The on-track debut of the all-new Ford Mustang GT3 racer just took place at the recent Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona a little over a week ago, though thanks to some last-second balance of performance (BoP) adjustments, the pony car’s first outing was more educational than anything else. Regardless, demand for the new Ford Mustang GT3 remains high – which can also be said of the road-going Mustang GTD, an all-out sort of machine that isn’t hampered by things like rules or regulations. However, technology from the GT3 will apparently trickle down to the GTD in the future, as Ford Performance global head Mark Rushbrook and Multimatic’s Larry Holt explained to Car and Driver in a recent interview.
According to Rushbrook, Ford and Multimatic plan to take their on-track learnings from the Ford Mustang GT3 and apply it to the GTD in the future, essentially reverse-engineering those findings “from road to race, and race to road,” he notes. This is particularly interesting as while both the GT3 and GTD share a lot in common, they’re also quite different due to the aforementioned competitive rule requirements.
Those BoP rules obviously don’t apply to the road-going GTD, which sports unique features like a drag reduction system (DRS) for the rear wing, though some things have already trickled down from the track-only GT3. Those include wind tunnel testing results, the car’s front louvers that remove around 200 pounds of lift, and underside aero, to boot. As a result, both cars are capable of generating around 1,500-2,000 pounds of downforce at speeds over 150 miles-per-hour.
These differences continue under the hood, where Ford placed the GT3’s powerplant further back and lower in the engine bay than the production car, as it doesn’t need to meet various safety regulations in place for road cars. However, other than these few variances, it’s clear that both the Ford Mustang GT3 and GTD share quite a bit in common – and that only figures to benefit both moving forward.
We’ll have more on the Mustang GT3 and GTD soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for more Ford Mustang news and around-the-clock Ford news coverage.
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