Ford announced its return to Le Mans factory racing at the circuit itself on 12 June 2015, committing to a four-car factory effort under the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing banner for the 2016 season. The programme was explicitly timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the GT40 Mk II's 1-2-3 sweep at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. The racing car was based on the second-generation Ford GT road car, which had been unveiled at the 2015 North American International Auto Show and was powered by a 3.5-litre twin-turbocharged EcoBoost V6 engine.
The road car's design had been built around aerodynamic and racing requirements from the outset. Its carbon fibre monocoque, active aerodynamics, pushrod suspension, and flying buttress bodywork were all conceived with Le Mans competition in mind, making the transition to GTE-Pro specification a natural extension of the platform rather than a radical conversion.
The Ford GT LM GTE-Pro debuted at the 2016 24 Hours of Daytona in January, finishing seventh and ninth in the GTLM class. At the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans on 19 June 2016, the No. 68 Ford GT driven by Dirk Müller, Joey Hand, and Sébastien Bourdais finished first in the LM GTE-Pro class — fifty years to the day after Ford's historic 1966 win. The symmetry of the occasion was not lost on anyone in the paddock.
Later in the 2016 WEC season, Ford demonstrated its speed across different circuits: at the 6 Hours of Fuji and the 6 Hours of Shanghai, both Ford GTs finished first and second in class, with the No. 67 car winning both events and the No. 66 car taking second in both.
In the opening WEC race of 2017 at Silverstone, the No. 67 Ford GT took victory. At the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans on 19 June 2017 — fifty years after Ford's 1967 victory — the No. 67 Ford GT of Ford Chip Ganassi Racing finished second in the LM GTE-Pro class.
Ford Chip Ganassi Racing continued factory GT programmes in both the WEC and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship through the 2018 and 2018-19 seasons. At the end of the 2019 season, Ganassi announced the conclusion of its factory race programme with Ford after four years of competition.
The racing Ford GT is built around a carbon fibre monocoque, consistent with the road car's architecture. Power comes from a race-prepared version of the Ford EcoBoost 3.5-litre twin-turbocharged V6 engine, heavily modified for endurance racing and balanced by the Balance of Performance regulations governing the GTE class. The car features the same pushrod suspension architecture as the road version, along with active aerodynamic elements adapted for competition use within GTE regulations.
The Ford GT's 2016 Le Mans victory — on the car's competition debut, at exactly the fiftieth anniversary of the GT40's breakthrough win — ranks as one of the more precisely choreographed moments in modern motorsport marketing and genuine on-track achievement. It demonstrated that the second-generation GT's design priorities had been correctly identified: building the road car around Le Mans requirements produced a genuine racer. A dedicated "LM Edition" of the road car, painted in Liquid Silver with red or blue accents, was later offered to honour the 2016 race-winning GT's livery.