The 2025 Ford Mustang GTD Takes On the World and Might Actually Win
The $300,000 Mustang GTD is America’s mightiest rival to top-shelf European supercars. This is how it’ll kick their butts.
My apologies for the drool everywhere, but the 2025 Ford Mustang GTD is one of the coolest cars to come out in years. Half of why it was cool is because it was a total surprise (other than a sketchy leak that offered no clues), and the other half was because the rumors were somehow less fantastical than the real thing. Folks, this is a supercar-beating Mustang that will almost certainly destroy anything you put it up against. Let’s do some bench racing.
The Mustang GTD isn’t just serious for a Mustang–it’s serious for any car. A 5.2-liter supercharged V8 makes roughly 800 horsepower and sends that output to a rear-mounted transaxle that helps balance the weight equally across the front and back. It uses dual wishbone front suspension and a multi-link pushrod rear suspension that is completely unique to the GTD in arms and geometry.
Multimatic spool-valve dampers complete the treatment, offering semi-active damping and adjustable ride height with two different spring rates. Most of the body is carbon fiber and designed to make downforce with an extraordinarily big wing and generous venting. Finally, the trunk is replaced with a massive heat exchanger dedicated to cooling the gearbox. This is seriously exotic stuff, and rightfully so for $300,000.
The Blue Oval’s most obvious competitor would be the current Porsche 911 GT3 RS, though a GT2 RS would be more appropriate if there were a new one. In all fairness to the GT3 RS, its base price of $241,000 means it is quite a lot cheaper than the Ford, but that doesn’t include equipment that puts it at parity with the ‘Stang. So if you want the lightweight Weissach Package and carbon ceramic brakes on the GT3 RS to match the lightweight carbon panels and ceramics of the Mustang GTD, it brings the Porsche right up to $296,000.
With the Porsche, you get one of the finest sports cars on earth that generates 900 pounds of downforce at 124 mph. A rear-mounted, 4.0-liter, 9,000-rpm flat-six makes 518 hp. Getting everything to the road is a set of Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires measuring 275 millimeters wide at the front and 335mm at the rear with a choice of forged aluminum or magnesium wheels. All of it weighs just 3,268 pounds.
While the Mustang GTD’s weight is unknown, it will very likely be much heavier than the Porsche. However, the Ford’s blown 5.2-liter V8 makes the flat-six look like a joke with its 800 horsepower. The Mustang has a better weight distribution overall with its 50/50 split, and it out-rubbers the 911 with 325mm wide front tires and 345mm rear tires. That said, it has the same choice of forged aluminum or magnesium wheels. I think it’s safe to say the Mustang will give the 911 real trouble anywhere the Porsche has the misfortune of meeting it, but the P-car might be a more precise instrument. Both delete their trunks in the name of cooling, which is a cute commonality.
The Mustang GTD’s specs suggest a supercar more than a sports car. While it looks like it will be built off of a normal chassis rather than a carbon fiber tub, Ford hasn’t confirmed exactly what sort of construction it will use. For the money, I hope we at least get aluminum under the carbon fiber body panels. Looking underneath those components, things get very interesting and exotic-esque. Some are tricks you would only see under a McLaren.
The front and rear suspension is totally unique to the Mustang GTD and has a novel system of dual spring rates with two different ride heights. The Ford GT, which was a collaboration with Multimatic a lot like this, used a similar system except with a coil spring for road comfort and torsion bars for the track. The Mustang instead uses hydraulic actuators to activate a different coil spring by locking out the softer one. Hydraulics also control an active rear wing that can open for less drag, a-la GT3 RS.
The rear pushrod suspension, meanwhile, is undeniably cool—but maybe not as advanced as it could be. It seems that Ford used a pushrod-style suspension to make space for the rear-mounted transaxle and didn’t take advantage of all the geometric tricks that suspension type offers. It still uses a conventional sway bar mounted to the 1:1 motion ratio pushrod rocker. While it’s a neat piece of kit, the way Ford set it up isn’t much more advantageous than a normal rear suspension aside from packaging benefits.
In the photos, it looks like nearly all of the control arms are forged or cast aluminum with spherical bushings and ball joints. The subframes are tubular, which is super trick for a production car. I don’t see a lot of alignment adjustability built into the arms or pickup points, though that could change from here to production.
Overall, the GTD fares extremely well against the rest of the world. It is one of the stated goals of the GTD to "take on the best of European sports cars," and it aimed to go far beyond. It has more power, more tire, more exotic suspension, and a cool, approachable everyman's hero factor to it that the others don't have. It costs supercar money, but it delivers on that hefty tag and arguably offers a similar spec sheet to cars $100,000 more expensive.
The Mustang GTD is the real deal. Unbelievably real. I’d even hazard to choose this as my coolest car of the decade so far, and that decade includes the Porsche 911 S/T and Toyota GR Corolla. There are even titanium parts from the F-22 Raptor used to make a plaque for each GTD. It really doesn’t get better than this.
Want to talk GT3 cars for the road? Hit my line at chris.rosales@thedrive.com
