Message to Mustang traction control: Not now!
LOS ANGELES
One of the vehicular stars of the movie “Drive” is a 2011 Ford Mustang GT.
Was there anything special under the hood?
“No, it was just a regular Mustang GT,” said Darrin Prescott, the movie’s stunt coordinator. “Just one of the cars Ford sent us for the movie. If I remember correctly, they were all automatics. You really couldn’t get them to do anything. The minute you started doing anything tricky with them – spins, slides, drifting – the traction control would start shutting everything down.”
The traction control is meant to keep the average Mustang GT driver from scaring himself and others too badly with its stock 412 horsepower.
“We really didn’t do anything to them,” Mr. Prescott said of the corral of movie Mustangs. “We didn’t have the time, or the budget.”
So, how did the movie-makers ultimately get the Mustang to perform “bootleg” 180 turns, and other cinematic magic, as shown in the final cut of the film?
“Somebody finally told us if we held the traction control button down for six seconds, we could get it to turn off,” Mr. Prescott said.
The filmmakers also managed to scare up one Mustang with a manual transmission.
“But it wasn’t black,” Mr. Prescott recalled. “So we re-painted it, or re-skinned it. Then we were in business.”
Jerry Garrett
September 12, 2011
Garrett On The Road 
[…] -”You really couldn’t get them to do anything,” the stunt coordinator said of the Ford Mustangs used in the film Drive. [link] […]
By: The Monday Grind | Mojo Motors Blog on September 12, 2011
at 12:46 pm
[…] Garrett’s blog includes an interesting post appropriately titled “The Cars of DRIVE” featuring an interview with Drive‘s stunt coordinator Darrin Prescott. Prescott recalls that […]
By: Ryan Gosling in Drive | BAMF Style on December 14, 2016
at 2:16 pm
I was wondering about that myself. That GT sounded great on-screen. Never knew it had that much stock HP. What I liked best was that it had a real low profile look about it. When Gosling walked up to it on the street, I said to myself “that would have been my choice too”.
By: Bill W. on June 24, 2017
at 1:04 am