It takes a lot of time to develop a new vehicle from concept to assembly line. In the case of the Roush 2010 Mustang, that timeline was just 11-months.

“It was last April that the conceptual drawings for the Roush ’10 Mustang were approved,” said jack Roush. “That kicked off everything that needed to be done in order to get the vehicle ready for production. We wanted to be as close to having our car available to the same time that the dealers would start to get their inventory of the ’10 Mustang, so there were a lot of people at Roush working under a very tight deadline. I’m proud to say that we accomplished everything that needed to be done in 11-months, a record development curve for a Roush vehicle.”

Once the design illustration of the new Mustang was approved, that started a series of events related to the appearance of the Roush vehicle. The drawing was then turned into a full-size clay model of the vehicle which was utilized for the overall theme approval. On review of the life-sized property, some minor changes were made and the car was then scanned and the CAD (Computer Aided Design) data turned over to the tooling department. In total, more than 11,600 man hours were invested into the initial designs, clay modeling, styling, CAD drafting, and Class A surfacing.

Much of the design and validation of the functional components, such as powertrain and chassis, were done using CAD and CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) systems. This allowed Roush to go from “art to part” while minimizing development time and risk. In some cases, Roush was able to go from the data straight to tooling to eliminate the lengthy prototype phase. Also, surrogate ’09 Mustang vehicles were utilized for design validation of the powertrain and chassis components due to the similarity to that of the ’10 Mustang.

“Roush has some tremendous resources available, far more than just about anyone else in the industry. This allows us to get a lot of people and technology working on all the different areas of the project simultaneously, and obviously allows us to compress the development timelines very significantly,” explained Joe Thompson, vice-president and general manager of Roush Performance.
The ’10 Roush Mustang will be available in three models at launch - the Stage 1, Stage 2, and 427R. Vehicle assembly is scheduled to begin in early April with the cars showing up on the Roush-authorized Ford dealer lots shortly after that.

For more information, see your local Roush dealer, visit http://www.roushperformance.com/, or call 800/597-6874.