When you’re willing to spend the time, effort and money taking a car to put down laps at the Nürburgring Nordschleife not once, but twice, you know that machine is something special.
That is indeed the case for the 2025 Ford Mustang GTD, the forthcoming “barely street legal” Mustang that will begin to arrive in customer driveways this spring. Put it this way, the Mustang GTD is more powerful than the GT3 Mustang race cars Ford will be sending to France to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans next month.
In case you just got back from Mars, or have only recently woken up from a coma, here are some Mustang GTD tech highlights:
- 5.2-liter supercharged flat-plane crank V8 (815 horsepower / 664 lb-ft. torque)
- 202 mph top speed
- Rear-mounted 8-speed dual-clutch transaxle
- Carbon ceramic brakes
- Semi-active suspension (40 mm ride height adjust)
- Dry sump oil system
- Carbon fiber rear wing
- Akrapovic titanium exhaust
- Near 50:50 front-rear weight distribution
First revealed in 2023, the Mustang GTD has been in active development since at least 2021 when Ford CEO Jim Farley gathered some Ford Performance folks together to create, “a race car for the road.”
A key part of development is proving the car’s bona fides on one of the world’s most unforgiving tracks: the 12.9-mile Nürburgring Nordschleife, aka The Green Hell. Ford’s first trek to the famed German track with the GTD in August 2024 produced an impressive sub-seven-minute lap of 6:57.685.
But the GTD team felt the car could go even faster so they loaded up and went back to tame the Green Hell to shave a few seconds off their impressive lap time. And did they ever.
The February 2025 lap shaved more than five seconds off the 2024 time, with a blazingly fast 6:52.072. That mark is the fourth fastest time ever for a production car, and it puts the GTD in rare air: it's the only entry from an American automaker to post a Nürburgring lap under seven seconds.
To put the improvement into perspective, the 2025 GTD would have completed its lap more than 800 feet ahead of the 2024 unit. Ford credits the faster time to a host of improvements made to the car, including powertrain recalibration, chassis tweaking, a more rigid body structure, refined aero, and reconfigured traction control and ABS. Ford also noted in a press release that the 2024 car was an early production unit, and the 2025 tester is a final production unit.
Ford is expected to build only 1,000 Mustang GTDs. Unsurprisingly, the starting price is steep, beginning at $325,000 USD.
Photos courtesy of Ford
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