Ford has been racing since before it officially existed, but when CEO Jim Farley says "motorsport has never been more important to the firm", it's not hyperbole.

And it's not just Farley's infectious enthusiasm about racing that makes this clear: it's that, while we're talking in a plush, soundproofed motorhome, he has to raise his voice to be heard above the roar of a 5.0-litre naturally aspirated Ford V8 engine at full pelt.

It's late March: tens of thousands of spectators have crammed into the Sebring International Raceway to watch some of the world's finest sports car drivers battle on the Florida circuit's unforgiving concrete for 12 intense hours. Today Farley has his work cap on: he's supporting the works Mustang GT3s making that distinctive V8 roar and has various meetings scheduled as Ford prepares its new LMDh hypercar project to return to endurance racing's top class.

It's that commitment to competition, 125 years since Henry Ford first raced one of his own creations, that has prompted us to recognise Ford Racing with our Motorsport Award. Ford supports 34 global championships, spanning everything from the Dakar Rally to Formula 1 - and that commitment is only growing.

"We've switched from thinking about motorsport as a marketing activity to really driving excellence in our products," says Farley. "Motorsport at Ford has never been looked at in that way before, other than by Henry Ford. The first couple of machines he produced had the philosophy of taking the best of everything from a racing car and making it affordable. You can make a great business out of winning and improving your product through engineering."

But while Farley is making racing a business, business isn't the entire reason he is at Sebring on this occasion - and that's why Autocar has come here to speak to him. Because yesterday he wasn't Jim Farley, Ford CEO, but Jim Farley, amateur racer, competing against a pack of hungry rivals in the Ford Mustang Challenge.

Farley is a proper motorsport fan, a passion honed in his youth when he befriended Luigi Chinetti, then the US importer for Ferrari, and later working for 1961 F1 champion Phil Hill in a restoration shop. He has competed at Goodwood in a GT40 and also races a Lola T298. For Farley it's escapism, his equivalent of yoga: "When I'm in the car racing, I don't think of anything else: a nuclear bomb could go off and I'd never know."

He describes driving a race car as "humbling, especially when you don't have a lot of time", adding: "I have to get into the car and get up to speed quickly, and I have to be safe: I can't be the CEO of Ford and bump someone off at the start. I can't win because of my engine, because they will say 'he's got a special engine'. There are a lot of constraints, and that keeps the pressure on me to be good in the car and have fun."

Farley can't really escape being Ford's CEO, then, and notes that "a lot of CEOs would never do it, but it humbles me". Still, he says there's a thrill to competing, "like in the business world". At Sebring, a technical issue meant he started both races at the rear of the grid. "Sometimes you have to start at the back," he says. "When I started at Ford, we were a $4 stock."

Ford isn't immune from current market pressures, but the firm is in a better place now than when Farley took over (a $16 stock at the time of writing) - and Ford Racing is playing a key role in that recovery. Previously known as Ford Performance, the division encompasses all of the firm's motorsport projects and its performance cars, such as the Mustang Dark Horse and the Raptor line of off-road vehicles.

Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Racing, has been with the division since 2013, having previously worked as a road car engineer. He explains that the "job has changed a lot", it having grown from a small team managing motorsport projects to a group of hundreds developing racing and performance cars.

"Sometimes Ford has leaned into racing for marketing and sometimes for tech transfer," he says, "but today we're truly doing both. We're learning and we're marketing, and we're really treating Ford Racing as a business. It's not just spending money to race Bronco Raptors on the Baja 1000, it's doing that with engineers who will take that experience, come to the office on Monday and make the new [road] Raptor better."

Rushbrook has some interested bosses: alongside Farley, chairman Bill Ford and chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra are avid racing fans, and he works with Bill's son Will, who serves as general manager of Ford Racing.

Don't think that gives Rushbrook carte blanche, though: "It's good, but it's certainly not a blank cheque. Jim holds us accountable for every dollar we spend, to make sure we're not just getting out on track but that we're learning from it, telling the right story to the right people, and that we're in it to win it."

Farley adds: "As an amateur racer who has wasted some of my own money on motorsport, I'm a pretty tough critic: I'm more demanding than someone who isn't a racer, because I know how much you could waste and I know what it takes to win."

Rushbrook jokes that "I don't have to wait for my annual review to know whether we're winning or losing", especially since he's in a group text chat with Farley and Galhotra to update them on results each weekend: "They don't want to read about it on social media, they want to know in real time."

Ford Racing's activities are largely split into four quadrants: Mustangs, stretching from the American Nascar and Australian Supercars series through various customer projects; off road, ranging from stock events up to the Dakar Rally; demonstrator vehicles, such as the recent electric Transit Supervan; and flagship projects, such as its F1 partnership with Red Bull and its forthcoming LMDh hypercar programme.

Broadly, Ford supports customer programmes at the lower levels, giving more manufacturer support as it goes up the ladder. It runs flagship projects (Dakar, F1 and Le Mans) in-house, working with partners such as Red Bull and M-Sport. Farley cites the decision to support Red Bull's powertrain programme, rather than buy a team, as many rival companies do, as one example of Ford's business-based approach.

"We're engaged in our programmes at different levels of technical depth," says Rushbrook. "Sometimes it's an engine, sometimes it's a whole vehicle."

Ford Racing is also structured so that knowledge is transferred between projects, into performance cars and then the wider company.

"We're organised to have instantaneous transfer of knowledge and experience," says Rushbrook. "I have a powertrain team, a vehicle engineering team and a functions team, and we have the ability within those teams to move people back and forth.

"A great example is our GT3 engine: M-Sport builds it for us, but we did all the design in-house. We're using that knowledge to work on future engine architectures that will be in Ford Racing products coming to dealerships - and that knowledge is going into the hypercar engine too."

Ford's global reach across 35 categories may be huge, but it is selective. So how does the firm pick where to compete?

"People think 'oh, they just race everywhere', but actually it's super-disciplined," says Farley. "We have a strategy board, including Bill, myself, Mark and the leaders of the company. We come together every quarter and treat it like a business. We know where we want to go as a company and we work backwards on the series we need to be in to get there."

Farley adds that "there's a lot of things going on in Europe that I would love to talk to you about but I can't, because it's very competitive" - but assures me that "you will see this conversation play out in the next four or five years and go that's what he was talking about."

He continues: "In Europe we have a very specific direction to beat the Chinese, and motorsport will be mission-critical to that, and it probably won't be what people think. We have picked that strategy considering manufacturing, product and brand. We always say: 'Will racing make our core products better?' If the answer is yes, we will spend the money."

Farley is true to his word: since speaking to him, the thrust of his argument has become clear: Ford has revealed plans for a new wave of European-focused cars that will have "rally-bred" design and dynamics - and his comments now give extra context to suggest that won't be a marketing gimmick. And it also shows how the famously fast-moving world of motorsport can help companies like Ford to act at 'China speed'.

"Motorsport used to feel like a lot faster than our industry, but now the Chinese have sped everything up and we all have to work at motorsports speed," he says. "This is normal now. But motorsports for so many years was an extra: they were different people not integrated into the core. We're not looking at that any more. The revolution is changing the model."

It's a model that's working, turning motorsport into a sustainable business while ensuring that the passion for it infuses the whole company.

"We want to be in motorsport from the grass roots up to F1," says Rushbrook. "There are very few series we don't participate in, and we're in them for different reasons - but always the right reasons. It's working really well for us, on the same pillars Henry Ford had back in the day."