Ford Performance has been granted an “erratum” fix by the FIA for its new Mustang GT3 ahead of this weekend’s FIA WEC weekend at Spa and IMSA weekend at Laguna Seca, RACER has learned.
The changes to the car are reliability-focused and have been made to rectify the issues surrounding the car’s boot lid and diffuser, which were becoming loose, damaged, or altogether detached during the races since its global debut back in January at Daytona.
The tweaks count as an official “out-of-cycle” homologation extension (erratum), which were signed off ahead of this weekend following a rapid turnaround by the FIA. The paperwork associated with these tweaks was submitted last Friday by Ford, allowing it to receive the green light before the WEC cars hit the track yesterday in Spa.
“These are changes we wanted to make as soon as possible,” Kevin Groot, Ford’s global sportscar racing program manager, told RACER. “And thankfully we have been able to make them prior to the Mustang’s Le Mans debut.”
Speaking about the boot lid fix, Groot explained that the issue had only occurred once during the car’s development and testing phase at Paul Ricard. Ford believes it began to happen frequently during races when cars would follow the Mustang closely and disrupt airflow. It has been solved with new latches.
“We saw that the issue would stem from the crease at the back end of the boot,” he said. “We have improved its stiffness to prevent the folding from happening. In competition, we were getting air pushing up from underneath and it was causing that to break the bonds on the stiffening elements that were in place to stop it from folding.
“We tried a few things, but couldn’t get it to work, so we’ve had to put latches in there. Now we have a second set of latches from the top upper edge, so we don’t expect that issue to happen again. There are severe damage considerations around rear bumper contact that could destroy those parts, but in general, the boot lid should be secure in aero-type events.”