shows how that went.

The number I'd look at before bidding is the model year, not the mileage. A 2019 car with 37 miles has spent seven years mostly sitting still. Tires age whether or not they turn, and most tire makers want them inspected once they pass five years. Brake fluid absorbs moisture sitting in a garage. Dual-clutch fluid and fuel don't improve with time either. If I were the buyer, the first mile would come after a fluid service and a fresh set of tires, and I'd count that bill as part of the purchase price.

BaT has its own history with this exact variant. A 10-mile '68 Heritage sold there for $1,256,000 in January 2023, near the top of the market. A 3,127-mile example from an original owner's estate sold there in July 2025 for just under $1 million, and a roughly 1,000-mile '64 Heritage Edition sold there last month for $958,000.

My call: this one sells, somewhere between $1.15 million and $1.2 million. The bid is already past the middle of this year's range, which tells me buyers are paying extra for the '68 livery and the 37 miles, and a bid this close to the top of the market makes a sale the likely outcome. I don't see it reaching the $1,256,000 the 10-mile car made in 2023. At $1.175 million, the original owner clears roughly $545,000 over sticker before fees, seven years of insurance, and the PPF.

Bentley unveiled the Torcal in London on Wednesday evening. It is the first fully electric car in the company's 107-year history and its fourth model line, next to the Continental GT, Flying Spur and Bentayga. At £173,000 in the UK, about $230,000, it is also the least expensive Bentley you can buy. US pricing and delivery dates have not been announced.

Bentley's pricing runs opposite to Ferrari's. Ferrari launched its first EV, the Luce, three months ago at €550,000, about $630,000, and we spent #27 on the backlash and the allocation politics around it. Bentley went the other direction. CEO Frank-Steffen Walliser calls the Torcal a more affordable Bentley that opens new markets. By his count, about half the interest so far comes from existing customers and half from people who have never owned one. Demand is strongest in Europe, the Middle East, and the US states with high EV adoption, and a China launch campaign starts next year.

Underneath, this is a Volkswagen Group car. The Torcal uses the same electric platform as the Porsche Cayenne Electric: a 113 kWh, 800-volt pack made of 192 pouch cells, a 400 kW charging peak, and a quoted 10-to-80 percent charge in 16 minutes. Two permanent-magnet motors, one per axle, make 810 hp in the base car. The Torcal S makes 876 hp and 996 lb-ft, the most torque ever from a Bentley, and runs 0 to 60 mph in 2.8 seconds. In 2022, Bentley's previous CEO promised 1,400 hp and 1.5 seconds for the first EV. Bentley now says it capped acceleration on purpose because most of its customers find anything more extreme uncomfortable. It is also the first Bentley with fully active suspension, which lets it drop the anti-roll bars. WLTP range is up to 375 miles; EPA numbers will come in lower.

Bentley put £350 million, about $465 million, into its Crewe plant to build the car, and it is engineered and assembled there.

The timing is not friendly. Bentley already moved its all-electric target from 2030 to 2035, and when it reset that plan, Walliser said plainly that its current customers weren't asking for EVs. Lamborghini has since pushed its first EV past 2030. And on September 18, parent Volkswagen cut its 2026 operating margin guidance to 1 percent at most, down from 4 to 5.5 percent, and flagged a goodwill impairment of about €6 billion (roughly $6.9 billion) on Porsche, the brand whose platform sits under the Torcal.

Volkswagen's Mission Efficiency concept measured a drag coefficient of 0.158 in the wind tunnel, the lowest figure recorded for a road-legal car. For reference, VW's own XL1 managed 0.189, and Mercedes' Vision EQXX, the previous benchmark most engineers quote, was 0.17. The part that interests me is what's under the body. The drivetrain is the MEB+ platform and the 133-hp APP290 electric drive from the ID.Polo subcompact. VW's engineers describe it as parts, modules and concepts already in production.

Drag coefficient on its own is half the story. What the road sees is drag area: Cd multiplied by frontal area. VW quotes 22.39 square feet of frontal area, which gives a CdA of about 3.5 square feet. A typical compact car with a Cd near 0.29 and similar frontal area lands around 6.5. Aerodynamic power rises with the cube of speed, so at 70 mph those two cars need roughly 6 kW and 12 kW just to push air, on my rough numbers. That is where VW's claims come from: more than 30 percent less energy than an ID.Polo at 50 mph, and the ability to run 87.5 mph on the energy the ID.Polo uses at 62.5.

The shape does most of the work. The rear tapers in at the sides as well as the top, like the hull of a boat, to shrink the wake behind the car. Skirts cover the rear wheels. Up front, a variable air intake opens only as far as cooling demands. VW's aerodynamicists say tires account for up to 30 percent of drag, so the car also uses patented deflectors that keep air from entering the inside of the wheels, and a special version of Continental's EcoContact 7 with 25 percent less rolling resistance than the EU's class A threshold.

On the road, the car drove from Wolfsburg to Vienna, nearly 800 miles, at an average of 42 mph with a top speed of 86 mph on the autobahn. It stopped to charge once and averaged 13.14 miles per kWh. The team's original goal was 10. The battery is a 54.9 kWh NMC prismatic pack, which works out to a theoretical 721 miles of range, and a 370-watt solar panel on the roof adds up to 18 miles a day.

One callback. In #27 we checked Tesla's Roadster target of 620 miles from a 200 kWh pack, about 3.1 miles per kWh. At the Mission Efficiency's measured rate, 620 miles takes about 47 kWh. Different cars for different jobs, but it shows how much of range is decided by the body rather than the battery.

VW's technical development chief says the team is thinking about what a production version might look like. The trade-offs are the obvious ones: a boat tail costs length and styling freedom, and wheel skirts complicate tire changes and steering clearance.

On August 6, Lockheed Martin and GM Defense signed a production contract. On August 28, GM Defense delivered its first batch of housing components for the PAC-3 MSE, the interceptor fired by Patriot air-defense batteries. Lockheed announced the 22-day turnaround on September 17 and said components like these can traditionally take months or years to produce. GM Defense says it used its casting and machining capability to meet the defense specification.

The relationship began as a June 16 memorandum of understanding, facilitated by the Department of War, covering defense supply chains, manufacturing and design, and the use of commercial manufacturing capacity to expand defense production. The contract followed seven weeks later.

The demand side explains the hurry. Lockheed delivered 620 PAC-3 MSEs in 2025. Under a seven-year framework signed in January, it is supposed to reach about 2,000 a year, and the program's contract ceiling now stands at $58.62 billion. The Army had already raised its long-term acquisition objective for the missile from 3,376 to 13,773. Lockheed says it is spending $8 to $9 billion across more than 20 US sites and adding almost 50 percent to its munitions production and warehouse space.

The supply side is where a carmaker fits. Tripling output of a missile means tripling every part inside it, and the slow parts to add are the ones that need foundry and precision machining capacity. A new foundry takes years to permit, build and qualify. An automaker already runs them for engine blocks, cylinder heads and structural castings. Volume is not the difficult part: 2,000 missiles a year is less than two days of output at one high-volume truck plant. The difficult part is documentation, traceability, and a customer that inspects everything.

For GM, the appeal is utilization. Foundry and machining lines are capital already spent, and a car business fills them unevenly: full in a good year, partly idle in a bad one. We walked through what idle capacity costs a carmaker in #21's VW overcapacity math. A seven-year, commercial-style defense contract with a stated demand curve is close to the opposite of a car program's volume risk. Neither company disclosed the contract's value or GM's margin on it, so the size of the benefit is unknown for now.

Lockheed calls its production push the "Arsenal of Freedom," an echo of the "Arsenal of Democracy" phrase from 1940, when Detroit last converted car capacity to war production at scale.

That's a wrap. See you Monday — same inbox, lower gear.

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