Multimatic CEO's gilded Mustang GTD

The Ford Mustang GTD has split into two stories at once. One is pure collector theater — a gold-painted, highly personal build owned by Multimatic CEO Peter Czapka. The other is hard stopwatch stuff — Ford’s GTD Competition just posted the fastest Nürburgring lap yet for an American road car. Put those together and you can see what Ford and Multimatic have really built here. This is not just a very expensive Mustang. It’s a halo car that has to work as art, status object, and track weapon all at once. ### Who is Multimatic here? Multimatic is the engineering and manufacturing partner doing a huge amount of the real magic on the Mustang GTD. Ford starts the car at Flat Rock, but Multimatic hand-finishes it and loads in the race-derived hardware that makes the GTD feel closer to a road-legal, it reads less like random executive taste and more like the people behind the car staking their name on it. ### Why the gold paint? Turns out the color is an inside joke made literal. Czapka’s GTD is gold because the car’s internal project name was “Project Gold.” Ford Authority says the car also carries chassis number S084, a nod to Multimatic’s 1984 founding, and mixes in brake calipers borrowed from the Liquid Carbon edition. So this isn’t an easter egg car. ### Why is that a big deal? Because GTD buyers are not shopping the way normal Mustang buyers shop. Ford made the GTD expensive, scarce, and application-only from the start. That means every unusual spec becomes part of the car’s mythology — who got one, what color they chose, and what personal claim they stamped onto it. A gold GTD owned by the company building the car adds to that mythology fast. ### But isn’t the real story the lap time? Yes — and that’s the part that gives the gold car substance. Ford first made headlines when the 815-horsepower Mustang GTD broke the seven-minute Nürburgring barrier with a 6:57.685 lap, driven by Multimatic Motorsports driver Dirk Müller. Then Ford posted 6:42.072 for the standard GTD and 6:40.835 for the GTD Competition, which it lists as the current fastest American production car around the Ring. ### Why does the Competition number matter so much? Because 6:40.835 moves the conversation out of patriotic bragging and into genuine supercar territory. The Nürburgring is long enough and weird enough that you can’t fake a time there with one party trick. You need a benchmark where none exists. ### Who’s coming after it? Czinger, apparently. Autoblog says a 1,250-horsepower Czinger 21C was recently spotted testing at the Nürburgring, clearly aiming at Ford and Chevrolet in this suddenly active American lap-time fight. That gives the GTD a second job. It has to defend the number now, not just set it. ### So what’s the actual takeaway? The gold GTD matters because it shows what the car has become. At one end, it’s bespoke enough to carry private symbolism for the CEO of the company building it. At the other, it’s serious enough to anchor an American Nürburgring arms race. That’s a rare mix — collector halo on the driveway, benchmark on the stopwatch.