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The first-ever Ford Mustang GTD is one wild, street-legal racing car.
Courtesy Ford
Sometimes with all the talk about electric vehicles and
Tesla
,
it’s a good idea to take a break and admire a good old-fashioned muscle car.
Ford Motor
(ticker: F) unveiled its latest gasoline-powered Mustang on Thursday evening. It’s a beast.
The first-ever Mustang GTD is an 800-horsepower supercar built with a carbon-fiber body that looks just beautiful. “Mustang GTD shatters every preconceived notion of a supercar,” said Ford CEO Jim Farley in a news release. “This is a new approach for us. We didn’t engineer a road car for the track, we created a race car for the road.”
GTD is short for Gran Turismo Daytona. It’s a class of racing cars.
The horsepower is generated by a supercharged, 5.2-liter V8 engine. The street legal version, which is a 2025 model year car, was inspired by the Mustang GT3 race car that is returning to the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 2024.
Supercars are expensive and this one will run roughly $300,000. That makes it a lower volume, trophy piece for a company like Ford. It won’t drive enough volume to generate sales and earnings that will be noticed by investors.
Still, Ford stock might be getting a small boost from the announcement. Shares were up 0.8% on Friday, while the
S&P 500
fell 0.2% and the
Dow Jones Industrial Average
gained less than 1%. (Shares of Ford peer
General Motors
(GM) fell 0.3%).
The GTD can yield benefits for the entire company, helping develop and enhance the Mustang brand. It also shows that any car¸—electric or gasoline-powered—can excite drivers if it’s cool enough.
Traditional automakers have had trouble exciting car buyers with their EVs. The Ford Mustang Mach-E has done well, but it sells thousands a month in the U.S., far short of the tens of thousands of
Tesla
(TSLA) Model Ys that are sold each month.
Mach-E sales are have fallen year over year. Through July, Ford sold 17,977 Mach-Es in 2023, down from 22,645 sold over the same span of 2022.
The Mach-E competes against other crossover-sized EVs. Ford and other automakers could use a Model Y-type hit to boost their EV businesses. Ford expects to lose about $4.5 billion selling EVs in 2023.
As for the traditional Mustang, it is, of course, a sports car. Through July, Ford sold 26,704 gasoline-powered Mustangs in 2023. That is pretty good. Sports cars only account for only a couple of percentage points of the U.S. new car market each year.
Write to Al Root at [email protected]