An Evening With a Visionary

POSTED BY Matt Farah, 18 July 2008

Camilo Pardo is a visionary artist, and one of the most unique people I have ever met.

While in Detroit for the Red Bull Air Races, we ended up hanging out with a bunch of the Ford SVT Engineers pretty much every night. Really good people, and after spending a week with them, I actually gained a much greater appreciation for what Ford's performance team can accomplish given the state of the industry, especially with the GT500KR and the Ford GT.

People can say that the Ford GT is just a copy of the GT40, that it's identical, isn't an original design, and that the GT40 was a better car. I have ridden in an original GT40 and spent a lot of time behind the wheel of the new GT, and the new car uses all 40 years of development since the old car to its advantage. I was told that the entire project had to be designed in just 18 months, which means they didn't have time for last minute failures to derail the project. Consequently, the whole car is over-engineered to the point of being extremely reliable and bulletproof. Case and point: When Jason Heffner started strapping 1,000 HP twin-turbo kits on the car, he experimented with all different combinations of forged pistons and crankshafts to beef up the bottom end for durability. After all his tests, he realized that the stock bottom end on the car is actually the best, and will easily handle 1,300 HP without putting up much fuss. As for the engine being a "truck motor," don't forget, the first appearance of the SVT 5.4L V8 was in the 2000 Mustang Cobra R, not the SVT Lightning.

Back on point, Camilo is an artist, plain and simple. His lifestyle, mannerisms, drunken antics, and attitude all reflect that of a painter, not an engineer or traditional designer. He spends most of his days painting race cars with incredible energy and attention to detail. And, like many other visionary artists, he isn't really understood, even by someone like me, who was an art major. Oh, and by the way, his paintings sell for thousands upon thousands of dollars. Some of them were upwards of $50,000, as pointed out by Camilo's assistant. 

One of the SVT guys told me that last year, Camilo took his Ford GT and drove it from Detroit to Key West, and lived out of the car for 2 months, out of contact from the world, before randomly returning. He put 30,000 miles on the car in a single year.

And let's not forget his hijinks on the 2006 Bullrun. Watch them here: (the White GT was his previous car, he just got the Gulf one)

So what's the conclusion here? This episode may not have had the highest production quality, nor was it scripted. But it's a glimpse into the life of a visionary artist, who showed us his skills at 3am, totally on the fly. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I find that interesting.