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Payne: How Ford racing has become an integral part of Ford production
Posted by Talbot Payne on August 5, 2023
Concord, North Carolina — In the lobby of the state-of-the-art Ford Performance Tech Center here, visitors are greeted by a grainy black-and-white picture of Henry Ford at the wheel of his Sweepstakes race car on a dirt horse track in Grosse Pointe. In large type above it, the caption reads:
“In 1901, Henry Ford designed and built the race car called ‘Sweepstakes.’ On October 10 of that year, he drove Sweepstakes against Alexander Winton, a famous racer and builder. Against all odds Ford won. That was the beginning — ‘the race that changed the world’ — and it continues today as the spirit of Henry Ford lives with us every day through our motorsports efforts around the world.”
Racing is in Ford Motor Co.’s DNA, and 122 years after that picture was taken, motorsports is more integrated into the company than ever before.
Behind the lobby wall, Ford has invested millions of dollars in three racing simulators used — not just to service the NASCAR, sportscar and rally teams that race Fords — but to test current production performance beasts like the Ford Raptor and Mustang Dark Horse, whose racing-inspired capabilities would awe Henry Ford if he were alive today.
“We opened the Ford Performance Tech Center in 2014 in the center of NASCAR valley … with a vision of supporting all of our global racing efforts, and we’ve done that,” said Ford Performance chief Mark Rushbrook from his office here. “Then we’ve learned from that how to transfer knowledge (from) our race cars to our road cars. So our mainstream engineers use this facility and its tools developed for motorsport to make our cars better for customers that put them in their driveway and garage.”
The 33,000-square-foot facility here north of Charlotte is the hub of the Blue Oval’s sprawling global performance footprint that also includes Allen Park’s Ford Vehicle Performance and Electrification Center (housing the world’s first 200-mph, automobile aerodynamic wind tunnel) and an engineering facility in Milton Keynes, England, as part of Ford’s partnership with Red Bull’s Formula One team.
“Formula One is in a similar valley north of London,” Rushbrook said. “We had a building put in at Milton Keynes, and that is where the 2026 power unit for Formula One is being developed. We’re working at a frantic pace — 2026 sounds like a long way off, but it is tomorrow in terms of racing development.”
Since its founding, Ford’s racing exploits have played a key marketing role. That marketing profile reached the summit of motorsport in 1966 at Le Mans, France, when a squadron of Ford GT40s dethroned mighty Ferrari at the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans — an accomplishment dramatized in the hit 2019 movie “Ford v Ferrari.”
“Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” goes the mantra. Racing has further been used in a feedback loop so that lessons learned on track can be fed back into production car technologies. In turn, competition helps attract world-class engineers to the company.
“Everything about racing benefits the production side,” said Stephanie Brinley, associate director for S&P Global Mobility. “And as Ford goes all-electric, specialized engineering teams helps them be efficient with capital resources in developing their remaining gas performance vehicles. The simulators also help save in development time rather than doing road-test miles.”
The Ford Performance Tech Center wraps the racing/production DNA strands even more tightly. At its core are three racing simulators.
“When we opened the facility, we put in a simulator that we used successfully in motorsports,” said Rushbrook. “Then we introduced it to the mainstream teams … and they started to fly engineers from Michigan on a regular basis to use the simulator. It was being used so much we added a second simulator, and we were still at capacity. A third simulator actually went to Dearborn, so it was closer to the mainstream engineers to use, and even with that, we now have a third simulator here.”
Concord’s first simulator — the $3 million MS1 — was used to develop the mid-engine Ford GT racer that would win the 2016 Le Mans GT class — 50 years after the GT40 accomplished its historic feat. Fast forward to 2023, and simulators MS1, MS2 and MS3 here were key to developing the new seventh-generation, 500-horsepower Mustang Dark Horse.
“The Dark Horse was developed at our simulators right here in Charlotte,” said Tim Scott, vehicle engineering supervisor for the first performance variant of the seventh-generation Mustang.
MS3 is the third — and most advanced — simulator in the Tech Center’s belly. It cost about $5 billion to build with Ansible, a simulator supplier from England. Simulators are used to test everything from NASCARs to Rally Cross Fiestas to Dark Horses to Bronco Raptors.
“The sim helps drivers test for the next race, but it also helps get production cars to market more quickly,” said Dave Ragan, an ex-NASCAR Cup driver who now does sim testing for Ford.
Ragan gave a demonstration of the MS1 simulator’s capabilities to media inside a NASCAR sim “buck” — the full cockpit of a Ford Mustang NASCAR mounted atop sophisticated hydraulic legs. With a 180-degree screen in front of him, Ragan drove a simulation of Charlotte Motor Speedway at full chat, the buck pitching and yawing as it would on a real race track under braking, side-g-loads, acceleration.
Pro drivers will spend four hours at a time in the simulator, testing various race setups ahead of a race weekend. Then production engineers will use the same sim to test attributes of, say, a Bronco Raptor.
“You should see this buck pitch go up and down when they are simulating the Bronco off-road,” smiled Daniel Tiley, NASCAR vehicle dynamic simulation engineer.
Ford’s Performance division is growing into off-road as well as on-road racing with its Baja-focused Bronco DR — but its sportscars are where the company sees the biggest potential to make money by producing race cars for customers in IMSA’s GT3, GT4 and Mustang World Challenge series.
“It’s a big step in customer support,” said Rushbrook. “When we did the (2016) Ford GT, we built only six cars. We weren’t able to sell that car to customers to race. Now with the new GT3 rules, we can race as a factory — which we will do with Multimatic (out of Canada) — but we can also sell the exact same car to customers so they can race in IMSA, Le Mans SRO.”
Sportscars will run under the Dark Horse badge. For the first time, Mustang will run its own World Challenge race series — just as Porsche and Ferrari have done for years.
Some 40 Mustang Dark Horse Rs — race versions of the Dark Horse production car gutted to fit rollbars and outfitted with slick ties — will be entered. Developed on Concord sims, the R will be powered by the same 5.0-liter Coyote V-8 as in the production car.
“Production-based Mustang vehicles have raced from the very beginning, all the way back to winning the 1964 Tour de France,” Rushbrook said. “Dark Horse R offers our passionate customers not just an attainable, factory-built race car, but also a racing series to compete with other Mustang enthusiasts.”
Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or Twitter @HenryEPayne.