Mustang Endurance | “The Heart” Ep. 2 | Ford Performance
If a car or any machine can have a heart it would certainly be the engine and what engine has more heart than a V8 mounted low under the carbon fiber hood of a Ford Mustang GT3 a V8 that comes off the factory floor like millions of other V8
Engines much like it but this one is destined to spend his life screaming down the almond straight of Sebring through the forests of Road America or echoing off the high bank turns of Daytona this engine isn’t just powerful it also has to be reliable it has to be able to withstand the rigors of 24 hours
Of constant thrashing by drivers battling wheel to wheel and asking everything from it it has to deliver incredible performance reliability and it has to do so under some of the harshest conditions a machine could endure it’s been machined massaged tuned and hand assembled specifically for this task
The task of enduring the task of winning races your our ponies they’re there and I like the noise I like the sound of it what I like about our engine is it is it’s there always it’s not like peaky it’s not like low it’s like the whole bend
You can make the world’s most powerful engine which we as Engineers absolutely want to do but it’s really about winning a 24-hour race you break down once you’re out of the race so you’ve really got to focus on your regulations and making sure you can work there reliably for sports car racing and endurance racing
With balance of performance there’s really no benefit to making you know 1,000 horsepower and running everything right on the edge robustness and reliability is really the key especially when you’re racing for 24 hours the Mustang GT3 race engine is designed from and starts life as a coyote 5 L V8 cylinder block
It’s first cast and shifts to the Essex engine plant like millions of other engines and F-150 and Mustang vehicles first it’s specifically mirrored and board on the factory assembly line to 5.4 L of displacement GT3 block is is a little bit special but it’s built on by regulation
Has to be built from 5 L castings and base machining so what we do is we work with Essex engine plant and we’ve kind of designed a couple of special machining features for us all derived from production it’s maybe the coolest thing I’ve done at Ford Performance is that uh when
We needed GT3 parts uh I actually called up Essex engine and said hey I need a block we’ve got our own production code they’ll type it in they’ll process it put in the schedule and it just goes it’s checked over and then shipped off for a few finishing machining touches from there
It goes to M-Sport in England’s Lake District where it’s meticulously assembled by hand by some of the finest technicians in the world best way to describe M-Sport is we we started as purely as a rally team working you know only for Ford we realized that if we can make an
Engine competitive in in that type of environment there’s no reason why we can’t do it in in other areas the sound is good I can tell you that everybody in here can can hear when it’s on the dyno which gets everybody quite excited
I think from that side of it it’s giving everybody a real buzz to be working with a a naturally aspirated V8 that sounds as good as it does it’s given a shakedown on the dyno packaged and shipped off to Multimatic Motorsports in North Carolina where it will begin its life powering a
Mustang GT3 around racetracks across the globe the engine package is incredibly important so we did a lot of work to push the engine as far down and rearward as possible it’s a completely bespoked system so the scavenge pump air oil separator the pan it’s all unique to this
Engine meanwhile engine development and constant endurance testing is ongoing at Ford in Dearborn in one of their state-of-the-art dyno cells where the engine is being abused with simulation laps and even entire 24-hour races historically we used to just run the engine
Dyno so back in the Ford GT race car days uh we would just run the engine dyno for durability so you’re not incorporating the feedback from the drive line into that test so what we did is we set up uh our powertrain cell so it’s a it’s a cell on the Deerborn campus
At Ford so we we will run simulated races in the dyno with the full drive line and powertrain that gives us the feedback from prop shaft from the gearbox shifting I’d like to say I think it’s probably the most complex test within all of Ford Motor Company each lap is
About 5700 M so 5.7 km it’s about 2 minutes so it’s 30 per hour * 24 it’s a long time on a program like GT3 you can really touch every part of the engine you can do a lot to
It to really modify how does the torque come on how’s the power peek and dive off how’s it drive the Mustang GT3 engine has to also be reliable both for the factory Ford and multimatic Motorsports race teams but also the future Mustang GT3 customer teams it needs to
Perform consistently and be able to do so while minimizing engine rebuilds throughout the season to help reduce costs a test like today where we’ve got two cars here it allows us to look at things like different exhaust systems one of our team based in Deerborn has designed two different
Exhaust systems two different uh Mufflers it’s not so much now about the performance it’s about getting the sound level right there’s actually requirements that we’ve got to stay [Music] [Music] below don’t know exactly what happened there but we think that some of the residual
Oil from the road America issue where we lost the oil line like just kind of impregnated the carbon fiber on that side and so right there we just breaking in quieter Mufflers also and they build I think some more heat especially when you’re breaking them in and burning them out that
Heat I mean we’re talking about like it’s you know it’s a/ quar inch from the muffler pack to the to the carbon and it just seems like it just caught the carbon on fire again I believe that’s it cuz
It’s just the Rock is that’s the side that we had all the oil go everything that was it was just an extension of what we did so we just put new rocker panels on and kind of give it another [Music]
Go racing is hard especially like long endurance racing 24 hours obviously you need to run the car properly but it needs to be reliable you know no you need to have the fastest car if you can
Continue constantly doing your stins you might be on the podum you know how many things can we can we test in an environment that’s under our control versus at a race where it’s out of our
Control so we keep going through the list trying to get more mileage trying to make sure we push the engine into areas that a driver may push it into and for every test we do we think of
Another one the list never gets shorter it tends to get longer until you out the time the biggest thing for me is that we’re doing laps with no issues that’s a big thing to me you we have two
Months till we’re on track at Daytona like real life Roar basically going racing so I think the more laps we can turn the better off we are we’ve had a timeline and a plan and we’ve got
All the right people and everything in place the things that we don’t know or that we can’t control that’s what I worry about is is something going to come that we’re not expecting that derails us oh
Dive into Episode 2 of #MustangEndurance, where we reveal the intricate journey of the Mustang GT3’s engine, from the block machining in Essex to its assembly at M-Sport. Witness the meticulous crafting and testing that embody ‘The Heart’ of this racing powerhouse. #BredtoRaceFP
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