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.”