In 2024, the Ford Mustang GTD managed to race around the Nürburgring’s lightly challenging layout in 6min 57.6sec. At the time, that made it the fastest American car to have achieved such a feat.
In 2025, Ford went even faster. After a raft of tweaks—more aero, more power, more...suspension—the GTD recorded a time of 6min 52sec. Hugely respectable.
And now, in 2026, capping off the longest and least surprising intro to a news story, considering you’ve already read the headline, Ford has absolutely sent the wild GTD to become the second-fastest production car overall with a time of 6min 40.8sec. Well, kinda, but we’ll get to that.
“When we said ‘game on’, we meant it,” said Ford boss Jim Farley. “Mustang GTD was always meant to bridge the worlds between GT3 race cars and street-legal supercars, and the GTD Competition takes this to the next level to continue keeping Europe’s elite up at night.”
OTHER STORIES YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED:
This set of rare R34 Nissan GT-Rs for auction is a hardcore Skyline nerd’s dream collection
‘Project Endgame’ is an exceedingly modified Porsche 993 speedster with 840hp
That’s right, the GTD is now the Ford Mustang GTD Competition, and it’s also being referred to as a ‘supercar.’ That new moniker brings with it a wealth of further tweaks to the car’s base content that helped shave—once more for the cheap seats—11 seconds around a massive circuit.
There’s more power from the 5.2-liter supercharged V8—we’re not told how much, only that it’s ‘more’ than the original 815hp—and additional aero for more downforce (more dive planes, aero discs, and rear wing mods).
Plus, Ford has bolted on new “high-performance” tires, new magnesium wheels, new carbon bucket seats, lighter dampers, and “additional actions” that help shed weight. All useful, remember, because despite looking like a gym-honed bruiser, the GTD is actually really quite heavy: It was originally just shy of two tons (1,970kg). Ford hasn’t said what it is now, but ‘less than that’ is a good shout.
Still, even carrying all that bloat, “the Mustang GTD Competition secures the sixth-fastest time on the Nürburgring pre-production/prototype class leaderboard,” according to Ford. Ah, right—it’s not technically a production car just yet, but it soon will be, as Ford is planning on building a limited number of these GTD Competition cars as special editions.
So currently, it sits behind the Porsche 919 Evo (5min 19.5sec), Volkswagen ID.R (6min 5.3sec), its big brother Ford GT Mk IV (6min 15.9sec), the mad Xiaomi SU7 Ultra Prototype (6min 22sec), the Lotus Evija X (6min 24sec), and the Porsche 911 GT2 RS MR (6min 40.3sec).
But once in production, it’ll technically sit behind...the Mercedes-AMG One (6min 29sec). And if it manages to find yet another 11 seconds of time, it’ll sit at the top. That’s a big ‘if’, of course, but Farley did say ‘game on,’ after all...
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
