Right around a year after its debut, the 2025 Ford Mustang GTD headed to the legendary Nurburgring in Germany with one goal – to lap that famous track in less than seven minutes, which is something that an American branded production vehicle had never done. It managed to achieve that goal with a lap time of 6:57:685, becoming just the sixth vehicle to do so while posting the fifth-fastest time of any stock production sports car ever. Regardless, Ford gave it another go earlier this month and shaved a few seconds off of that time – now, we can see exactly where those improvements occurred.
The even-quicker Ford Mustang GTD lap time video was posted earlier this month, giving us an in-cockpit view as Multimatic Motorsports driver Dirk Müller wound up improving upon his previous effort by a whopping 5.5 seconds, lowering that personal best to 6:52.072 and making the GTD the fourth fastest vehicle in the production sports car class. That translates to a distance improvement of around 800 feet, and comes after Blue Oval engineers spent this past winter making various improvements to the GTD based on what it has learned thus far.
Those improvements consist of things like revising the chassis tuning, increasing torsional rigidity, making aerodynamic tweaks that resulted in additional downforce, updating the suspension hardware and alignment to make handling both more precise and predictable, revising the ABS and traction control systems, further tweaking the Active Spool Valve, and making some powertrain calibration updates. In this video, we get a great look at how those two laps compare, thanks to a ghost overlay of both.
The Ford Performance team made those rather effective changes and tweaks after reviewing every second of the previous Nurburgring lap attempt by the Ford Mustang GTD, and they also tested them out on a simulator before heading back to Germany. All of these improvements will be baked into customer cars as well, which are slated to begin landing in private hands this spring.
Comment
Very cool! One has to wonder if there’s a third run lurking in the team’s minds…if we adjusted this and that just a wee bit more….