The saying “Race on Sunday (and perhaps win), then sell on Monday” is well known. Ford, however, reversed this concept by basing its newest race car on the aerodynamic design of its street cars. Chief Program Engineer Greg Goodall and Design Manager Anthony Colard announced during the 2025 Ford Mustang GTD introduction that the Mustang GT3 race car would have a normal decklid-mounted wing, just like other race cars. GTD’s debut transformed everything. The planning and development were a joint effort between Darkhorse, GT3, and GTD. But once the projects started, the last two, GT3 and GTD, were worked on at the same time. This is now that the GTD has been accepted. How about the GTD? “We need to make this street-legal,” Colard remarked after viewing the Mustang GT3 alongside Bill Ford and Ford CEO Jim Farley. Following six months of development on the road car, Colard revealed that a designer suggested a swan-neck rear wing design mounted on the C-pillar. This concept eventually became known as the GTD. The racecar’s CAD design was still being worked on. Colard says that the crew knew fully well how much downforce would be put on the rear wing, which made attaching it to the trunk lid “a difficult task.” Putting it on the C-pillar with swan necks was easy right away because the piers were already strong. All of this happened before active aerodynamics was talked about. Once the team was sure it would work well on the racing, they decided to combine the two. It is both useful and stylish, as both Goodall and Colard said. “When we finally figured out the active aero, we said, ‘Oh yeah, thank God we made this choice because it makes the active aero easier.'” Even though it looks great, it can handle loads much better and hides features better, as Goodall said. Instead of a trunk lid that has to be slid up and down to get to the trunk, the C-pillar stays in place. This arrangement optimizes the routing of cables and wiring to the wing, ensuring the active aerodynamics operate effectively. Colard notes that, under different circumstances, the GTD would not have featured active aerodynamics, as it was not part of the initial plans. Goodall said that active aero was debatable at first, but that it finally made the car better and faster, which let the GTD finish the Nürburgring in less than seven minutes. Our “Ring lap time” would have been less than seven minutes without it, but Goodall said, “We thought, hey, we can get some time with the active aero, and we should just do this.” Goodall thinks that it would have been a lot harder to finish the race under seven minutes without active flying. Without its rear wing and active aerodynamics, the GTD would not have been able to shave 5.5 seconds off its initial ‘Ring debut of 6:57.685, achieving a lap time of 6:52.072 six months later.
