Mustang scally

The GTD is the most extreme Mustang ever to wear numberplates. MATT PRIOR drives one into the desert and unleashes its wild side

- PHOTOGRAPHY WEBB BLAND

I wonder if Ford would have liked to build this car 10 years ago. Back then it was planning to return to Le Mans, given it was approaching 50 years since the GT40 had won there, and senior Ford bods wanted to do that with a Mustang. It was the swankiest car they made and they thought it would be good to see it racing: win on (Saturday and) Sunday, sell on Monday.

But the more Ford's engineers looked into it, the more they thought they couldn't make it competitive. The Mustang would be a big car for endurance racing's GTE category, and while various 'Balance of Performance' allowances would be made for that, giving it more power than some rivals, there would be a limit to how fast they could make a car with such a large frontal area.

So on the sly the engineers started developing the GT, with its narrow cockpit and standing just 1.8 inches higher than the 40in-tall GT40. The bosses were convinced, and it was so naturally fast that race cars routinely had their power capped so they didn't run away with it in competition. But it was a race car that became a road car, rather than the other way around.

The Mustang itch seemingly remained unscratched, because a decade and a generation of Mustang later, Ford still really wanted to race one at Le Mans, so it made a GT3-class variant. With a gearbox mounted at the rear, suspension by Multimatic (the Canadian company that co-developed, builds and helps race the car) and more trickery besides, it has a Le Mans class podium to its name.

You're looking at the road car that was developed alongside it to celebrate the fact. You could think of it as a GT3 RS or Speciale variant of the Mustang. It's called the GTD, which comes from IMSA racing's 'Grand Touring Daytona' category, by the way. I'm guessing they didn't have VW Golf GTDs in the US to confuse it with.