Richard Hammond Reviewed the Ford Mustang Dark Horse — Then Went Out and Bought the Exact Same Car

Former Top Gear host Richard Hammond has driven nearly every car imaginable, so when he called Ford’s 500-hp Dark Horse a joy machine, it meant something. He didn’t stop at the review — weeks later he bought the identical spec for his own garage.

Richard Hammond has driven nearly everything with a steering wheel, from million-dollar hypercars to homebuilt off-road rigs across three continents of television. So when the former Top Gear host climbed into Ford’s Mustang Dark Horse for a DriveTribe review, the expectation was a tidy verdict and a handshake goodbye. That is not what happened. By the time the cameras stopped rolling, Hammond was hooked on a 500-horsepower, naturally aspirated V8 pony car with no turbos and no apologies — and within weeks he’d bought the exact same specification for his own garage. It’s the kind of reaction Ford built this car to provoke: the Dark Horse is the first genuinely new performance nameplate the company has introduced since the Bullitt revival in 2001, engineered specifically to be a car people can’t walk away from. Hammond’s review captures exactly why.

About the Video

DriveTribe is the motoring content brand Hammond co-founded back in 2016 alongside fellow former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May, along with producer Andy Wilman. The original DriveTribe social platform shut down in 2021, but the brand lives on as a YouTube channel putting out exactly the kind of unscripted, opinionated car content that made its founders famous in the first place. Sending Hammond out in a Mustang Dark Horse fits that mold perfectly — he’s spent decades reviewing cars for a living, which makes his reaction here worth paying attention to.

The video is billed as a straightforward test drive and review, but it turns into something closer to a conversion story. Hammond spends the drive working through the Dark Horse’s naturally aspirated 5.0-liter Coyote V8, its Magnetic Damping System, and a Torsen limited-slip differential — the hardware that separates the Dark Horse from a standard Mustang GT and pushes it toward genuine track-day territory. He comes away calling it, in his own words, the car “distilled down to what it really is — a joy machine.”

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That line is doing a lot of work. Hammond has spent his career around six- and seven-figure exotics, and here he is describing a Ford that starts well south of $70,000 as the purest expression of what a car is supposed to feel like. The video doesn’t just sell the Dark Horse as fast — it sells the idea that Ford quietly built one of the most emotionally honest performance cars on sale today: V8-powered, manual-available, and unbothered by the industry’s broader turn toward turbochargers and electrification. Hammond liked it enough that he didn’t just hand back the keys and write it up. He went out and bought one, making the Dark Horse his own daily driver.

That’s a meaningful data point precisely because of who’s giving it. Hammond built his reputation on Top Gear putting hundreds of cars through their paces on camera, from budget hatchbacks to Bugattis, and he’s been doing the same thing on The Grand Tour and now DriveTribe for years since. Presenters in his position see enough manufacturer press cars that genuine enthusiasm doesn’t come easy — most reviews end with the car going back to the fleet and the presenter moving on to the next one in the queue. A car that breaks that pattern and ends up in someone’s actual garage is a stronger endorsement than any spec sheet Ford could publish itself.

The Dark Horse’s Place in Mustang History

The Dark Horse nameplate is newer than most people realize. It debuted for the 2024 model year as the range-topping performance trim of the current S650-generation Mustang, and Ford has been explicit that it’s the first entirely new performance badge added to the Mustang lineup since the Bullitt name was revived in 2001. Ford Performance has described the name itself as deliberate: a dark horse is “the horse you didn’t see coming,” an unexpected contender that outperforms low expectations — branding meant to signal that this trim shares no direct bloodline with any specific historic Mustang, unlike the Mach 1, Bullitt, or GT350 names it sits alongside on the options sheet.

Matt Simpson, Ford’s general manager of enthusiast vehicles, has talked publicly about the design language built around that idea: “We have a new aesthetic with the Dark Horse. Not just heritage design cues. More black accents. More war paint. A more sinister look.” That philosophy shows up throughout the car, from its darkened badging to the standard staggered wheel setup that visually sets it apart from a regular GT at a glance.

The Dark Horse isn’t just a road car with a badge, either — its chassis is the basis for the Mustang GT4, a turnkey endurance racer developed with longtime Ford partner Multimatic, extending the Dark Horse’s role from showroom flagship to homologation platform for international sports car racing. Few production Mustangs in recent memory have gone on to underpin an actual factory-backed GT4 racing program, which says something about how seriously Ford engineered this specific trim rather than treating it as a trim-level upsell.

Under the hood, the standard Dark Horse’s Coyote V8 is rated at 500 horsepower and 418 lb-ft of torque, good for a 0-60 mph run as quick as 3.7 seconds with the automatic transmission, or 4.1 seconds for buyers who choose the six-speed manual — a gearbox Ford still offers here while much of the rest of the muscle car segment has moved to automatic-only lineups or abandoned the V8 entirely. Pricing for the 2026 model year starts at roughly $63,080, positioning the standard Dark Horse as a genuine performance-car bargain next to the six-figure, supercharged Dark Horse SC variant Ford also sells for buyers who want considerably more power.

Context matters here too. The Dark Horse arrived as part of the seventh-generation, S650 Mustang — the version Ford brought to market at a moment when nearly every rival in the muscle car segment was either discontinued, going electric, or switching to smaller turbocharged engines. Ford leaned the opposite direction with this specific trim: more mechanical grip, a heavier emphasis on the manual gearbox, and a naturally aspirated V8 as the headline engine rather than an afterthought. That’s a deliberate bet that there’s still a market of drivers who want the analog experience, not just the horsepower number on the window sticker.

What Makes It Special

The Dark Horse’s appeal isn’t really about outright numbers — 500 horsepower is respectable, not class-leading, in a world where electric sedans casually claim four-figure output. What makes it special is what Ford refused to compromise on. There’s no forced induction on the standard car, no synthetic engine noise piped through the speakers, and a manual gearbox still on the order sheet in 2026, years after most rivals quietly dropped theirs. The standard Brembo brake package — 15.3-inch front rotors and 14-inch rears, with black calipers wearing white Brembo lettering — isn’t just for show either; it’s sized for genuine track use, not just curb appeal.

Buyers who want to push further can add the Handling Package, which brings 19-inch wheels wrapped in sticky Pirelli P Zero Trofeo RS rubber, adjustable front strut top mounts, stiffened front and rear springs, a solid rear stabilizer bar, and a carbon-fiber-look rear wing finished with a Gurney flap borrowed conceptually from the Ford GT supercar. None of that is standard trim-level fluff — it’s the same category of hardware found on serious track-day cars, tuned specifically so the Dark Horse can live on a road course as comfortably as it does on a Saturday morning cars-and-coffee run.

That combination is exactly what got to Hammond. He’s tested cars that are objectively faster and vastly more expensive, and he still walked away from the Dark Horse wanting to own one for himself. In an era when even diehard American muscle car nameplates are hedging toward electrification and turbocharged six-cylinders — and as rivals like the Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger have exited the market entirely in their traditional V8 form — Ford built a car whose entire pitch is old-school engagement, and got one of the most experienced drivers in the world to put his own money behind it. That’s not a marketing win. That’s the product actually working.

It’s also worth noting what buyers get without stepping up to the supercharged SC model. The Torsen limited-slip diff and MagneRide dampers on the standard Dark Horse already give it genuine road-course composure — the kind of chassis behavior that used to be reserved for halo trims costing tens of thousands more. Ford essentially built the driver-focused hardware into the entry point of the lineup rather than gatekeeping it behind the priciest variant, which is part of why a car starting in the low $60,000s can hold its own against machinery that costs multiples of that. For a segment that many assumed was in terminal decline, that’s a fairly aggressive statement of intent.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.