Ford builds a 1,400hp electric Mustang drag racer

If you want to go from a standstill to very fast as quickly as possible, there's nothing quite like an electric motor. They're compact, powerful, efficient, and they can make all their torque almost instantly, so they're pretty darn good at drag racing. Which is convenient for automakers who still need to convince 98 percent of American car buyers that battery electrics are worth a look, given the emotional resonance of the quarter-mile among the nation's car enthusiasts. That's why Ford Performance has put together the Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 prototype.

"This project was a challenge for all of us at Ford Performance, but a challenge we loved jumping into. We saw the Cobra Jet 1400 project as an opportunity to start developing electric powertrains in a race car package that we already had a lot of experience with, so we had performance benchmarks we wanted to match and beat right now. This has been a fantastic project to work on, and we hope the first of many coming from our team," said Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports.

The specs make the Mustang Shelby GT500 we tested last year seem pretty tame. The Cobra Jet packs more than a megawatt of power (1,400hp) and 811Nm (1,100lb-ft) of torque, with its electric motor and inverters supplied by Cascadia Motion, which also builds high-end electric motors and control hardware for race cars in F1, Formula E, Le Mans, and Pikes Peak. The powertrain software comes from well-known AEM, which recently added a new line of performance EV systems to its range of motorsport and tuning products.

Sadly, the specs that Ford is prepared to release end there—we're not sure what kind of battery the Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 uses, but since it's been built as a pure racer for the drag strip and nothing else, we imagine it's small, light, and maximized for power density, not energy density.

Ford says it should be able to run the quarter-mile (400m) in the low-eight-second range with a terminal speed of 170mph. That would make it significantly faster than the Mustang Lithium that Ford built for last year's SEMA. That electric pony car conversion boasted 671kW (900hp) and an even greater 1,356Nm (1,000lb-ft) at the rear wheels. But with a full production interior, six-speed manual transmission, and the need to remain street legal, the Mustang Lithium is at least a couple of seconds slower at the drag strip.

The Cobra Jet 1400 should also be more than a second faster than one of my favorite electric cars, the tiny orange Flux Capacitor. This started life in the 1970s as an Enfield 8000, a short-lived electric city built on the Isle of White and funded by a Greek shipping magnate. But a few years back, UK journalist Jonny Smith got hold of one and turned it into the world's fastest street-legal BEV when he ran the quarter-mile in 9.87 seconds.

Ford says it plans to debut the car officially later this year, but in the meantime it released this short testing video at what looks like the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It certainly appears to be going a lot faster than I did on the same drag strip last year in the GT500, and much more quietly, too.

Listing image by Ford

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