Ford Mustang GTD Plants Stars and Stripes at Nürburgring with Blistering Lap Time
Ford’s limited-production Mustang GTD has recorded a sub-seven-minute Nürburgring lap time, a feat few production cars have accomplished. It marks the first time an American manufacturer made it onto the list of sub-seven-minute laps, alongside Mercedes, Porsche, and Lamborghini. “The team behind Mustang GTD took what we’ve learned from decades on the track and engineered a Mustang that can compete with the world’s best supercars,” said Jim Farley, Ford President and CEO. “We’re proud to be the first American automaker with a car that can lap the Nürburgring in under seven minutes, but we aren’t satisfied. We know there’s much more time to find with Mustang GTD. We’ll be back.”
Multimatic Motorsports driver Dirk Müller was chosen to pilot the 815-horsepower Mustang GTD on the notoriously difficult 12.9-mile, 73-turn circuit. The track veteran delivered an officially certified 6:57:685 time on his first attempt to crack the seven-minute barrier.
We spoke with Mustang GTD Chief Program Engineer Greg Goodall to learn how the team prepared for its sub-seven-minute lap, which took place in August. Goodall, who had spent several years working on projects for Ford Performance, including the fifth, sixth, and seventh-generation Mustang, took the GTD lead on faith, not knowing the full details. From day one, the GTD’s goal was to break that seven-minute mark. Still, the car’s development was kept under tight wraps. Even after Goodall was on board and tasked with setting up some of the early GTD development with Multimatic at its facility in Toronto, the scope of the endeavor was kept quiet. “I didn’t know a whole lot about what the project was,” Goodall recalled, but he knew it was going to be worthwhile. Soon he was up to speed and briefed on what the team codenamed “Project Gold.”
“We had engineers working on the project, their bosses had no idea what they were working on,” said Goodall. “If we involved an engineer, we would tell them what they needed to know in order to do their job, but the number of people that actually knew the full mission and the full details of what we were doing was very, very small,” said Goodall. “This was the mission from day one on the project, to run under seven minutes, to compete with the European supercars, to halo the Mustang brand that we sell and race globally. Everything we did was with that mission in mind. Every time we changed a millimeter on one of the exterior surfaces we were rerunning our aero analyses to make sure we were doing the right thing for the product.”
Because the Nürburgring has become the de facto proving ground for sports cars from many manufacturers, testing time is a hot commodity. “You have to book your timeslots months in advance. It’s not like you can pick and choose,” said Goodall of the hour and forty-five-minute segments that are blocked out for setting lap times. “Everyone’s booking timeslots, so you take what you can get.” The initial timeslot they got was October 1, but the GTD team eventually picked up a day in August as well.
When their August 7 timeslot of 4:30-6:15 in the afternoon finally came, the GTD team was ready, having spent the earlier parts of the afternoon anxiously studying weather charts and taking feeler laps to determine how the wet course was drying up. “As we were getting ready to run, the raindrops started coming down. We were stressed,” recalled Goodall. After a check of the track, the team decided they might not get a better shot and Dirk Müller suited up and got bucked in. “August 7th was the first time that Dirk was in the car, running the car ten-tenths, by himself on the track,” said Goodall. His other time came running near the limit, but with other lap traffic on course. Muller’s input on shift points and shock damping helped squeeze out tenths of a second here and there, and proved to be critical in getting the most out of the car under less-than-ideal conditions.
Spirits were high, but so was the team’s anxiety. “We were standing on the start/finish line for the first lap, and Dirk comes flying by us. Seven minutes is a long time,” said Goodall. “You hear the car for ten or fifteen seconds as he’s going past you. Then it’s just silence, it’s just waiting. You have no feedback, no idea what’s going on. At about 6:40 you start hearing a rumble in the background, and the anticipation is just building, especially on that first lap because you don’t know how far away you can hear the car so you have no idea if you’re on track or not.”
Even with the times on their handheld stopwatches showing a solid number, nothing is official until the notary on site gives their final say on the matter. “When we finally knew that we officially had it, there was a lot of pride, a lot of joy, some relief, but we’re not done. We still have another hour and 20 minutes,” said Goodall. The next thoughts the team has are ‘What does Dirk need?’ as they ready for another lap. “There’s a moment of celebration and excitement, but you’re still on task,” said Goodall. After a break due to threatening rain, the GTD team got in two more laps during their session, when they had hoped to get three. Those two additional laps were also under seven minutes, but they were no better. The GTD team ended up getting two more time slots in addition to their initial October 1 date, and all three were rained out. They had one shot, and they made it.
Ford has produced a short documentary, The Road To The Ring, that highlights the GTD’s development and some of the drama surrounding that impressive lap by Müller. You can see the car doing its thing and hear from Jim Farley, Dirk Müller, Greg Goodall, Multimatic Chief Technical Officer Larry Holt, Mustang GTD Design Manager Anthony Colard, and other Ford and Multimatic team members.
“You have to have a great car that delivers all of the things it needs to deliver. You have to have a great driver. We had both of those things. But you need the weather to cooperate, you need a little bit of luck. Unfortunately, after that date in August, we didn’t get another one,” said Goodall.
Goodall calls this achievement a high point in his long career at Ford, but he and the GTD team are hungry for more. “We left a little bit of time on the track, partially because of weather conditions, partially because we learned a lot during that event,” he said. “We’ve got more in the gas tank.”
A very impressive result. I’ve raced the Nürburgring 24Hr in a modified production car, and a lap under 7 minutes is quite an achievement. Congratulations to the Ford team.
I’m a died-in-the-Blue-wool Ford guy….but
$325,000 for a Mustang!!!??
And I always thought that Porsches are WAY overpriced.
I’ll gladly take a 2003 – 2006 FORD GT for that kind of coin!
Plus up.
I’m glad they went Sub 7 minutes but Porsche is about 15 seconds faster with the 911 GT3 RS last I checked and cheaper. So Ford Still has a bit to go here. For theoretically less money I’d rather have the Porsche.
Don’t think you’ll find a new GT3 RS for under $300 grand.
Porsche “options’ add up to a ridiculous total cost very quickly.
True, but you could theoretically get the Porsche. The Mustang GTD is supposedly starting at $325k but is likely also more in reality.
Theoretically is right. Much like Ferrari, the top cars go to top collectors. Even a Z06 is like 60K or more over MSRP…and they’re all spoken for five years out. FWIW car gurus:
2024 Porsche 911 GT3 RS Coupe RWD
$409,840
3,153 miles
32 saves
VIN: WP0AF2A95RS272329
Fair Deal
Ridiculous deal IMNSHO.
Who cares? It’s a Ford Mustang? The creators of the Mustang Mach E potato. For that money I’ll buy 3 other vintage vehicles that will surely go up in value; 911 Air/Oil cooled, BMW 2002, and a 996.2 GT3. All with NO nannies, visceral fun and me being able to do most maintenance. Lost in the woods those Fordsters are!!! Ford; reaching for brand cache with less and less consumer connection every year.
I feel the hobby is dividing in many ways, and this is one of them. I could not care less, for example, how fast a $300,000+ car can lap the ‘Ring. It is as relevant to my appreciation of cars as the speed a rocket can achieve. The higher the high tech and price tag, the more disconnected these sleds become from the experiences and reference points of ordinary people, including those who might, conceivable, buy some kind of new Mustang. Heck, most Hagerty readers probably live in houses that cost less than the GTD (either because of where they are or when they bought them, or both). The Youtubers fixing crashed and flooded supercars are closer and more relatable to us because they did not start out buying good McLarens and Lambos — they worked their way up from busted beaters to busted supercars, and you can follow their trajectory. Factory motorsports left the rest of us behind in the 1980s…
I have to agree with you about the rarified air this car lives in. There will be a few folks who’ll want and buy this car, but I’d rather have two or three other desirable cars.
However, I’ve got to give Ford a lot of credit for being the first American automaker to accomplish this feat.
Well, if you go back a few decades there’s always the GT40 that whomped Ferrari if not the later GT40 models GT MKIV and even GT40-Shelby. Then there’s the multimatic(?) built mid-Stang but that’s well north of 300K.
Great. Take it to the Nurburgring and enjoy your 13 minute lap times.
You’re doing something completely different to what’s going on in this article. You might as well be talking about vintage fire engines.
There’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing, or vintage fire engines for that matter, but it’s completely irrelevant to this subject matter.
Jealous because no gm junk or nocar can do that.
The comments section here is always bizarre.
Seems like a lot of readers are looking for Consumer Reports and stumble in to an enthusiast’s site by mistake.
You nailed it!
LOL Yes!
See? This is why we need a “like” button. 🙂
I submitted that request to Hagerty 2 days ago. We’ll see what happens
*like*
Like👍
Three cheers and a “Huzzah”! for this team and this project. Multimatic must be a wonderful place to work (And play!) Congrats to all on both sides of the border.
WOW! That is absolutely RIPPING up the course. I wonder what the Camaro did…..oh wait, the General parked that turd a while ago. Well, at least GM knew their limitations.
And apparently about 30 seconds faster than the Corvette.
for only 3 times the price 🙂
30 seconds on that track is expensive, so that’s not out of line.
Ford, pay no mind to the naysayers here. Good on ya, guys. Kicked ass, took names and did it with an American car. It’s things like this that make me a Ford guy. Some very cars from the other guys out there, but when push comes to shove, gimme a blue oval…..
Ford, pay no mind to the naysayers here. Good on ya, guys. Kicked ass, took names and did it with an American car. It’s things like this that make me a Ford guy. Some very cool cars from the other guys out there, but when push comes to shove, gimme a blue oval…..
I think you need to consider these lap records attempts in eh same vein as the early aircraft record attempts. They certainly weren’t supported by the average person’s income yet they enticed the population at large into seeing what human ingenuity could do. Think also eh space race to the moon and now shortly, Mars.
Big news! That’s great, but wait, it was 4 months ago? Even if they did it in the October date, that’s still 2 months ago.
I am a Mustang guy, have been since my first in 1969. There were several years I was a Datsun 510 guy in the early 70s. But now firmly back in the Mustang fold.
Like any real American, I’m certainly proud that the GTD has cracked the 7-minute barrier, but for $325K it damned well should have. What I’d really like to see is a sub-$125K American car like a Corvette or a Shelby Mustang do the same. That would really drive the Eurosnobs nuts.
The 2017 Dodge Viper ACR would have done a sub 7 Nurburgring run if the weather would have held up and it were actually sponsored by Dodge- instead it was team sponsored and 7:01 in semi-moist conditions.
In short, I think a sub-150K american upstart CAN do it… if we cared enough to make it happen.
Great accomplishment. My Chevy Cruze is jealous
Great job by the whole Mustang GTD team! I think many of the commenters misunderstand the metric of a ‘Ring lap time. It is not something to be repeated by owners but a measure of the track capability a vehicle has measured on a global standard track. Think of it as the sum of max lat, stopping distance, your preferred acceleration metric, aero balance, thermal management and top speed. Driver skill and how well the vehicle systems are integrated is also a huge factor in the lap time. You have to value track capability regardless of whether you plan to use the vehicle at the ‘Ring. Many owners will track their cars at local venues and enjoy demonstrating its capability. Yea, this rig is pricey but it must have some expensive bits to enable that level of track capability. Finally, as the former lead development engineer for the Gen2 Cadillac CTS-V, I have first hand knowledge of pursuing a lap record at the ‘Ring and the team effort it takes to make it happen.