Ford has officially launched the new Ford Mustang GT3 at the 2023 24 Hours of Le Mans ahead of its debut next year. The new GT3 car is based on the road-going seventh-generation Ford Mustang muscle car. which has entered production this year.
The look of the car has been known for some months already, back in March Ford Performance showed off the first photos of the full-carbon prototype Ford Mustang GT3 during testing at Sebring and a short while later the car continued with more tests at the Multimatic factory in Mooresville, North Carolina. Multimatic has been a long-time partner with Ford and they did help to develop Ford´s last endurance machine, the Ford GT LM GTE. Multimatic is also supplying LMDh chassis for different manufacturers in the FIA World Endurance Championship and the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship, one of them being the Porsche 963.
Multimatic is helping with the development of the new Mustang on the technical side while the British rally specialists M-Sport are helping with tuning the 5.4 liters Coyote V8 which will be the heart of the new beast.
Shortly after the revealing, Ford also announced they have secured the first customer team for the new car. The German powerhouse Proton Competition will be switching from running Porsche 911 RSR in the LM GTE-AM to running a pair of Mustangs in the new GT3 category in WEC next season after the ACO announced they will be dropping the current class after this season. In the new LMGT3 that will be introduced from 2024 onwards, ACO and FIA will only allow two cars per manufacturer to be entered so this indicates that Proton will be running the factory team for Ford next season.
Besides Proton running in the WEC, Ford will also have a two-car factory team in the IMSA GTD Pro category next year with the official race debut set to be at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in February. where Multimatic will be taking charge of running the program. It is still unknown if the car will appear in any other series next year.
