Ford Mustang FAQs

The list of available-to-the-public hot Mustangs, already lengthy with efforts by Ford’s own SVT and tuners such as Shelby, Roush, Steeda, and Saleen, grows by one with the pending addition of the King of All Mustangs, which comes from Ford’s own racing division, which turned to Multimatic Motorsports, a Canadian performance company, to complete the project.

The naturally aspirated engine comes from Roush-Yates, the NASCAR boys. The inspiration and the initial investment come from Dan Davis, director of Ford Racing Technology.

As befits the fastest, most powerful Ford Mustang ever to be sold by the company, almost everything on the car that doesn’t make it go faster has been eliminated. That carbon-fiber and aluminum rear wing 15 possible positions is there for a reason, as is the carbon-fiber front splitter. They help hold the car down at top speed, which, we learned, is 172 mph, engine screaming at the 7200-rpm redline in sixth.

Geared for top speed, this is certainly an over-200-mph car. As it is, performance numbers are pretty respectable for a car built not for acceleration but for road-course racing: 0 to 60 mph comes in 3.9 seconds, the quarter-mile in 12.1 seconds at 123 mph. The skidpad number is 1.15 g, with a full tank of 100 octane.

The car’s formal name is the FR500GT. Insiders refer to it as the “Man Racer.” The $125,000, 420-hp FR500C Mustang, having just wrapped up it its second year racing in the Grand-Am Cup Series, was originally called the Boy Racer by Ford executives. So this new Mustang, with 130 more horses, has been referred to as the Man Racer.

In every sense, it’s a step up from the FR500C, but that program has been an excellent template for what Ford hopes to do with the Man Racer. The Boy Racer won at Daytona in 2005, its first race. The car was delivered to its owners just three days before the 200-mile race. That program, says Davis, “proved that we can build a turn-key race car that can win and not cost a fortune. And it proved we can make money at it.”

The engine in the FR500GT we drove is essentially a Roush-Yates engine from a Grand American Rolex Sports Car Series Daytona Prototype and actually is down 16 horsepower from the 550-hp engine Davis wants for production Man Racers. The $12,000 transmission is a six-speed sequential Hollinger unit used in the Australian Touring Car Series. It works like a motorcycle transmission: Pull the lever rearward for upshifts, press forward to downshift. The clutch isn’t needed to upshift, but you need to lift the throttle. Davis says the unit in the production cars should be capable of foot-to-the-floor shifting.

Name-brand stuff abounds: BBS alloy wheels and 18-inch Pirelli P Zero racing slicks that are the same size front and rear for lower cost. Brakes are AP Racing with Performance Friction pads. There’s a Sparco seat with a six-point harness and a removable steering wheel.

But a lot of the money in the FR500GT involves stuff you can’t see, Davis says, “anything that might be fragile, that’s where we spent the money: the rear end, the bearings, the full-floating rear axles, the spindles, extra cooling. The idea is that once you buy this car, unless you wad it up, you should be able to get through a racing season with very low maintenance costs.”