Ford’s announcement of its 2025 Mustang GTD supercar has sent pony-car fans into a frenzy. What is it, exactly? The new Mustang—still in development—features an almost completely unique carbon-fiber body widened 100 mm from the seventh-gen road car, a 5.2-liter supercharged V-8 targeting over 800 horsepower, an eight-speed dual-clutch rear transaxle, active aero that functions like Formula 1 DRS, plus magnesium wheels, titanium exhaust, carbon-fiber brakes, and a roughly $300K sticker. We talked to some key figures and here’s what they told us—hype and all.
Jim Farley
Ford Motor Company CEO
“Our idea behind this car was, let’s take a race car and not change anything for the street. In fact, let’s add some stuff that’s outlawed in racing, for the street. So it’s like a different kind of project. It’s for AMG Black, it’s for Aston Martin, it’s for the GT3 RS. And we want to beat [that competition]. We take what we’re really good at, like a Mustang, and we do the unthinkable. Like, take on the Europeans—punch for punch—at what they have been doing for decades. As an underdog.”
“The vision for this is totally different than any high-performance Mustang we have. [It has] all the latest technology from our [GT3] race car, but we actually put it on the street. That’s why I care so deeply about this car. Because it’s been in my head for five decades. I want to see Porsche, I want to see Aston Martin, I want to see Mercedes sweat. We’re going to compete with them globally.”
“This is a new approach for us. We didn’t engineer a road car for the track, we created a race car for the road. Mustang GTD takes racing technology from our Mustang GT3 race car, wraps it in a carbon fiber Mustang body and unleashes it for the street… This is our company, we’re throwing down the gauntlet and saying, ‘Come and get it.’ We’re comfortable putting everybody else on notice. I’ll take track time in a Mustang GTD against any other auto boss in their best road car.”
Larry Holt
Multimatic founder and “in many ways the father of this car, with our Ford team,” according to Ford CEO Jim Farley. [Multimatic and Ford worked on the Mustang GTD together]
“There’s going to be confusion… People will think that the GT3 race car is homologated off this road car [the GTD]. But that can’t be. The race car has been homologated off the gen-seven Mustang. And then we made a road car off the race car [the new GTD]. That’s pretty unique… Here we actually did a race car, and then have done a road car.”
“[The GTD] is way more sophisticated than the [GT3] race car. I mean, I don’t think anybody would not say that. You can’t have active aero on the race car. We have active aero on this. You can’t have active suspension on the race car. We have active suspension on this. So it takes a look at that race car and takes it way further, technologically.”
“The race car has a transaxle instead of a [traditonal] gearbox. All the Aston Martin front-engine cars have transaxles in the back. All the Ferrari front engine cars have transaxles in the back. So we packaged a transaxle into Project Gold [the GTD]. We gave ourselves a target of a 50/50 weight distribution. We’re at 51/49 at the moment. And we may be able to squeeze out 50/50, which is a big deal. The Mustang has never been anywhere near that before. So that was a big one.”
Colin Comer
Automotive historian, restorer, R&T contributor, all around car impresario
“We’re all here tonight to witness history [the unveiling of this car]… To have a project like this be top secret for so long, to keep it under wraps in this day and age, is virtually impossible. And to do something this out of the box…it blows me away. But when you have a race driver, like our good friend Jim [Farley] here, who’s running the company, and he calls the shots, you can do crazy things like this… Targeting 800-plus horsepower, 5.2-liter dry sump V-8, supercharged, 8-speed dual clutch, high-torque capacity transaxle in the back. Fifty-fifty weight distribution, ceramic brakes, titanium exhaust, magnesium wheels, extensive carbon fiber throughout the whole car. Mustang guys like me have dreamt about this our whole lives.”
Greg Goodall
Chief Program Engineer, Future Model Year Performance, Ford Motor Company. Also: chief engineer on the GTD Mustang, from the Ford side
“This Mustang was just an idea about two years ago. That’s how fast we’ve gone. The Mustang GT3 was already in development. Mr. Farley said, ‘We have to do a road car version of this.’ Much like the model we used on the Ford GT: We wanted a car that dominates on the track, but you have an equally impressive road car offering. That was a very successful formula. We wanted to repeat that but do it even better.”
“The project started in August 2021… Secret meetings that started at Multimatic, four hours every Monday night, away from the Ford machine. Late hours. This was peoples’ second job… We went from this being a concept to an approved program within about six months, which is lightning speed… Eventually we moved into a super-secret studio behind one of the test labs in Allen Park… We had to remain secret, externally to the media and social media and internally at Ford. A small group of people were in the know on this. We kept the project hidden in code names, even in company internal documents. Everything was done under non-disclosure. The code name was Project Gold.”
“It started with technical details. The team used an extensive amount of CFD [computational fluid dynamics] and lap time simulation. The simulation drove us to using very high horse-power. Optimized weight balance was really important to the product. We used that information to drive the selection of the powertrain. Then the selection of the chassis architecture to enable putting the power to the ground. We came up with tire grip requirements, which drove the tire size, and ultimately, weight and aero requirements drove the wide body architecture that we have. There’s a lot of carbon fiber construction.”
“This isn’t just another Mustang variant. There’s an amazing amount of technology that’s in this vehicle. It’s got the skin of a Mustang around it. It’s an all-new vehicle that is consistent with being a Mustang and is part of the Mustang family. But it’s something we have never done before. The vehicle needs to be unmistakably a Mustang. The Mustang is iconic. It is a huge part of the company. It is a huge part of America. This takes all that history somewhere completely new.”
A.J. Baime is the author of seven books, including Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, and The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World. An R&T editor-at-large, he has driven cars on racetracks all over the U.S. and Europe, going back to 2007. He is proudly the R&T staff’s slowest track driver.
