Watch the Mustang GTD’s Trick Multimatic Dampers Do Their Thing

Ford’s $300,000, carbon-bodied Mustang is going to have a busy year. Following appearances at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the 24 Hours of Spa in June, and the retro-tastic Goodwood Festival of Speed in early July, the Mustang GTD will spend the summer testing in Europe for its end-of-year challenge: A sub-seven-minute lap of the Nürburgring Nordschleife. That time would put the GTD among the top ten fastest production cars at The Green Hell.

Ford must know that we can’t get enough of this road-legal track beast, because it’s further whetting our appetite for the unobtainium, road-legal track monster: Earlier this week, the automaker shared more details about its trick suspension, made by Multimatic, the Canadian company that designed the suspension for the most recent Ford GT. The GTD received Multimatic’s newest and most exotic tech, and the dampers are so fancy, they get their own window, made of polycarbonate and measuring about 24 by 10 inches:

Naturally, you can also see them from outside the vehicle:

Now, to the nerdy details. The rear suspension is a pushrod design that places the shocks atop the tubular rear subframe rather than inboard of the wheels in a more traditional setup. We expect that Multimatic and Ford decided to use a pushrod setup at least in part to accommodate the massive, 345-mm rear tires: Since the shock isn’t mounted vertically behind the wheel, taking up precious space, there’s more room for a larger tire—and for the engineers to design the suspension for just-right geometry.

Based in Canada, Multimatic Motorsports has campaigned both production-based and from-scratch race cars on the international stage since 1992. It boasts wins at Sebring, Le Mans, and Daytona. Multimatic is also a Tier 1 supplier of suspension systems to manufacturers as diverse as Ford (with whom it partnered to build the 21st-century GT supercar), Chevrolet, Aston Martin, Mercedes, and Lotus. Multimatic also has experience fettling ultra-exclusive production cars for ‘Ring times: It designed those on the one-off Evija X:

You’ll find Multimatic dampers, easily recognizable by their gold-and-blue housings, on Chevrolet’s 2024 Silverado ZR2, a Porsche 992 GT3 Cup car, the Bronco DR, and now the Mustang GTD.

Multimatic didn’t invent the spool-valve damper—the aerospace industry has used them for a long time—but it introduced the technology to motorsports. It’s developed the technology even beyond what’s legal in motorsports, and the Mustang GTD is one of the beneficiaries. Its adaptive dampers use a spool-valve design to adjust the flow of fluid within the damper (in contrast, a magnetorheological shock uses electricity to change the viscosity of the internal fluid).

“Adaptive damping allows more flexibility in absolute ride performance compared to a passive damper,” said Scott Keefer, vice president of engineering for Multimatic. “It lets you decouple the ride versus handling compromise that you would normally make in damper tuning. Our system is a double win in that adjustments feel very analog, very natural in terms of motion control.”

These proprietary Adaptive Spool Valve (ASV) dampers can adjust from their softest to their firmest setting six times quicker than you can blink (15 milliseconds). From a seat-of-the-pants perspective, that’s basically real-time. The range of adjustability is remarkable, and well-suited to a track-worthy car that you would also drive on the road: When set to Track mode, the dampers and the springs of the GT work together to lower the car up to 1.6 inches while nearly doubling the spring rate.

Ford’s press release also features some beauty shots of the optional, more expensive wheels, which are made of magnesium, but all we want to do is watch this video and watch the dampers go pinchy-pinchy-pinch.