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Boston and New York Bear Brunt
Monday, January 1, 2018
- 23 °C
- 23 °C
Boston and New York Bear Brunt
- 23 °C
Production numbers and any word on whether the Mach 1 will make its way outside of the US are being kept hush by Ford for now
It’s been more than 50 years since the first time, and close to two decades since the last time a Mach 1 badge has appeared on a new Ford Mustang. And now it seems the wait won’t be much longer for those holding out until the next time it happens. The word announcement has come down from the big brass in Dearborn, Michigan that the Mach 1 is to return, taking its place atop the ladder of Ford’s 5.0-litre V8 Mustangs.
The Mach 1 badge, as its name suggests, has always been synonymous with the fastest Mustang you could buy short of venturing into the realm of Shelby or Boss badges. The name was inspired by fighter pilot Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. In turn, the Mustang Mach 1 broke 295 speed and endurance records during its debut year.
Really, we should have seen this coming. The last time Ford built a Mach 1 it was in the early 2000s, not long after the 2001 Bullitt. Sound familiar? This time around, the 2019 Bullitt’s engine tune powers the Mach 1. And that’s just the way Ford’s chief program engineer for the Mustang wants it.
'I love the way the Bullitt motor pulls all the way to redline, it’s one of the best 5.0-litres we’ve ever done,” Carl Widmann, the aforementioned program engineer says. To bring you up to speed, this setup included an air box and intake manifold from the Shelby GT350, as well as an 87mm throttle body'
Even though this means the Mach 1 will have familiar outputs of 480bhp and 420lb ft, you can rest assured the Mach 1 won’t just be ‘Bullitt Part 2’. There’s a host of engineering that’s gone into making the Mach 1 a more track-focussed car than the GT or the Bullitt, and the question of cooling is the first to be answered.
While Ford says the standard 5.0-litre GT wasn’t built to be a track car, especially not with its 10-speed auto, the Mach 1 will borrow a more intense cooling system from its Shelby-badged bros. The entire front bar of the Mach 1 has been altered from the standard Mustang to account not only for a design which features some retro styling cues, but also to accommodate its new cooling system.
'The trick to this is really to engineer the Shelby’s cooler setup which is two side air-coolers,' Widmann says. 'There’s an oil cooler on one side for the engine oil which improves that cooling by about 50 per cent, and a transmission oil cooler on the other side which hooks into either a manual or automatic transmission. This gives us flexibility for both track performance and as decent straight-line car with an automatic transmission and the power of the Bullitt motor.'
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Furthering the Mach 1’s track credentials is the suspension setup which is unique to the model. Widmann says since the adaptive Magneride is standard on all Mach 1s, it allowed the team to use the sway bars and springs to create a more focused setup with software learnings borrowed from the Shelby-badged cars. The wheels all around the car were also widened by half an inch (now 9.5-inches wide at the front, 10 at the rear) to provide more grip. An optional handling pack for the manual model also adds a larger front splitter, a ‘swing’ spoiler with a Gurney flap, and rear tyre spats from Shelby GT500.
Production numbers and any word on whether the Mach 1 will make its way outside of the US are being kept hush by Ford for now, but we’re told it will be a 'relatively low' production run with American customers expected to start taking deliveries around Q2 2021.
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David Williams
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