2018 Ford Mustang Cobra Jet First Look: One Fast Pony

What better place than Woodward Avenue during Dream Cruise week for Ford to unleash a limited-edition 50th anniversary Mustang Cobra Jet race car.

With the roar of engines and high-octane smell lingering over the boulevard from night after night of cruising leading up to the main rolling event on Saturday, Ford ups the ante with the fastest production Mustang on the drag strip. The car was shown to the media today and will make its public debut at the Dream Cruise on Saturday as part of the Mustang Alley display.

The 2018 Mustang Cobra Jet is a turnkey race car—it’s not street legal—and Ford will only make 68 of them to mark the year the original debuted. You have a choice of two colors: Race Red or Oxford White. Price tag: $130,000, not including available anniversary badging and graphics. You can place your order now.

Under the hood is a 5.2-liter version of Ford’s 5.0-liter Coyote V-8 with a 3.0-liter Whipple supercharger. Ford says the car can exceed 150 mph and do the quarter-mile run in about 8.5 seconds, which means it has at least 700 horsepower and likely substantially more (more specs including horsepower will be revealed later this summer). For perspective: Motor Trend clocked the Tesla Model S P100D’s quarter-mile at 10.5 seconds.

The Mustang has a four-link rear suspension, 9-inch solid rear axle, two-way coil-over shocks with adjustable ride height, and a low-drag disc brake system from Strange Engineering. An NHRA-certified safety roll cage can be ordered from the factory along with FIA-certified seats and anniversary-badged racing wheels.

This latest rendition is a reverent nod to the original Cobra Jet engine that debuted, and won, in 1968 at the NHRA Winternationals. The orignial V-8 generated 335 horsepower and 440 lb-ft of torque. Ford brought back a Mustang Cobra Jet in 2008 with a supercharged 5.4-liter V-8; that run was limited to 50 examples, and they did not have VINs and thus weren’t street legal. From 2009 to 2016 Ford made another 250 cars.

The 2018 model was developed by the Ford Performance team and uses the 2018 Mustang platform. But again, no VINs.

If you can’t get to Woodward, the new Mustang Cobra Jet will be in Norwalk, Ohio, Aug. 25 for the 50th Anniversary Ford Performance Cobra Jet Reunion at Summit Motorsports Park, which is expected to attract more than 150 cars.

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