I Drove Ford’s Preposterous $350,000 Mustang GTD To Find Out if It Makes Any Sense

There’s only one place to start when discussing the Ford Mustang GTD supercar: its estimated $350,000 price tag. Before we even touch the carbon fiber or Nürburgring time, let’s put that figure into perspective.

For the price of one Mustang GTD, you could buy:

There’s only one place to start when discussing the Ford Mustang GTD supercar: its estimated $350,000 price tag. Before we even touch the carbon fiber or Nürburgring time, let’s put that figure into perspective.

For the price of one Mustang GTD, you could buy:

• A three-bedroom house in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio…
• Three full four-year degrees from the University of Georgia…
• Two Ford Bronco Raptors and a Ford F-150 Raptor…
• A Porsche 911 GT3 RS…
• A Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica…

Or, you could just buy its direct Italian rival, the Ferrari 296 GTB, which lands in the same eye-watering price bracket. So, the question extends beyond the car’s mere quality to something far more fundamental: Does a Mustang that costs as much as an entire life plan make any logical sense?

After a day piloting this machine through the California mountains and desert, I can tell you the answer is an emphatic “no.”

And that’s precisely the point.

The word “preposterous”  is the only one that adequately describes this machine.

It’s a word that practically leaps out of the engine bay and smacks you in the face. The fact that Ford, the company that gave us the sensible Taurus and Explorer, decided to build a Mustang that costs more than 5x my entire state school education is an act of pure, glorious audacity.

In a way, Ford is picking a fight instead of making a statement. Rather than gloating over specs and engineering prowess, they’re dropping the gloves by simply building the damn thing and letting the lap time do the talking, as well as drivers having their pants practically wowed off of them.

It’s a fun way to flex, 61 years after the first Mustang was unveiled at the World’s Fair in Queens in 1964. Ford is proving they have that dog in them, delivering a star-spangled, eagle-screaming flex aimed squarely at the chins of European supercar elites. This is the automotive equivalent of planting a flag on the moon and then doing donuts on it.

It’s important to understand that Ford built this car with the singular mission of conquering the Nürburgring, the infamous German track that serves as the ultimate benchmark. They posted an official sub-7-minute lap time at the world-renowned proving ground, a feat that puts the GTD in the rarefied air of the world’s most elite performance machines. They showed this accomplishment to the world with an incredibly badass documentary about how they sweated out the feat, too:

 

This is the modern-day “Eleanor” from Gone in 60 Seconds, a mythical beast so potent it feels like it should come with its own movie soundtrack, maybe with Ram Jam’s “Black Betty” as the first song. If you’re paying close attention, we’re witnessing a new chapter of Mustang heritage being written in real-time. First, the track-focused Dark Horse reset expectations for what a modern muscle car could be, and now the GTD catapults that legacy squarely into supercar territory.

Getting behind the wheel for the first time is, frankly, unnerving. You’re acutely aware that you are piloting a vehicle that costs more than most houses in the Midwest. In my Los Angeles neighborhood, $350,000 might get you a nicely renovated garden shed, so the comparison felt… apt. But then, something magical happens. As I steered this carbon-fiber-bodied rocket through downtown Palm Springs, down Palm Canyon Drive towards Cathedral City and Rancho Mirage, I started to settle in. The initial terror gracefully morphed into one long yippeeeeeee after the other.

The drive was just me and a couple of folks from Ford in a support car behind me. The drive took us up the Palms to Pines Highway, a ribbon of asphalt that snakes its way from the Mojave desert floor into the San Bernardino Mountains. On roads that look like they were originally sketched out by a hyperactive goat, the GTD came alive. Born from the DNA of the track-only Mustang® GT3, this is the quickest road-going Mustang ever built.

It’s a machine that is, as Ford puts it, “Street Legal. But Just Barely.” That massive, aerodynamic rear wing is more than a styling element; it’s part of an active hydraulic aero system that also controls hidden flaps under the nose to toggle between high-downforce and low-drag modes.

I was told by the folks at Ford that you’ll hear the pushrod suspension before you feel it, and that was spot-on. It’s a visceral, mechanical cacophony of clunks and whirs, a constant, jarring reminder that you are not in your daily grocery-getter. This is a track car, and it wants you to know it.

This is also immediately visible when you look over your shoulder: Where the back seat should be, there’s that a pushrod and rocker suspension setup actuating electronically controlled Multimatic shocks. At CEO Jim Farley’s insistence, there’s a polycarbonate window so you can literally watch it work in the rearview mirror. IE: 

In Track Mode, the whole car hunkers down nearly two inches, using those same hydraulics to compress a softer secondary spring and engage the stiffer primary racing springs. Then, to clear a speed bump, the front end extends back up on command. It’s ridiculous. It’s brilliant. It’s why the price tag is what it is.

It’s… preposterous.

Stretching nearly four inches wider than a standard Mustang, its body, at 78.4 inches, pushes the 80-inch legal limit for needing commercial clearance lights. Its 325-width front tires are the widest ever fitted to a production car, period. The massive fender vents alone went through over 120 iterations, and the aero flicks on the hood? Those were 3D-printed trackside at the Nürburgring during testing because they shaved seconds off lap times. The 3-D printed designs were immediately sent from Germany to Michigan for rollout in the GTD.

See? Preposterous.

Now let’s get back to driving this many-trick pony…

With every paddle shift on a hairpin turn, I found myself yelping. Not screaming in fear, but yelping with the kind of pure, unadulterated joy you experience as a kid on a roller coaster. Each yelp was a tribute to my younger self, the one who sat at the kitchen table with my dad, painstakingly gluing together a Hunter Green Mustang Cobra model. I remember thinking that little plastic car was the absolute pinnacle of cool. If only that kid could see me now, gripping the wheel of its unhinged, futuristic descendant. It was a genuine “pinch me” moment, except if you pinched me, the car would probably correct your steering and shave three-tenths of a second off your lap time.

In Norse Mythology, Sleipnir is Odin’s eight-legged steed, the fastest and best of all horses, able to gallop over land, sea, and through the air. Driving the GTD feels like a modern-day Sleipnir, the same spirit of mythical speed and over-the-top capability. And considering the GTD’s absurd amount of extra hardware, having double the normal number of legs feels about right. You hear it in that big V8 roar, but most importantly, you feel it. Acceleration is the wrong word; this thing boogies. It has a dance fever, a manic energy that begs to be unleashed from its projected 800-plus horsepower. There’s no questioning why and how the Mustang GTD has tested up to 202 MPH on the track. The faster you go, the more graceful and planted it feels. It’s a monster that’s been meticulously trained for the ballet of high-stakes performance.

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When we pulled into Idyllwild for a coffee, the preposterous nature of the GTD was on full display. I have never been in a car that draws a crowd. But this thing is a magnet. Heads snapped around. Phones came out. A small crowd formed, not with questions, but with a kind of quiet, slack-jawed reverence. There were murmurs, pointed fingers, and the universal language of raised camera phones capturing every aggressive angle. For a moment, I ceased being some guy making a coffee stop for some strong-as-jet-fuel cold brew. I’m not exactly a person who’s used to attention in public, and I felt like the temporary custodian of a four-wheeled celebrity.

No one cared about me; they were gobsmacked by the machine. My own thoughts weren’t on horsepower, but on the primal fear that a single stumble could trigger a financial catastrophe on par with the GDP of a small island nation. I chugged the cold brew and got the hell out of there, ready for the descent back to the desert valley. Obviously, no drinks in the car. Especially a $350,000.

If you needed any more proof that this car is a rolling spectacle, just look at what Ford did at Monterey Car Week in August 2025. In a power move aimed directly at the heart of the automotive elite, they unveiled the Mustang GTD Liquid Carbon at Laguna Seca.

They stripped away the paint to show off the raw, beautiful carbon fiber body, from the hood to the new composite door skins. It’s another flex of engineering precision, right down to the seam where the weave meets perfectly down the car’s centerline. As Mustang GTD Chief Program Engineer Greg Goodall put it, this version shown at Monterey is “the ultimate expression of the Mustang GTD’s high-tech, high-performance construction.” It’s a car for the fanatics that geek out over the microscopic details.

In that shared moment of awe, you realize the GTD is a four-wheeled conversation starter. And this is where the car’s nonsensical price tag starts to make a different kind of sense.

We live in a weird, often conventional time. Our cars are becoming more pragmatic, more electric, more… sensible. And that’s fine. Yes, you can rocket from zero to sixty in the automotive equivalent of an iPhone, thanks to its blistering-fast algorithms. But a Tesla, for all its world-bending speed, is now as ubiquitous as a Starbucks cup. The thrill is efficient, digital, and… sterile. It’s also, dare I say it?, a bit boring.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece exploring a semi-ridiculous question based on a common meme: could a Sea-Doo be the cure for male loneliness? The response went viral on Instagram, clocking over 700,000 views over the course of a month, and proved that the underlying idea resonated. Our brains get into trouble when they don’t have something tangible, visceral, and thrilling to latch onto. We get sucked down the rabbit holes of our own minds, doom-scrolling our way into a state of permanent, low-grade dread. The real thesis is this: to fight your own brain, you have to be into things. You need a productive obsession. You need a passion that pulls you out of the digital ether and into the real, tactile world.

The GTD is the ultimate “third thing.” These technical details, like the GTD’s Nürburgring time, the carbon fiber weave, the specific torque specs, are the vocabulary of connection. Every card that Ford deals out about this Mustang, you want to talk about it with someone else. You need to, deep in your soul, simply because they dared to make it. And these conversations amongst Mustang enthusiasts can lead to incredibly deep friendships, built not on awkward small talk but on a shared passion for something gloriously irrational.

Owning a GTD isn’t like owning a Porsche or a Ferrari, where you blend into an established sea of European luxury. You own it because it’s preposterous. It’s the membership card to a very specific, very hardcore tribe.

That’s precisely why something as gloriously unhinged as the Mustang GTD needs to exist. It’s the bright red jelly bean in a jar of black licorice. You can’t be a passive owner of a car like this, because it simply demands your enthusiasm from the second you grab the keys.

There’s a special kind of audacity in what Ford did: building something just because they could, because they had something to prove, and because they found joy in the sheer, preposterous thrill of it all.

So, does a $350,000 Mustang make any sense?

No, not if you’re using a calculator or retirement accounts. Your financial advisor will certainly not advise it.

But the idea it represents absolutely does. It’s the shared admiration for a sub-7-minute Nürburgring lap or the nostalgic connection to a childhood dream. It’s the raw joy of sitting behind the wheel of a piece of supercar engineering brilliance.

These are powerful antidotes to a world that can often feel too digital, and maybe too sensible.

The Mustang GTD is preposterous, and that’s the point.

This machine isn’t built for a spreadsheet. It’s built for the soul.

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Brandon Wenerd is the publisher of BroBible.com. Follow him on Substack, where he writes about the behind-the-scenes of BroBible’s business, as well as on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.