Ford Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 is an OEM EV for the drag strip

Ford once more harnesses its Mustang to pull the automaker’s cart of battery-electric technologies, this time with the Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 prototype. That’s right, Ford Performance developed a battery-electric dragster with help from suppliers MLe Racecars, Watson Engineering, AEMEV, and Cascadia. The whirring racer packs a battery of undisclosed capacity and a total output of 1,400 horsepower and more than 1,100 pound-feet of torque from an undisclosed number of motors. From the video, it also looks like the powertrain houses a two-speed transmission. With all that electric muscle, the Cobra Jet 1400 is “projected to crush the quarter-mile in the low-8-second range at more than 170 mph.”   

More than a test of pushing Ford’s EV knowledge to the limit, Mark Rushbrook, global head of Ford Performance Motorsports, said, “We saw the Cobra Jet 1400 project as an opportunity to start developing electric powertrains in a race car package that we already had a lot of experience with, so we had performance benchmarks we wanted to match and beat right now.”  The last Cobra Jet, from 2018, packed a Whipple-supercharged 5.2-liter Coyote V8 and was suspected of producing close to 1,000 horsepower for a mid-8-second quarter-mile at 150 miles per hour. When Hennessey put a 2016 Cobra Jet on the dyno, that car powered by a supercharged 5.0-liter Coyote V8, the fat rear rubber put 871 hp through the rollers, and that Cobra Jet was also rated an 8.5-second car. 

The real tease for what the Cobra Jet 1400 promises is the dragster “incorporating some of the most advanced technology coming to Ford’s future powertrains.” At some point this year the coupe will prove itself “at drag racing event where fans, media and competitors will get to meet the race car, as well as see exactly what it’s capable of on the asphalt.” Subscribers to MotorTrend On Demand can book an early preview by watching the show “Hard Cell“ on April 26. 

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