Ken Block FINALLY HOONS The New FORD MUSTANG MACH-E

Remember when Ford invited me out for the first drive of the all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E but wouldn’t let me HOON it? Well today I get a second chance thanks to Ford Performance and RTR Vehicles (who helped to design and build my 1965 Ford Mustang Hoonicorn V1 & V2) and this time it’s in a one-of-a-kind – 1,400 horsepower prototype – built specifically for sliding sideways and slaying tires – and it is a beast!

I’m jared deanda and you know these guys ken block vaughn gittin jr welcome to my state for keeping social distance here but uh we’re at the ford proving grounds these are these are some hallowed grounds when you say your state though it’s arizona yes i’m from arizona we’re in arizona i had to drive here as did you guys you drove all the way from maryland yes

So we did and i drove 10 hours down for park city with a stop at lake powell on the way that’s that i know you got to have your these are hallowed grounds man coming in here there’s some awesome features have you been here before yeah last time i was here i we were doing some testing on one of our race cars and there were four gt mules out testing which was

Just super rad have you been to these yeah yeah before we’re fortunate in being the ford performance family we get access and it’s amazing to have all the run of the facility which we have today i mean there’s a 20 acre concrete pad right behind us you know and so for ken and i it’s a great place to do things this is a playground speaking of play you get

To do something you’ve never done before there’s been footage of you driving a very special vehicle that has a pony on it it’s part of the ford family it’s new technology why are you here today well last i think it was like november i was part of like the launch program for the maki and uh i just wanted to slide it around it can i own it can i own it can i

Hold it you can finally home no still no emma was very nice and she just kept saying no i think there was only three units at that time and they hadn’t launched the car yet so they would they were just absolutely not letting me drive it very aggressively and it was raining out so i had a lot of fun but today vaughn has a brand new toy uh the you and ford

Performance built yeah we built it you know rtr team built it similar team to built uh the unicorn we dreamed up this this project and collaborated for performance and uh built a very badass battery electric ford mustang yeah you need you’re going to drive this thing as well am i going to be able to finally drive this camera if we have time i don’t know if we

Have time look at that we got to go he helped to have this thing come to life and he’s never driven it but let’s go back to your thing i get to drive your thing and finally so can you let’s show this thing sure this is the ford mustang machi 1400 something that my rtr team and i are extremely proud of that you know we’ve been working on this under wraps for

The last year and a half so you know i’ve been watching bad electric technology for a while being a like v8 you know the unicorn all of our rtr stuff are 1200 horsepower drift cars man i love gas engine fire you know it’s amazing but the capabilities that i understood from battery electric vehicles is very next level and for things that like ken and i love

Doing and the full control of them is like something i’ve been so interested in and finally the technology was there to do something i felt that we could really demonstrate electric vehicle technology and have fun with it we dreamed this up the result was was this epic collaboration between our team and ford performance and building this you know first of its

Kind our perspective game changing demonstrator yeah it makes over 1400 horsepower and about 1500 foot pounds of torque at the motors and then so if you take that math that’s before the differentials so now when you add like a you know a diff it’s a torque multiplier it could be up to four to six thousand foot pounds of torque if if we want to put that output

Or depending on what we’re doing there’s nothing like this it’s literally like a magnet roller coaster that you control like it’s just obnoxious for us it’s like wow look at this next step of ways that we can go out and do the things that we love but in a rad way that takes the performance to an even higher level so that’s why i’m uh stoked to get in this thing

So tell us some more about it but i want to so it’s got a 57 kilowatt hour battery it’s between both wheels as low as possible so while it’s quite heavy the battery the center of gravity is super low so this thing weighs about just over 5000 pounds the battery alone is 1500 pounds but that weight down there and that low center of gravity it feels like an indy

Car like it just turned in everything it’s so crisp you don’t feel that it’s heavy it’s got three motors in the front four in the back and you can uh switch them you can go 50 50 and we have 20 20 increments right now but you can go to two percent increments if you want it’s infinitely adjustable you can make one driveline go the opposite direction so you can

Just sit there burning out against each other super fast doughnuts i can’t do that with that either you can fully control it so you mentioned the arrow so uh this car is a swiss army knife basically as a demonstrator it’s a a test bed for ford performance to you know engineer and and you know learn things for production right but just to clarify that real quick

It wasn’t built to go race anything particularly this was like a technology experiment there you go to kind of take a step up with the maki so this is the first time the maki has been modified it’s meant to kind of explore what’s possible to potentially do some stuff down the line but right now it’s basically a demonstration sure exactly obviously uh under

Here so motor and drivetrain wise in the front there’s three motors of stack it’s effectively like a a rotary but electric right so they’re axial flux motors so they’re stacked together so that just multiplies the power we’ve got a winter’s quick change in the front and rear because gearing with electric cars is very important depending upon what you what you’re

Trying to do obviously cantilever suspension and so it has two cooling systems for each motor set uh so one of the systems is is oil uh this runs through the motors and then we obviously have uh some water that runs through the motor so separate radiator for each system wait and is there a whole other set in the back yeah so there’s a giant venturi on top with

Radiators down in the back to then have the same setup exactly that goes to the rear four motors exactly there’s four motors in the rear it’s got fully uh fully electrical power steering obviously right like all of our cars we’re used to have a mechanical pump this is a electric power steering pump which again is is tunable and things like that where is the

Flux capacitor so the flux can see that’s right there there it is so the flux capacitor is actually an inverter and there’s one inverter per motor so those are what basically take the power from the battery and you know give it to the motor all of your gearing is controlled by main gear and you have all that torque and horsepower so you don’t need to split to

Split the gears we obviously wanted to build a tunnel that you could see all this cool you’re looking here as wires things you’ve never seen it was the first thing you said yo look how big is your wires they’re big they’re big and they’re shielded so very simple you know we have a very simple switch panel on there and motec dash like you’re used to seeing some

Of your vehicles same push button controls you’ll look you’ll see there’s only two pedals yeah there’s not three yeah but that dash is huge yeah it’s beautiful um well you said you said it could run for 45 minutes right so like a pike speak hill climb run how long does it take to charge on like you know do you plug it in overnight no 45 minutes full charge wow

Yep yeah let’s get you suited up and i’ll give you a little bit of you finally get the tutorial this is it this is you ready bro i’m running all right let’s do it engage rock and roll so it’s in full power now full power it’s like a magnet roller coaster just so crazy how there’s no sound because i’ve driven a couple other ones but that’s really good torque

Just turn in pull the handbrake you know rotate right it’s just all there whenever you want it what do you want to do this time i don’t know maybe just a longer slide okay just get a bit more speed just flick in pull the handbrake and go this is so weird because your tires don’t make any noise it’s the ring like that’s your reference yeah the thing is i want

To play with the throttle control and really but it like my calibration of my brain with it is still at like zero yeah just get going around the radius and just stand on and then just modulate your throttle around it so how you feeling good like i want but that wasn’t fair that wasn’t fair i was just such a teaser i know you wanna go jump in the hoodie now

I would love to may i please yes yes it’s happening right now um oh thank you ken appreciate it man that was right it’s fast no doubt but the experience like everything the hit of the shifter the flames coming out of the room how’s that view oh it’s just so nasty so we just wrapped day one uh i actually had to have a bunch of fun ken today had to sit in

His car hot car drive straight two or three times he did maybe oh and we did a couple donuts well one very exciting thing for me was seeing ken drive our creation can you give us a little just a short summary uh amazing yeah i mean i tried to mop the maki back in detroit before the launch and they wouldn’t let me so vaughn and uh finally let me do it today so

And ford approved it yeah yeah thank you for it so that was fun i mean that’s what it’s built for though it’s uh an incredible machine so it was fun to come out and get to slide it around a bit although now that i’ve driven it now i just want to drive it more and then you got the driver and then ken made a dream of mine come true you know it was uh really awesome

Working with ken and his team to build this at the rtr lab and um i just haven’t you know he promised me i could drive it at some point we haven’t been able to and it’s been like five or six years and now he let me and it worked out for me too so thank you very much this thing is everything that everybody thinks it is it’s raw it’s nuts and it’s really fun to

Drive and very nimble and uh when we were building designing it that was the goal but i never got the field to confirm it and hats off to the team once again and i’m lucky bastard he gets to drive it all the time so i’m stuck you actually got the driver yeah tomorrow boom we’re going to do gymkhana day so full day of me and can rip in unicorn maki 1400 about

We’ve done some driving together like in rear wheel drive like a gymkhana grid um rear wheel driving that but we’ve never been able to have some fun and you know integrating all while driving i’m certainly not uh at the level he is i’m learning and uh having a lot of fun with you know you already be able to unlearn your other instincts right yeah because right

Now in all-wheel drive every time i rotate i want to like counter forever rather than be driving straight and driving out of it but i’m figuring out i’m just getting a switch in the brain let’s go get some sleep see you tomorrow

Transcribed from video
Ken Block FINALLY HOONS The New FORD MUSTANG MACH-E! By Ken Block