In this video, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the upcoming 2020 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500.
The moratorium on the GT500 seems to have expired as lots of publications are starting to come out with their own opinions of the most powerful Mustang ever created. However, while most of those reviews relate to how the car drives, only one goes in-depth into the true design of the GT500, and that’s in a video from Engineering Explained.
Rather than just talk about how breathtaking the car's acceleration can be, Mr. Explained gives us the complete lowdown on just how Ford made the GT500 so amazing. Starting with a topic near and dear to his heart: thermodynamics.
According to Ford engineers, the GT500 required a cooling system good enough to keep 12 average homes from overheating. This required a grille opening that's twice as large as on the GT350, but also a whole extra radiator too. Car enthusiasts might look at that with a measure of pride, but our host just laments how woefully inefficient the internal combustion engine is at converting long-dead animal juice into speed.
Also, while automotive purists might complain about the lack of a manual transmission, Engineering Explained gives us a first-hand look at how the new 7-speed DCT provides instant shifts thanks to being hardwired into the transmission control module.
Gearing? We got gearing info, too. Gears one through five are all about acceleration, but gears six and seven? Those are for highway cruising at super low RPM. Apparently, fuel economy regulations required that the Mustang sacrifice some aggressiveness in its gearing in order to achieve a better fuel economy. This is another thing that will infuriate automotive purists, but it's something that Ford had to do just so the GT500 could be created legally.
Finally, we get to see Engineer Explained at the drag strip where he tests a few of Ford's numbers. Acceleration from zero to sixty is definitely doable in 3.5 seconds even by a novice driver, but a quarter-mile time of 10.7 seconds might require a bit more racing experience.
Check out the video above for more on lateral Gs, brake rotor size, and just how much oversteer this car can produce when you start whipping it around the track.