In The Ballad of Gay Tony, the Vapid Bullet (known as the Bullet GT) still resembles the Ford GT, borrowing design cues like the waterfall hood scoop and body shape.
Also, the Bullet uses a conventional door design, unlike the real life Ford GT's 'aircraft door' design. The change to a single stripe in the actual game may have been aimed at avoiding a blatantly obvious design influence from a car that wouldn't exist for another 13 years.
In a pre-release screenshot of GTA San Andreas, the Bullet is seen with a double stripe and a different hood, identical to that on the real Ford GT the beta model is also portrayed in some renderings inside of Otto's Autos, a showroom in Downtown San Fierro. The Ford GT40 was used as a racecar in the 1960s, but bears less of a resemblance to the Bullet. The Bullet's shape closely resembles a first-generation Ford GT, making the car an anachronism the GT wasn't introduced until 2005, 13 years after the game's events in 1992.