Deliveries of the all-new 2025 Ford Mustang GTD just began in late June, shortly after the most track-capable pony car ever became one of very few production cars to lap Germany’s Nurburgring in less than seven minutes. Since then, we’ve seen more than one famous person order or take delivery of the $300k+ road-going supercar – including Jay Leno and Vaughn Gittin Jr. – but apparently, there are still some factoids about the Ford Mustang GTD that are still coming to light, well over a year after its official debut.
In fact, Ford Mustang GTD Chief Program Engineer Greg Goodall and Design Manager Anthony Colard told The Drive that the new model shares something surprising in common with its track-only GT3 pony car cousin – its gigantic rear wing, which became a bit more evident when we saw those cars side by side earlier this week. Interestingly, Colard also explained that the team originally planned on using a regular old deck-mounted wing on the GT3 initially, at least, until the GTD came along.
The GT3 and GTD were developed essentially in tandem, with the latter designed to be basically a road-legal version of the former. During that process, one of Ford’s designers came up with the idea for a swan-neck wing using a C-pillar mount, given the fact that the tremendous amount of downforce it generates would make mounting it to the trunk difficult. From there, the team ensured that the new wing design would work on the GT3 racer as well – and the rest, well, is history, with the GTD ultimately getting active aero for its gigantic rear wing as an extra added benefit.
“Not only does it look cool, it can manage the loads a lot better, and hides the features better, later on, much later, we figured out the active aero and said ‘oh yeah, thank God we made this choice because it makes the active aero easier.’” Goodall said. “We would have still got under seven minutes (referring to the car’s Nurburgring lap time) without it, but then we were like, hey, we can get some time with the active aero, and we should just do this. It would have definitely been tighter.”
No Comments yet