Under the hood, a supercharged 5.2-liter V8 makes 815 horsepower.
The ridiculously trick active suspension even has a window to watch it work.
Active aerodynamics produce professional-grade levels of downforce.
Priced north of $315,000, this Mustang is way the heck out of our budget.
The Ford Mustang GTD can only be described as the ultimate expression of a Mustang. It doesn’t just look like a race car; it is a race car — crazy aerodynamics, super exotic suspension and all. It’s the kind of vehicle you might expect from a boutique European manufacturer, but certainly not from Ford. Here’s how the common Mustang made its way from a standard road car to a GT3 race car and finally to the new GTD.
Parts, parts, parts
You don’t even need to open the GTD’s hood to see what’s sitting under the carbon fiber. The hood vents on this thing are ridiculous, but they offer a view of what’s underneath. That view is mostly hoses, tanks and the ugly, practical infrastructure of a modern engine. But should you release the hood pins, there’s an 815-horsepower supercharged double-overhead-cam V8 engine to gawk at.
Up 55 hp and 39 lb-ft of torque over the dearly departed GT500’s version of this engine, the GTD’s mill sports new internals and features a trick dry-sump system to keep oil where it needs to be as the GTD pounds around a racetrack. The sheer size of this supercharged V8 made the addition of the dry-sump tank quite a challenge, but a nifty — if nearly unserviceable — position was found behind the engine where the bell housing would normally be.
The lack of that bell housing gives away another of the GTD’s massive mechanical modifications: a transaxle that combines the transmission and rear axle assembly. This improves the GTD’s weight balance, benefiting handling, evening out tire wear, and giving you more traction under hard acceleration. While all of these benefits are not easily revealed on the street, they make a monumental improvement in the way the GTD behaves on a racetrack. Similar to the GT500, the GTD uses a dual-clutch automatic transmission from Tremec but now features eight speeds, one more than the Shelby had.
Aero magic
If you think the GTD looks like a race car, that’s because it shares quite a bit of the purposeful and aero-influenced design from the Mustang that races in the GT3 series. Development for the two cars was run in parallel, so the GTD benefited from all of the serious aerodynamic work for the race car, as well as contributing some of its own help. For instance, the giant rear wing was designed for the GTD and was adopted by the race car. The only difference is that the GTD uses a more tricked-out movable rear wing, whereas the race car does not.
The GTD is 81.9 inches wide, which makes it over an inch wider than the GT3 race car and over 6 inches wider than a standard Mustang. That allowed Ford to mount ridiculously wide wheels (12 inches up front and 12.5 inches in the rear), massive brakes and ultra-wide Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 R tires.
Since the aerodynamic work was done concurrently with the GT3 program, the air going into and out of the GTD is managed to within an inch of its life. From downforce to cooling, every scoop and vent is absolutely functional. Most of the photos you see are of the GTD with its Track pack. That includes the active rear wing (like a Formula 1 car) and active front splitter; little flaps open and close under the front of the car to balance the aerodynamics with whatever that huge rear wing is doing. But while the non-Track pack GTD lacks the fancy movable aero parts, it too is balanced to work with all its wings and things. In other words, you can’t go slapping the active rear wing from the Track pack onto the base GTD model. It could make things unstable at higher speeds. The aero is that serious.
