Watch the Ford Mustang GTD Maximize its ‘Ring Time

When the Ford Mustang GTD became the fastest American car around the fabled Green Hell of Germany’s Nürburgring in December 2024, it still wasn’t fast enough. Blue Oval boffins were determined to find more pace from the mightiest Mustang ever made.

So Ford returned to the ‘Ring in April 2025 with a suite of updates to beat its previous 6:57.685 time around the 12.9-mile track. The suspension was modified, there were tweaks to the aerodynamics package, and braking and traction control systems, and laptops were plugged in to recalibrate the powertrain.

Each tiny alteration was designed to gain a fraction of a second at every one of the Nordschleife’s 73 corners and never-quite straightaways. The plan worked and the Ford Mustang GTD slashed more than five seconds off its 2024 attempt to cross the line in just 6:52.072, making it the fourth fastest production sports car on the Nürburgring’s leader board.

To demonstrate just how these incremental enhancements added up Ford has released a video comparing the 2024 and 2025 laps, with detailed telemetry overlays. You can see the side-by-side speed differential between the original and enhanced Mustang GTDs on every inch of the circuit, visualize the gap with a ghost car and see how driver Dirk Müller literally gets ahead of himself.

If you’re not familiar with the Green Hell, then a there’s a track map that follows the GTD around the Eifel forest circuit, highlighting key moments where the updated GTD progressively leaves the 2024 car behind. What’s fascinating is that at the start the two cars actually trade places a couple of times, suggesting it’s not raw acceleration where the improvement has been made. At points through the lap the original car is actually recording a higher speed, and the distance between the two ebbs and flows.

After 11 seconds the modified Mustang GTD begins to make its move, while just one minute from the start it’s almost 140 feet ahead, and at two minutes the lead has doubled. On the three-minute mark the gap is over 500 feet. At the legendary banked Karussell corner the delta drops to just 300 feet, but then Müller pushes on to pull a gap of more than 700 feet by the sixth minute. At the finish line the older car has closed again, but there’s still 550 feet between them.

It’s a fascinating watch and we can’t help but think it will help Ford to further maximize the Mustang for an even faster run around the ‘Ring.