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 2010 Mustang were approved. That kicked off everything that needed to be done in order to get this 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 stock Ford 2010 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,” stated Jack Roush.

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. That calculates out to 5.6 years of time.

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 the development time and risk. In some cases, ROUSH was
able to go from the data straight to tooling; this eliminated the
lengthy prototype phase. Also, surrogate 2009 Mustang vehicles were
utilized for design validation of the powertrain and chassis components
due to the similarity to that of the 2010 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 ROUSH 2010 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.