You hardly ever end up with positive results when messing with the styling of an iconic muscle car. The best you can hope for is to mix and match relatively similar design philosophies in a way that doesn’t disturb the vehicle's entire look.
The story of how the sixth-generation Mustang came to be is a fascinating one. During the model’s early design stages, Ford struggled to make the new car look different from the old one, which eventually resulted in a “back to the drawing board” type of approach.
“We wanted to sort of shrink-wrap the car around its mechanicals and make it look lighter, make it look more efficient, make it look like it could handle better,” said design VP Moray Callum back in 2014, during an interview with Car and Driver.
Compared to its predecessor, the current-gen Mustang is wider, lower, and more planted both visually and mechanically, and if we jump directly to the Shelby GT500, which is the car used for this “face swap” by Superrenderscars, then we end up with arguably the most aggressive-looking Mustang ever made.
This render does away with the Shelby GT500’s entire front fascia, replacing it with that of an F40 BMW M135i hatchback instead. It’s not just the headlights and grille, but also the Bimmer’s M Sport bumper that digitally made its way onto the American Muscle car. We actually don’t mind the bumper since it doesn’t break up any important design lines. Everything else? Controversial at best.
The headlights are clearly too big for a Mustang, and the grille, well, let’s not open up that can of worms.
There’s really nothing we’d take off an F40 1-Series and put it on or inside a 2020 Shelby GT500. However, if we were dealing with a base-spec Mustang, you could probably talk us into swapping the 310-hp 2.3-liter EcoBoost unit for the M135i’s higher-revving 302-hp turbocharged 2.0-liter four-pot.
“We wanted to sort of shrink-wrap the car around its mechanicals and make it look lighter, make it look more efficient, make it look like it could handle better,” said design VP Moray Callum back in 2014, during an interview with Car and Driver.
Compared to its predecessor, the current-gen Mustang is wider, lower, and more planted both visually and mechanically, and if we jump directly to the Shelby GT500, which is the car used for this “face swap” by Superrenderscars, then we end up with arguably the most aggressive-looking Mustang ever made.
This render does away with the Shelby GT500’s entire front fascia, replacing it with that of an F40 BMW M135i hatchback instead. It’s not just the headlights and grille, but also the Bimmer’s M Sport bumper that digitally made its way onto the American Muscle car. We actually don’t mind the bumper since it doesn’t break up any important design lines. Everything else? Controversial at best.
The headlights are clearly too big for a Mustang, and the grille, well, let’s not open up that can of worms.
There’s really nothing we’d take off an F40 1-Series and put it on or inside a 2020 Shelby GT500. However, if we were dealing with a base-spec Mustang, you could probably talk us into swapping the 310-hp 2.3-liter EcoBoost unit for the M135i’s higher-revving 302-hp turbocharged 2.0-liter four-pot.