Sam Krahn 
Yesterday, the Ford Mustang Mach-E 1400 debuted with a whopping 1400 hp coming from a 56.8-kilowatt-hour battery pack and seven electric motors. Its aim is to be successful in any type of motorsport you can throw at it: drag racing, circuit racing, drifting, you name it. But its seven motor setup is unlike anything we’ve seen before, as most EVs top out at four motors with one for each wheel. Thanks to an interview by InsideEVs with Mark Rushbrook, Ford’s Global Director of Motorsports, we have a better idea of why they went with that setup.
The powertrain consists of three motors at the front axle and four at the rear. Some of them are actually stacked on top of one another, “like pancakes.” While seven may seem like a number plucked out of thin air, the team actually spent over 10,000 hours developing the vehicle.
Still, it was actually just a case of trial an error to land on the final seven motors. Rushbrook told InsideEVs that they had a number of performance targets set for the car during development, and they experimented with amount of motors and battery size until they hit those targets.
Part of that also involved heat management. The Mustang Mach-E 1400 is designed to be able to run all day with no heat issues, as long as the battery is recharged. The energy in the batteries can last about an hour of seriously hard driving before needing to be replenished, where it can go from 0-80 percent of a charge in about the same amount of time it took to drain them (1 hour).
The cooling system actually works in two stages. Obviously, the system works hard while driving, but the dielectric coolant can also cool the batteries while charging. If you’ve ever noticed your phone heat up while charging, imagine that on a 1,400 hp electric car with a 56.8-kilowatt-hour battery pack. Not many companies think of that, so it’s good to see Ford implement it on this prototype. Rushbrook also said the learnings from this cooling system could trickle down into future production EVs. Mustang Mach-E Shelby, is that you?
