Photo: Ford
On February 4, 2024, the new NASCAR Cup season should kick off with a bang at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. We already knew that the Busch Light Clash at The Coliseum event would kickstart what is likely to be a memorable racing season, but now that we got news of the new Mustang Dark Horse joining the fray, we're even more convinced that will be so.
The Blue Oval unleashed the Dark Horse into the world as "the first new performance nameplate for Mustang since 2001" more than a year ago, but it needed all this time to develop the NASCAR Cup variant of the monster. Which it presented with less fanfare than you would have expected on the first day of November.
The NASCAR-spec modified Mustang Dark Horse is the product of Ford Performance, and plans to be a serious contender in the upcoming competition. After all, it has some very big shoes to fill.
The Mustang as we know it first took part in NASCAR in 2011, when it joined the Xfinity Series. And it immediately proved to be a winning bet: in the 12 years that have passed since, Ford won either a driver's or owner's championship nine times. On top of that, it snatched the manufacturer's titles in 2011 and 2013.
In the Cup series, which it entered in 2019, the Mustang won a manufacturer's championship, a driver's championship, and had quite a performance in 2020, when it won no less than 18 races. It also has under its belt two wins at one of the most famous races on the planet, the Daytona 500.
As far as what lies ahead goes, with the arrival of the NASCAR Cup Mustang the nameplate is now present in racing competitions on all of Earth's continents. The coming year will see these Ford cars engage in track battles in the Repco Supercars Championship in Australia, the Formula Drift series, GT3 and GT4 races, and the Mustang Challenge Series.
As for the Mustang variant that formed the base of the new Ford NASCAR racer, the Dark Horse can be had by civilians for prices that start at $59,270. At the time of writing are two versions on the table, the standard and the Premium.
Both are powered by a variant of the 5.0-liter Coyote engine that develops 500 horsepower. The car in this configuration is described by Ford as "most track-capable 5.0-liter V8 street-legal Mustang ever," and we’re already getting a sense of that, as more and more drag races featuring the Blue Oval's new star muscle car come to light showing the thing's capabilities.
We'll have to wait and see how it performs in the hands of professional drivers on the oval tracks.
The NASCAR-spec modified Mustang Dark Horse is the product of Ford Performance, and plans to be a serious contender in the upcoming competition. After all, it has some very big shoes to fill.
The Mustang as we know it first took part in NASCAR in 2011, when it joined the Xfinity Series. And it immediately proved to be a winning bet: in the 12 years that have passed since, Ford won either a driver's or owner's championship nine times. On top of that, it snatched the manufacturer's titles in 2011 and 2013.
In the Cup series, which it entered in 2019, the Mustang won a manufacturer's championship, a driver's championship, and had quite a performance in 2020, when it won no less than 18 races. It also has under its belt two wins at one of the most famous races on the planet, the Daytona 500.
As far as what lies ahead goes, with the arrival of the NASCAR Cup Mustang the nameplate is now present in racing competitions on all of Earth's continents. The coming year will see these Ford cars engage in track battles in the Repco Supercars Championship in Australia, the Formula Drift series, GT3 and GT4 races, and the Mustang Challenge Series.
As for the Mustang variant that formed the base of the new Ford NASCAR racer, the Dark Horse can be had by civilians for prices that start at $59,270. At the time of writing are two versions on the table, the standard and the Premium.
Both are powered by a variant of the 5.0-liter Coyote engine that develops 500 horsepower. The car in this configuration is described by Ford as "most track-capable 5.0-liter V8 street-legal Mustang ever," and we’re already getting a sense of that, as more and more drag races featuring the Blue Oval's new star muscle car come to light showing the thing's capabilities.
We'll have to wait and see how it performs in the hands of professional drivers on the oval tracks.
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