Supply chain issues have become increasingly rare as the impact of the COVID pandemic fades, but as recently as one year ago, they were still a frequent challenge. In fact, in the early days of the Ford Mustang racing push, supplier issues were a major hurdle in getting vehicles to customer teams, but these problems had little effect on the race car’s delivery to the teams – even if the timeline was a little tight.
Scott Bartlett, global sports car marketing manager for Ford Performance, spoke about the supply chain challenges in a report from Racer. While they were still able to deliver the vehicles before the races, the teams didn’t have much time to get the car ready to race.
“Deliveries were in Q1 (of 2024), and there were supply chain challenges, with some teams getting cars a week or two weeks before the first race,” Bartlett said.
But even though there was a short turnaround between delivery and race time, the Ford Mustang racers delivered results on track and proved mechanically sound during their races.
“It was stressful but the one thing that was really impressive was we had no mechanical DNFs that first weekend, with a bunch of teams that had little to no prior running time with their cars,” Bartlett said.
Supplier issues didn’t just hurt Ford’s motorsports efforts. They affected the roadgoing Ford Mustang, too. Sales of the street-legal pony car dipped last year, and not just because it was more expensive than the outgoing 2023 model. Supply chain hang-ups made it difficult to produce the Mustang (and its electric sibling, the Ford Mustang Mach-E) with all of its features intact, driving sales down even further.
Regardless, now that supply chain hurdles are out of the way, the Ford Mustang GT3 is one of the hottest racers on the market. Before the 2025 season even began, buyers were banging down Ford’s doors to get their hands on the race car – and then it went out and won the Rolex 24 at Daytona, making it an even more highly sought-after machine.
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Go Mustang!