Ford Faqs

With its inspired rear wing, fancy stick-on graphics, and a means-business exhaust note, the King of All Mustangs does not just show up it sort of presents itself. Its appearance should be accompanied by a drum roll. Ford would love to sell you one and say thanks for your $225,000!. Please enjoy your new full-race, 550-hp Mustang.”

Your first question is, of course, “Can I drive it on the street?” The answer: If you live in Hazzard County, maybe. 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 an unlikely source: 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.

Typically, an automaker’s motive for building a car like this is slightly masturbatory, conceived, then achieved, with little more of a long-term goal than making yourself feel good while showing off. Not so with the King of All Mustangs: Ford, which is expected to lose upwards of $5 billion this year, really isn’t in a position to engage too much in self-gratification. Dan Davis figures he can build two of these cars a week and already has orders for them, despite minimal publicity.

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 FR500C Boy Racer is plenty fast, but it still feels like a Mustang, due in part to the restrictive Grand-Am Cup rules that dictate, for example, stock rear brakes. Bound by no such limitations, the Man Racer feels, and performs, more like a double-throwdown tube-frame race car. Had you not known, you’d never have guessed that it started life as a production car. The FR500GT begins as a stock Mustang body and chassis from the plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, and moves to Watson Engineering in Dearborn, where 30 hours are spent welding in a roll cage and another 40 stitch-welding seams.

Which include the engine. He knows it will be a Ford V-8, naturally aspirated, 550 horsepower, but the rest, he says, may be negotiable. “We have a lot of sources for engines, but I’m leaning toward Roush-Yates because we have a great relationship with them and because they build good stuff. Plus, I think customers would like having that NASCAR pedigree.”

Known for making horsepower, team owner and engine builder Robert Yates, who won the 1999 NASCAR Winston Cup championship with driver Dale Jarrett, combined engine shops with the better-known Jack Roush in 2004, and Roush-Yates now supplies engines for eight Nextel Cup teams.