About a year ago, before the Mustang Mach-E broke coverage, Ford’s motorsports division quietly began working on something outrageous: a unique version of the 1,400-horsepower electric vehicle. Now the company is showing it for the first time. Dubbed the Mustang Mach-E 1400, it is a wicked-looking three-seat demo car that screams like a soul in pain and smokes tires like they’re on fire.
Equipped with a massive rear spoiler, aerodynamic bodywork and seven, yes, Seven – Electric motors, the Mustang Mach-E 1400 has a top speed of around 160 miles per hour. Presumably he can reach that speed very quickly, although Ford says he hasn’t yet compared a time of 0-60 mph or a quarter mile.
The engines draw their power from a relatively small 56.8kWh battery (which is about 75 percent of the “standard range” Mach-E production capacity) made up of nickel, manganese, and cobalt (NMC) bag cells. . Ford says these cells allow for “ultra high performance and a high discharge rate,” and that the package is designed to cool with liquid while charging to quickly refill.
Still, a battery pack of that size that powers seven motors will run out pretty quickly. Since this is just a demo car, Mark Rushbrook, the global director of Ford Performance, tells The edge The goal was to create something that could do multiple runs in the span of, say, an hour before needing to recharge, all while showing the “extreme potential” of Ford’s EV technology.
As for those electric motors – four drive the rear wheels and three drive the front, so the demo car can cut power in many different ways. It can operate in all-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, or front-wheel drive modes, and can be easily adjusted for drag racing, traditional track driving, or drifting.
That this unique electrical system can produce massive smoke burns should come as no surprise, as Ford Performance built the Mustang Mach-E 1400 with the help of professional tramp Vaughn Gittin Jr. Rushbrook says the company’s collaboration with Gittin Jr. it was the result of A lucky moment.
“We as a company are making this huge investment, $ 11.5 billion by the end of 2022 in full electric cars,” he says, “[so] we, in motorsports, start to think: ‘Well, how can we be part of this? At the same time, Rushbrook says that Gittin Jr., who has a long history of working with Ford and manufacturing terrifyingly fast special cars. – “He started thinking about fully electric cars and what he could do with a high-performance version of one.”
Ford reportedly considered entering Formula E, the young but exciting all-electric alternative to Formula One, and even had conversations with the Penske-owned team. Racing in motorsport is the typical way of showing a company’s technology (and pushing it to the limit). Rushbrook says Ford Performance is holding the door open to join an all-electric racing series (many others have emerged in the wake of Formula E), but he also says there’s a benefit to having built the Mustang Mach-E 1400 as one. : off: “There are no rules”.
That is why the car the company ended up developing is so absurd. While there are a fair amount of hybrid and electric supercars that produce 1,000 or more horsepower, few do it with the hype of seven engines. Rushbrook says this allowed his team to practice “extreme learning,” especially when it comes to thermal management of the battery as well as the braking system. This helped inform the consumer version of the Mustang Mach-E, he says, that it will be out later this year.
To showcase the capabilities of the Mustang Mach-E 1400, Ford released a video of it adrift and exhausted after exhaustion alongside some of the more recognizable performance variants, such as the company’s NASCAR car, Ken Block’s Hoonicorn, and one of Gittin Jr.’s own custom Mustangs.
Believe it or not, this is not the first 1,400 horsepower electric Mustang to come out of Ford Performance this year. In April, the company debuted a Mustang drag racing with electricity. Ford Performance also helped create an electric Mustang with a manual transmission that was unveiled at last year’s Special Equipment Markets Association (SEMA) trade show in Las Vegas.
But the Mustang Mach-E 1400 has a much more specific purpose. With those other projects, the company was introducing electrical technology into Mustangs that were built to run on gasoline. However, this scandalous new exception is a modification of the first Mustang that went electric from the get-go. It’s another way to sell people with the idea that an electric Mustang can go stupidly fast, even if it’s an SUV meant for a family of four.
