When I heard that I was going to be driving our new Ford Mustang at Charlotte Motor Speedway as part of a tire test for 2027, I couldn’t believe my luck. Afterall, it isn’t every day that you get to be the first one to do anything, so I was super excited to get to the track and see it up close.
I wasn’t disappointed.
Even though the car was wrapped in a Ford Racing camouflage scheme, you could see how mean this car looks, and I say that in a good way. I’ve always felt our Ford Mustang is the best-looking Next Gen car of the three manufacturers, and this only strengthened that belief. The Ford Racing team did a great job of making this new SC easy on the eyes.
I feel like the first thing you notice is it definitely resembles the Ford Mustang Dark Horse SC street car in an incredible way, especially the front end. And then when you get around to the back end, you realize how aggressive it is and just how racy and sporty it looks.
Even though my experience behind the wheel of the SC production car was limited to Joey Logano’s driveway for a Fox pre-race feature, I was impressed with how everything has been raised to the next level. There’s no doubt that when you look at it, you instantly know it’s a Mustang. And there’s no doubt that when you drive it, it’s fast.
It’s so fast that on my first run the blue oval decal on the front hood blew off. That’s no lie.
When I think about it, though, I’m not surprised because I don’t think I’ve ever driven at Charlotte Motor Speedway at 8 a.m., and I have never felt the track have that much grip in my life. The whole first day was interesting because it would start out with a ton of grip and then by our lunch break, it was back to having none at all. As the day went on, the grip started trending back, so it was cool and funny to see that transition throughout the day.
We definitely got our money’s worth as far as the test went because we ended up running a total of 630 laps, not including the 267 we ran in the race a couple of days earlier. That was particularly helpful because I was able to compare what I felt with our current car to how the new car reacted on the same track and my first thoughts are all positive.
The weather we had during the race was overcast and cloudy while we had nothing but sun for both days of the test, so I feel like I got a good sense for what this car is going to be like. Overall, I feel the SC is going to help us be more competitive on the intermediate tracks because we had more grip and I was able to get into the corners better than I could with our current car.
I was in Detroit for the Season Launch in January when Mark Rushbrook unveiled the SC production car and announced it would be our new race car for 2027, but to see how much work has been done in a short amount of time is amazing. It’s insane for me to think that you can design, build and test a car from the ground up using only computers and the wind tunnel.
And while I know this season just ended, I can’t wait for 2027 to get started because this new car is gonna look incredible underneath the lights when we qualify for the Daytona 500.
Zane Smith is an American professional NASCAR driver.
