The process that led to the unveiling of the latest products from ROUSH Performence was far from old-school. Production of the cars, initially available in Stage I, Stage 2 and 427R versions, will start in just a couple of weeks. The first approved sketches, however, appeared a scant 11 months ago.

According to ROUSH Performance General Manager, Joe Thompson, the first two months of production for the new ROUSH Mustang have already been sold out - sight unseen. This confirms the market's confidence, already proven, in the development processes that drive ROUSH Performance.

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 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 wasable 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.

There's nothing old-school about that!