Even if you didn’t know how much horsepower the GT500 made, you’d know it made a lot. And that was the point of the original sketch that Ford Exterior Designer Chris Stevens drew six years ago when the GT500 project was just kicking off.

Speaking to Motor1 in an interview, Stevens said that the design had to “be pretty damn brutal and it’s got to look like it breathes in a bunch of air.”

The point was to telegraph how much power the car made, to show anyone even glancing at it was a weapon. And he says that as soon it was turned into a clay model and put next to the GT350 and the regular Mustang, it was clear that the car made big power. 

The process wasn’t easy. Apparently the team started with a number of designs and Ford kept weeding out the weakest designs until the best one was chosen.

“I tried to make it as impactful as possible,”says Stevens. “I made it red and I printed this thing at 60 inches wide and 120 inches up in the studio, just to make my mark.”

Perhaps more impressively, Stevens is still early enough into his career that he’s still paying off his student debt. That means that he doesn’t even have a Mustang of his own yet—though he plans to change that soon. And that, he says, will be when the supreme coolness of what he’s done will sink in, he thinks.

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