How Ford Stole The Detroit Auto Show

Welcome to the gas, the Detroit Auto Show Edition, or should I say the Ford Auto Show Edition.

Explain that in a minute.

I'm Gary Gastelou.

This is the Gary and Alex show.

And with me, of course, our favorite Ford Mustang owner, Alex Nunez.

You're really frightening me as to be like the top Mustang influencer when, in fact,

you are a 20-year-old car.

That's what I'm saying.

You are America's premier 2006 Mustang GT convertible driver.

It's a known fact.

Well, it's something.

That's for sure, Gary.

So the Detroit Auto Show was going on this week.

Alex, normally people like you and I would be in Detroit covering the Auto Show.

I remember spending three days there chasing dozens of press conferences, and that just

happened this year, did it?

I used to have to be up at around four in the morning during the Detroit Auto Show in

usually on a Sunday.

Oh, yeah.

The worst weather, getting ready, if I was there with a media outlet, you're trying

to get there early.

And when I was doing PR, same thing, you're up there early.

You're there before it opens.

I'll say this.

If you're there early, if you're in the media, you might be waiting outside the doors waiting

for it to open.

If you're with an automaker, at least I was in the Hyundai lounge having cappuccinos

while I waited for people to show up.

Two, three, wasn't it like 4,000 journalists?

That was amazing.

I remember those lines very well.

It's shocking to me, frankly, how almost an afterthought it has become compared to what

it was.

It was the, apart from Geneva, another one that is now just a very small echo of what

it once was.

It's not even Switzerland, but Detroit was where everything got announced.

And listen, we live in a different era.

Everybody understands that they can have their own share of voice without having to compete,

and they'll do their own events, or they'll do a digital reveal on YouTube or whatever.

The coverage is effectively the same, so the appetite is long gone for the most part

for these shows.

I mean, you saw it with big automakers leaving early on.

So the Germans leaving first, and then here we are, where Detroit happens, not a lot to

talk about.

The other ones happen, usually maybe one or two things to talk about, but Detroit happened.

And like you said, Ford, I think, took advantage of the fact that nobody else had anything

to say.

Ford unveiled technically one vehicle at the show, the new Bronco RTR, although it

was actually at an event the night before the technical press day of the show.

So press day didn't actually have any new car reveals this year, but they did do the

Bronco RTR Tuesday night, Wednesday was press day.

And then on Thursday night, Ford Racing had its big season launch event over at the

Michigan Central Station, not at the show itself, where they unveiled the new Mustang

Dark Horse SC, the new supercharged version of the Mustang Dark Horse, and then all

of them racing stuff coming up.

Before we get to the racing stuff, I do want to talk about these couple of vehicles first

because they are pretty cool.

First off, there's the Bronco RTR.

This is a collaboration with Vaughn Gittin Jr.'s RTR vehicles.

They've already got the Mustang RTR in the works.

That's a drift-focused version of the Mustang, Bronco RTR off-road, high-speed driving

type vehicle.

Amazingly, Vaughn does both things professionally, drifting and king of the hammers and

all that fun off-road stuff.

They're really in on him as a brand, though, by bringing RTR in here.

I mean, besides Shelby, they've never really done this before with an outside brand.

Yeah, I think it's a smart play, frankly.

What RTR does on the motorsport side is fun and it talks to, frankly, a younger and

different demographic.

This is why you see Dark Horse and now Dark Horse SC is the two sort of top Mustang

V8 cars also.

They're not these Shelby-licensed vehicles.

They're doing their own thing.

But going back to RTR, the whole positioning of RTR is about having fun and all that stuff,

which aligns with professional drifting.

If you've ever taken the time to watch clips from King of the Hammers and stuff

like that, this is bonkers stuff.

I think in terms of brand alignment, it's smart.

It is a real motor sports-adjacent play, and frankly, the stuff looks cool.

The RTR vehicles have their own look and feel that is something that RTR established before

they became this partner with Ford, where you now have actual Ford vehicles that you

go buy at the Ford dealer with normal warranty and all that stuff.

The Bronco RTR, basically a budget raptor in a lot of ways.

It's got the turbocharged four-cylinder.

The big change there, they added an anti-leg system, which the

Mustang RTR also uses, and it's got 33-inch all-terrain tires.

You can get a Sasquatch, which upgrades to the Haas 3.0.

They didn't announce a price, but they said it'll be less than a Bronco Badlands with

the Sasquatch, which right now is 56 grand.

Considering a Bronco Raptor is 90 grand, this seems like it'll be a pretty good deal

if it hits that target point there.

That's going to be the Raptor for everybody.

I think it has a shot at being the best-selling Bronco, at least of the more

upfitted off-roading ones, simply because you're going to get a lot of the good

of the Raptor without having to drop 90 grand.

Switching over to the Mustang Dark Horse SC.

This is the latest version of the Mustang to feature the supercharged

5.2-liter V8 engine, which we last saw in the Shelby GT 500

that was discontinued after 2022.

As you mentioned, moving from Shelby to Dark Horse, actually asked Ford

about this, they said, yeah, that's very intentional.

We've got this new Ford Racing brand, Dark Horse is what we use in NASCAR,

Dark Horse, we're using the Mustang Challenge.

Shelby's just not our racing brand anymore.

So we kind of put that on the shelf for now.

And I'm guessing the customer base is kind of aged out of this segment anyway.

Wouldn't you agree?

Yeah, I mean, listen, as long as you create something that looks cool,

sounds right and makes all that power and does all that stuff,

it doesn't matter. You could call it the Cookie Monster Edition.

No one's going to care. They're going to want the car.

It's cool. I think, you know, listen, the car looks and sounds the business.

You know, like you said, they didn't announce power figures yet,

so they'll save that for the future.

But I'm sure it's, you know, going to be 700 something, you know, horsepower.

Frankly, what Ford's done is they've got a nice ladder set up in Mustang.

I mean, you get into any Mustang and you're over 300 horsepower, right?

So even with like a complete base rental spec, you know, Mustang,

it's still 300 300 plus horsepower GT, you know, way over 400 horsepower,

dark horse, 500 horsepower, all motor, you know, that's that's a really sweet place to be.

And this supercharged car is something that, you know,

people have been waiting for that halo car to come back.

And this seems like it's going to fit the bill.

And it sounds like it's going to be, you know, pretty track capable

from a practical perspective, 80% of GTD for, you know, much more normal money.

Kind of a side at the Ford racing event after they revealed the Dark Horse

SC, they mentioned it's going to be going racing with NASCAR at the Daytona 500

in 2027. They didn't say anything more about it than that.

But what I've gotten from this is that they're going to be changing

the identity of Ford's NASCAR Cup Series car in 2027.

Right now it's a regular Dark Horse.

They're going to be changing this to the Dark Horse SC because, you know,

NASCARs are all supercharged.

This does give them the opportunity to update the body again,

which they did in 2024 when it switched from regular Mustang to Dark Horse.

You know, this year, of course, we've got the Camara getting updated.

A couple of teams jumping ship from Ford, Rick Ware racing and Haas

both switching to Chevy this year.

There's a good chance that Chevy ends up with a big performance advantage,

even though they tried to balance it, even though Ford and Toyota approved

all these changes, but I imagine Ford is going to be wanting to have a new car

as soon as he can get one. 100%.

So that's what it's going to be.

I mean, this the new car body is going to have, you know,

things that can translate to the to the NASCAR silhouette

and probably give them an advantage over the current car.

And then, of course, they release some new information

about the hypercar program that's also coming in 2027.

That's going to debut at the 24 hours of long as expected.

It's going to have a V8 engine.

And as it turns out, it's basically the same 5.4 liter V8,

which they brand Coyote, just like the Mustangs five liter that's

in the current Mustang GT three car.

But the difference is hypercar is a hybrid system.

So you jump up for about 550 horsepower GT three to about 670

in hypercar combined in the V8 with some electric drive.

Ford's going to tap into its Red Bull Ford powertrain partnership

that's developing the power units for the Red Bull and Racing Bulls teams.

One thing that's interesting about this is that a couple of weeks ago,

I saw a job opening for a Ford racing communications position

and I mentioned that it's going to be covering the Mustang brand

in NASCAR in IMSA and in hypercar.

So they might actually put the Mustang name

on this V8 powered hypercar as well.

It would not surprise me if they did.

It would be smart, in my opinion, if they did.

Mustang is your performance brand.

It's obviously your racing brand.

So why not carry it all the way through?

The other thing that jumps out at me, it's like they're running a V8.

You know, this is this is going to be a new war of whose V8 sounds better

between Ford and Cadillac and who's got the better boom

coming out of the pits after the, as you know, with these GTP and hypercars.

They they leave the pits very quickly out of, you know, under electric power.

And then the combustion engine cuts in the Cadillac is the clear champion

of how awesome that entire experience sounds.

So it sounds like Ford's going to get in on this.

So another another area for Ford and GM to sort of go to battle here.

That's going to be fun to watch them versus Cadillac there.

But of course, this year, they're going to be battling each other in Formula

one, Ford with Red Bull Cadillac with its own team.

The beef and has already started and I don't know how organic this is

or if they're riling each other up together.

But the head of the Cadillac Formula one team, Dan Taurus was talking to the

athletic and when he was asked about Cadillac's effort and Ford's effort,

he said, it's not even close.

One's a marketing deal with very minimal impact.

That'd be Ford.

While GM is an equity owner in the Cadillac team, deeply embedded

from an engineering standpoint and involved from day one, these two deals

couldn't be more different.

Bill Ford over Ford retorted, I would say, actually, the reverse is true.

They're running a Ferrari engine, which is true Cadillac's a Ferrari customer.

They're not running a Cadillac engine.

They will be in twenty twenty nine, however.

I don't know if they even have any GM employees on the race.

Oh, my God, it's all so funny.

I mean, this is a level of trash talk.

So people that don't like sort of live and breathe this stuff.

These two companies kind of do really hate each other that that rival.

It's not some it's not some invented rivalry, you know, between the two.

If I'm Formula One, I'm loving this.

And, you know, if I'm the Netflix producers of Drive to Survive,

I'm praying to God that this carries on through the whole season

because this is exactly the sort of soapy stuff that just that that

particular Formula One fan, the Drive to Survive F1 fan, you know, lives for.

It's hilarious that this like level of trash talk has already begun.

Not a single wheel has been turned in anger yet.

It's it's like, let's get to Australia already and see, you know,

see where the chips start to fall.

Formula One totally stepped in it with these two brands joining the series.

And when you think back a couple of years or even just over a year,

it's hard to believe they were even resistant to allowing Cadillac

to come into Formula One.

It's crazy. This is one of the best things to happen.

You have this you have a fresh platform.

You know, yes, there are Formula One teams that are very well established

and have incredible resources to develop vehicles and test and do all that stuff,

you know, outside of, you know, outside of what you normally see.

But the reality is it's a brand new car.

It's kind of, you know, level playing field in that sense for everybody going in.

Although it's funny, you're already reading that, you know,

Ferrari is somehow behind.

It's like, come on, guys, get, you know, get it together.

But but this is this is the ideal time for these two American brands to show up,

you know, Ford, obviously appearing on the Oracle Red Bull, you know, cars.

So that's a that's a well established thing.

And and Cadillac coming in, you know, as a newcomer,

ready to take some swings at its traditional rival.

And frankly, probably everybody else there.

And I give Cadillac credit because they could easily slipped in here

and been like, you know, we're just getting started.

We'll see how it goes.

Might be a couple of years before we're running up front.

But they're making it sound like they're in it to win it in 2026.

Whereas Ford, and we're talking to Mark Rushbrook from Ford a couple of weeks

ago about this, they're joining Red Bull.

That's a front running team. They have to do well.

And they do need to do well.

You know, there's there is credibility, you know, on the line here.

If you go in there and get your, you know, teeth knocked in on a weekly basis.

It's just, you know, it's one other thing that you have to climb out of.

There are going to be some probable growing pains.

But again, I could also be totally wrong.

Nobody knows what's going to happen until the first race.

Again, it's Formula One.

People are going to find the loopholes and exploit them.

Let's see how good everybody is at doing that.

And, you know, maybe you get an interesting championship one way or the other.

Could end up being wrong, Formula One all over again,

or it could end up being Mercedes 2014 all over again.

My money's on Mercedes dominating this season.

I'm just saying that right out front here, but hopefully that won't be the case.

Hopefully cars will be all over the place.

Everybody's going to have something wonderful going on.

And every race will be interesting instead of just one team dominating

the next couple of seasons, because Formula One's biggest problem

is they don't move fast enough when that happens as far as updating the rules.

In the meantime, one thing I do know GM is winning at.

It's the acceleration wars in the sports car space, particularly American.

But even at this point, I would say they're the quickest car in the world.

They just put down the official numbers for the ZR1X.

That's the 1250 horsepower hybrid version of the Corvette.

Listen to this, Alex.

On a prep drag strip, we'll start there.

Zero to 60, 1.68 seconds, quarter mile, 8.675 seconds

at 159 miles an hour.

Insane numbers from this thing.

I mean, that beats the Dodge Demon in the quarter mile.

Though the demon did beat it with 1.66 to 60, but it was running drag

radials and that's a whole other thing.

It's totally crazy.

I've almost gotten sort of bored by the numbers because so many vehicles

and many of them electric are putting up essentially what are like

sport bike numbers at the track for these kinds of things.

But these numbers for this Corvette are nuts.

One and a half seconds.

This is like unheard of.

It's not some small thing either.

I mean, you stood next to a modern Corvette.

These are not small cars.

You know, the footprint is substantial.

The quarter mile time is crazy, but the track speed is nuts.

I mean, this is just banana stuff or something that you could then turn

around and just daily drive, you know, and just do little milk runs with it.

And it's going to be just as happy as, you know,

essentially making the jump to hyperspace on demand.

On an unprepared surface, 1.89 seconds to 60, so slow.

And 8.99 second quarter mile.

Now, the big thing here is that as a hybrid, it's all wheel drive.

It's got the electric motor driving the front wheels, the V8 driving the rear wheel.

So you get all that extra traction.

And just to put that into perspective, the 1064 horsepower is zero one,

which is just rear wheel drive, basically the zero one X without the electric

motor up front needs 2.3 seconds to go to 60.

So that launch from that extra traction really does help.

Although once you get up to speed, they've got the same top speed.

Yeah, 2.3 seconds is intolerable.

Embarrassing.

Quickest car I've ever driven is the Pina Frida Batista,

which is two, three million dollars.

That does a 1.89 zero to 60 as well.

And it really is just an absurd experience to go through.

Put it this way, if you drop one of these cars from the sky,

it needs about three seconds to get to 60 miles an hour.

It's crazy. And the Batista, which you mentioned, again, all electric.

The ZR1 and ZR1X, these are primarily combustion vehicles.

Yeah, the ZR1X is hybrid, so it has the the electric driver.

These are bananas numbers for combustion vehicles.

I mean, what that Corvette engineering team has,

you know, done some miraculous stuff, you know, here with these sort of

apex level predator versions of the C8.

And it makes two hundred and nine thousand dollars or whatever the base

prices for the ZR1X now sound almost like a bargain.

Yeah, it's peanuts.

You know, again, to buy that, to buy the same performance.

And, you know, I've talked to my friends who will argue with,

well, it's not the same, the cache doesn't matter.

If if you're there for the pure, you know, performance thing,

Corvette has always been an insane performance value.

And it applies here at the top end, even at, you know,

two hundred thousand dollars, which is a very obviously enormously

expensive car, but still a gigantic value for the performance for that money.

This sort of stuff is the future and present of performance cars.

But our friends over at NASCAR are going back to the future

in updating their postseason format.

Very exciting news this week that they are getting rid of the playoffs

as we expected, the elimination playoffs and returning to a new version

of the classic NASCAR chase.

It's going to be the last 10 races of the season.

Sixteen drivers will qualify.

Big difference between now and the last couple of years of the chase,

as well as the playoffs, there's no win in your end.

It's all based on season points, but they finally made wins worth more.

Last year, if you want to race, you got 40 points.

Second place got 35 points.

Now, if you win a race, you get 55 points.

Everybody seems happy with this decision.

As I mentioned last week, I'm really glad that they brought back the chase name.

So I think there's a lot of potential here in the chase.

And just, you know, again, from a competition's perspective,

10 races is more than some racing series have right now.

Yeah, that itself is a season.

I know that I've said it on this show in the past.

You know, I was I was for a full season points format.

But this is, frankly, this is the ideal compromise.

I think they everybody gets something that they like out of it.

Winning is still encouraged, which is what you want.

I mean, you want guys out there racing to win.

You have a clear advantage if you go out there and run up front

and manage to get a win, your accumulating points to try and get into the chase.

I like the fact that winning, that they give a little emphasis on winning.

But the reality is consistent performance is going to benefit you

and put you in a better position to make the chase.

And the chase is going to be thrilling.

Those last 10 races, it just changes the whole dynamic

for at least for me as a viewer, where it's like I'm not just watching,

you know, for guys, it's a real it's a real race where half the field

is in the chase and finding for the championship.

So this is a good thing for NASCAR and I'm looking forward to it.

And I'm fairly certain that no one ever clinched

the championship under the chase before the final race.

Maybe it happened once.

I don't think it happened at all.

So these go down to the wire, even though Jimmy Johnson's were very close.

This is what you want.

But you want you want meaningful races all the way down the stretch.

And this is a this is a more authentic way to decide a champion

than the playoff elimination format, which, you know, bad luck could

could ruin your your your day and your and your shot at winning a championship.

Whereas here, even if, you know, you could wreck,

and that's going to have a negative impact on your ability,

you know, in terms of your ability to collect points in the chase.

But you're still in it.

You know, you're not your chances are not completely obliterated,

you know, if something like that happens.

So I think it's going to be fun to watch and develop.

Interestingly enough, people have been going back

and applying the new format to the playoffs years.

Turns out Kyle Larson still would have been champ last year.

Now, the dynamics different.

Last year, you were racing for that win and you're in.

You might have approached the season differently

than you will now with the chase format.

I'm no dog in this fight.

I understand the position.

But the those championships and the ones

that people like, you know, a rag on Logano for winning, saying,

oh, it's not as authentic or whatever.

It's with those were the rules of the game.

The drivers don't have any control over this.

You have to win in the context of what it is.

And so Joey Logano won those championships.

It's funny how it always comes down.

It's like, you know, Kyle Larson would have won this.

Kyle Larson is a really, really good race car driver, guys.

He is legit that good.

So there are a lot of guys that run NASCAR who are really good drivers.

And I think that this is what I think this could be a lot of fun.

This coming off of what was such an ugly, ugly episode with this trial

where everything seemed like the whole thing was going to burn down

to the point where it almost feels like that was 10 years ago

because there is so much juice around this chase announcement

and there's going to be so much juice going into the season around it.

After this came out, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

basically said he was kind of done with NASCAR.

He was losing interest in the sport that he is the biggest name.

He's the biggest name of the 21st century.

No doubt about that.

He was starting to lose interest in it.

Tony Stewart, who we should mention, is going to be the first one

of the Ram truck free agent drivers at Daytona.

He left NASCAR.

He was the Stuart Hawes team.

They were done with NASCAR.

Now he's coming back to race for that team.

And he's more excited about things as well.

Ultimately, he came down to, according to Steve O'Donnell,

the president of NASCAR.

He said, I needed a system that if I got in the elevator with somebody

and we went up 20 flights, I can explain how our playoffs work.

You couldn't do that with the old one.

No.

Playoff points with the knockout rounds and all that sort of thing.

One thing that's not changing, though, stage racing is here to stay.

I'm sure the TV folks love that.

You're still going to get points for stages,

but they did get rid of the whole playoff points thing,

which I'm still not even sure I knew how that works.

I never understood the playoff points things.

The stage racing is I'm not so crazy about it.

I wish I had no problem with winning stages.

I don't like the stage cautions, which sort of like throws a huge anchor.

Flipping the stage is an annoying strategy for me.

I wish you, but they would just lock the field started up again after the break.

I'd be happier with that.

Like they do an ARCA with a halftime break.

Yeah, I'm with you on that.

I mean, honestly, I think the stage the stages should just be at the

at those lap numbers and then they just keep racing instead of the caution.

But like you said, you know, caution is a very valuable TV time out

for the broadcast partners.

Nevertheless, Chad fans are always going to complain about something.

But we are now a month away from the Daytona 500.

And I think this is going to be the most

psyched most NASCAR fans have been in a decade.

Yeah. And you mentioned it in passing.

I think it deserves a little more attention before we sign off here.

This Ram and colleague racing free agent truck

is going to wind up being one of the best ideas ever.

It takes that sort of the Trackhouse Project 91 idea.

And by making that a weekly thing, it's awesome.

And now you're opening it with Tony Stewart.

I mean, this is just so smart and so cool.

And it's going to put additional eyeballs on that truck race.

This was something they worked on.

They wanted to get Tony Stewart into that truck.

If they're putting that much effort into week one,

you know they're going to be doing the same sort of thing throughout the year.

Who is going to be the driver week to week?

That is a huge announcement.

You look at the NASCAR schedule.

That schedule is crazy.

It's essentially the whole year that you have a very newsworthy moment

like that for every single race.

And it's not even for Cup.

It's for trucks for your Friday night series.

That's wild.

I'm looking forward to what Dodge does when it joins the Cup series,

whether that's 27 or 28, probably looking like 28 at the earliest at this point.

But if they're doing this much with the truck series,

things are going to be even crazier there.

They're able to use the truck series as a laboratory for a bunch of ideas.

And I think everybody's going to be watching.

These are ideas that people should rip off.

It's good better for the sport.

Yeah, I'm still surprised Ford and Toyota and Chevy have not stepped up

with any fun stuff in trucks yet to match Ram.

I can't believe they're giving them the stage for this.

Here we are talking about the truck series,

which is something that is not we would not customarily be doing.

You if you're talking about NASCAR, you generally are talking about Cup.

It makes also a ton of sense to put this energy into trucks

because that's all those brands sell.

That's it, that the trucks pay for everything.

Well, that kicks off next month in Daytona

and the racing season kicks off next week in Daytona with the Rolex 24

and will be back next week.

So if you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast

on your favorite platform or on all the big ones now

and head over to Americancarsandracing.com every day

to keep up with the latest automotive news.

The gas is production of a car, media and American cars and recent.

How Ford Stole The Detroit Auto Show

About this episode

Ford Shelby Gt500

Request an Explanation

Want to learn more?

Help improve this episode

More from The GAS: An American Cars And Racing Podcast