The 2025 Ford Mustang GTD Is an 800-HP $300,000 Supercar
On Wednesday night, at a gathering for media in CEO Jim Farley’s private garage in Monterey, Ford Motor Company pulled the tarp off its biggest secret project in years: a Mustang supercar that will take on the most sophisticated machinery from Europe. Ford is calling the 2025 Mustang GTD “the most audacious and advanced Mustang ever.”
“We take what we’re really good at, like a Mustang, and we do the unthinkable,” Farley said. “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. All the latest technology from our 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.”
While the Mustang GTD is in its final development phases, the company shared some legitimately mind-blowing details: An almost completely unique carbon-fiber body widened 100 mm from the seventh-generation road car, a supercharged 5.2-liter V-8 of over 800 hp, an eight-speed dual-clutch rear transaxle, active aero that functions like a drag-reduction system on a Formula 1 car, dual ride height suspension that can be lowered for track optimization, plus magnesium wheels, titanium exhaust, and carbon-fiber brakes. Ford and race-car partner Multimatic have teamed up on the car, targeting a sub-seven-minute Nürburgring lap. Ford has developed the GTD road car with the new GT3 race car, set to debut at Le Mans next June, as a start.
“Our idea behind this car was, let’s take a race car and not change anything for the street,” said Farley. “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].”
The Mustang is the best-selling sports coupe in the world, and since its debut in April 1964, has always been the everyman’s semi-affordable American pony car. The GTD street supercar takes an American icon where it has never gone before. It also raises glaring questions: How could Ford have kept its code-name “Project Gold” such a closely guarded secret during two years of development? More importantly, can this thing be as good as the company says it’s going to be?
The car began on a whim, in the summer of 2021. Farley was looking at a 40-percent scale model of the Mustang GT3 race car the company was developing with Multimatic, with Multimatic founder Larry Holt. “It was a review of how the race car was going, in Detroit,” Holt recalls. “It was a fairly regular review.”
Farley said, “We've got to make a road car version of that. What do you think?”
This was a scintillating challenge: To develop a road car from a GT3 race car, packed with every high-performance technology imaginable. Essentially, to make a Mustang supercar. “That’s pretty hard to achieve,” according to Holt. “You can’t just cowboy a road car out of a race car and make it legal. How wide can you make it? Can you make it look like the racecar?”
Ford and Multimatic gathered a tiny team, the best engineering minds from both. “This happened in secret meetings that started at Multimatic, four hours every Monday night, away from the Ford machine,” recalls Greg Goodall, chief engineer of Project Gold on the Ford side. “Late hours. This was peoples’ second job. Eventually we moved into a super-secret studio behind one of the test labs in Allen Park.”
The team came up with performance targets for a Mustang that could measure up to the likes of a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, which seems like an impossible goal and may in fact be. “The team was aware that when you do a project like this, there’s not an infinite number of dollars,” says Goodall. “So we had to be scrappy.”
They chose a 5.2-liter supercharged V-8, but that raised the issue of weight distribution. If they put the motor in the back of the car, then it wouldn’t be a Mustang. But, if they moved the gear box, they could achieve something closer to 50/50 distribution. “The race car has a transaxle instead of a gearbox,” says Holt. “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.” Achieving this in a Mustang presented what Holt referred to as a “smoking hard problem to solve.”
The team came up with tire grip requirements, which drove tire size. They are massive: 325 mm width in front—as wide as the rear tires on a Ford GT—and 345s in the rear. They crafted a body almost entirely of carbon fiber. Aero requirements drove the wide body architecture. The hydraulically actuated DRS rear wing came next. “Corner speed is where we make our money,” said Ford Le Mans driver Joey Hand, who called the new GTD “one of the most badass cars I’ve ever seen.” The active aero means “we can float more speed across the apex. We have that downforce.”
All of this happened with extraordinary speed and secrecy. Phone calls were made privately in cars. Employees signed internal non-disclosure agreements. “We went from this being a concept to an approved program within about six months, which is lightning speed,” says Goodall. “This Mustang was just an idea about two years ago. That’s how fast we’ve gone. Eighteen months later and here we are talking about the car with the media, very well into the development process.”
Development speed is even more impressive when you consider how much of the GTD is unique. Cost savings required some borrowing from the stock seventh-gen Mustang, like the electrical architecture, for example. But little else.
All of it is the vision of Farley, who has been recrafting the brand with a wink to Henry Ford II, the Ford chief executive who famously launched the company into every form of racing in the Sixties with the Total Performance marketing program. In the Sixties, Ford went from not racing at all to competing in IndyCar, NASCAR, Formula 1, and at Le Mans. All of that aimed to sell showroom Mustangs and other Fords. Farley is doing all that again, developing Mustang iterations to compete everywhere, road and track.
“Literally, every weekend around the globe, in literally every form of racing, there will be a Mustang out there trying to win,” he says. The GTD aims to fill the final gap of competition for the Mustang: on the road, versus Euro supercars.
The company is supercharging the hype. Famed automotive impresario Colin Comer, who was at Farley’s garage, called the GTD “the pinnacle of what Ford’s racing technology and engineering minds can do when someone takes off the rev limiter and lets them loose.” “It’s the most impressive project I have ever been a part of,” says Goodall. “We are trying to produce something that’s not 99-percent awesome, but 100-percent awesome?”
Can it really be that good? We cannot wait to find out.
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