Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, kept the fact that he was going to make a road version of the Mustang GT3 a secret. Instead, he met in secret to put together a skunkworks team, where everyone signed a deal not to tell anyone else about the project. As ideas for the Mustang GTD started to take shape, secret meetings moved to a plain aluminum shed. Mustang Dark Horse chassis were secretly sent to Multimatic, the huge company in charge of the GT3 and GTD projects. For a long time, most people would not know about the GTD. Jim Farley shared a video of factory driver Joey Hand testing the Mustang GT3 race car around Sebring to X (now known as Twitter) on March 21, 2023. The same day, he replied to his own tweet with a question: “Should we make a road version?” We hadn’t seen the GTD yet, but it was clear that Farley had made a lot of progress on it by the time those blogs were posted. Any Track, Any Weekend To find out more about the GTD, we agreed to Ford’s offer to see the Multimatic plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Mustang GT3 race cars are made. Following that, we went to Daytona to see the Rolex 24 race cars in action. We wanted to know more about why Ford was putting so much time, effort, and energy into these two projects. Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports, gave us a straight answer to our question: Ford wants to connect with car fans all over the world, especially since sales of the Mustang are growing in Europe and the brand is about to celebrate its 60th anniversary. That connection is helped by the fact that Mustangs can race every weekend on every track in the world. Ford will also race in GT3 for the first time since the end of the 2019 season, when the GT stopped being made. Larry Holt, Multimatic’s crazy scientist in charge of engineering and motorsports, says that Jim Farley came up with the idea for the GTD. History of Production Cars The Mustang GT3 starts out on the factory line the same way every other GT3 race car does. The race car is based on the Dark Horse road car, with Holt and his team at Multimatic taking what they learned from the GT3 car and applying it to the GTD. “From road to race, and race to road,” stressed Rushbrook. You know right away that the two cars are linked as soon as you see them. The cars have a lot in common, like wider front fenders, twin air vents in the hood, and gooseneck wing mounts in the back. The GTD is a better all-around performance car than the race car thanks to Multimatic’s use of a drag reduction system (DRS) for the rear wing and other features. This is true even though the GT3’s balance of performance rules limit some of its engineering. Holt points to the GTD and says, “Every surface on that car is based on function.” The GTD can use information right away, like the results of the GT3’s wind tunnel tests. Teams share information about the front fender louvers, which Holt says take away about 200 pounds of lift from the car. Even though there are some small changes, the GTD’s underside looks a lot like the race car’s. Ford hasn’t given us exact downforce figures, but we do know that at speeds over 150 mph, both the race car and the GTD can make up to 1500 to 2000 pounds of downforce. We also learned that when the DRS flap is open, the GTD lowers its front downforce to keep the center of pressure from moving around the car. Every surface is based on a function Without the hood, the “Ford Performance” lettering above the engine, which can be seen peeking out from its carbon-fiber nest, makes it hard to understand where the race car came from as a production car. The naturally aspirated 5.4-liter V-8 Mustang engine was made on a factory line, just like every other GT3 engine. The GTD doesn’t have to follow any rules or laws, but the GT3 can only make about 550 horsepower because of balance of power rules. The 2013 Mustang Shelby GT500 has a supercharged 5.2-liter V-8 engine that is tuned to 800 horsepower in the GTD. It also has a dry-sump oil system. The oil tank in the shape of a doughnut is right behind the engine block, where a normal 10-speed automatic gear would have been. Since race cars don’t have to follow the same safety rules as regular cars, Multimatic is able to put the 5.4-liter V-8 engine very low and far back in the engine bay, so the firewall is almost completely around the engine. Both cars have a rear transaxle instead of a standard trunk. They also have a transmission cooler that gets air from two scoops on the top edge of the trunk lid. This helps balance out the nose-heavyness that the front-mounted V8 engine causes. The air is then pushed out of the transmission cooler through vents located between the headlights. The GT3 car has started racing, but work is still being done to improve both cars. We talked to Rushbrook about 18 hours into the Rolex 24 to find out what he thought about how the race was going. As expected, there were a few gremlins during the race. Tire debris doesn’t matter when tested by itself on a track, but the Ford Performance team found that tiny pieces of rubber were getting through the car’s mesh screens when it was racing bumper to bumper with other cars. But Rushbrook said, “the problems we’re having today are much less important than the debut of the 2016 GT.” The Ford GT GT3 won the Le Mans LM GTE Pro class that same year. There are still enough races left in the Ford Performance Mustang GT3 to fix some of those problems, even though it finished sixth and ninth in its class at Daytona. Also, Ford and Multimatic will need to work on the GTD for a few months before they let anyone drive it. We will be looking forward to the GTD like kids wait for Christmas, whether it has gremlins or not.
