HERROD’S ADDED PUFF FOR MAGIC PONIES
Tickford isn’t the only local outfit with skin in the blown Mustang game. Herrod Performance has been upgrading Fords for more than 30 years and officially distributing Ford Performance Parts since 2012. More than 100 supercharged Mustangs have been built at its workshop in North Melbourne.
The Herrod Compliance Package retails for $ 21,500 and uses a rigorously tested Ford Performance supercharger kit to lift engine power of the Mustang GT to around 500kw. Rob Herrod ( right) insists the package (which also includes a sports exhaust, underbody heat-shielding, lowered suspension and Ford Performance badging) is legal everywhere in Australia with certification to prove it. A limited warranty covers all components fitted by Herrod, backed by Ford Performance. Further cosmetic upgrades include Roush bodykits and Shelby GT350 parts.
Since our test, Ford Australia has confirmed it will offer a selected range of Ford Performance parts through its dealer network. Mustang GT owners can specify a sports exhaust ($ 3584), lowering springs ($1260) and a short shifter for manual gearboxes ($ 805). A Track Handling Pack ($ 4130) adds revised anti-roll bars, dampers and lowering springs.
Ford will apply the same new car warranty of three years/100,000km to all Ford Performance upgrades when fitted at the point of sale.
way aft, the whole front of the car bobbing its head.
Get the Mustang onto a more consistent surface and it feels special. The body control is sharper than the Commodore’s, turn-in is more incisive and throttle mapping far more aggressive. It feels like a supersized Toyota 86 until you try to drift it like a Hachi-roku, whereupon you find that the neurotic throttle response requires equally rapid hands.
The 3.0-inch mandrel-bent exhaust and engine work gives the Coyote 5.0-litre the voice it so signally lacks in standard form. There’s that characteristic Bullitt wubwub at idle and, unlike many tuner cars, there’s clearly been a lot of work put into linearity of engine response rather than merely achieving a big number. About the biggest compliment you’d pay to the power uptick is that it feels factory-grade.
This car also wears a Tickford wheel and tyre set, featuring 10-spoke satin black alloys and staggered width 20-inch Dunlop SP Sport Maxx GT tyres. With tyre pressure sensors, locking wheel nuts, fitting and balancing, that’s going to leave you a Mcdonald’s meal’s worth of change from $4500. Then there’s the Tickford sports suspension that lowers ride height by 25mm for that great hunkered-on-its-rubber look, but which could use a little more gradation in compression damping. The tyres tramline more on city streets than the Holden’s slimmer 19-inch hoops, sniffing out and nibbling at any minuscule contour in the surface.
The engine requires a few more revs on the board than the Redline, getting into its stride at 4500rpm, so you need to be a bit more diligent with gear selection when attacking a tight corner. The pedal box isn’t as well set up as the Holden either but the steering feels far meatier, the front end even more tenacious and the brakes feistier, although it requires a more measured pedal application.
The Mustang also sounds much more aggressive on the way out. What it doesn’t feel is a lot faster, something that our performance data attests to. The Tickford doesn’t get its snout in front until 160km/h, and there’s a mere tenth of a second between the two cars to 400m. For a car with a 56kw power advantage and which is hefting 80-odd kilos less timber up the strip, we’d have expected a wider gap. Time to see if some forced induction can open up a wider advantage.
The HSV Clubsport R8 LSA is a formidable package we know well, and the 30th Anniversary version’s massaged outputs are unlikely to make us like it any less. The bi-modal exhaust has been tweaked on this version to go louder sooner but the biggest news for
keen drivers is that the Clubbie not only gets the Bosch torque vectoring set-up as seen on the GTS, but also beefs up the stoppers with chunky four-piston calipers. Six-piston AP Racing items are an option.
Parked next to the Redline, the HSV looks enormous, the bulkier chin and butt mouldings, lower ride height and more pronounced lateral lines making it look half a class bigger. It’s not a car that shrinks around you on a tight road either, but it’s astonishingly lithe for such a hefty unit. The torque vectoring helps here, although that requires some fairly focused throttle commitment to generate that degree or two of yaw to fire you out of a corner in vaguely the right direction. The front end takes longer to trust than in the Redline, largely due to the stiffer sidewall hysteresis of the OE fit Continental Contisportcontact 5P tyres, which grip harder but are a little more taciturn than the Holden’s malleable Bridgestones.
The only car here with an automatic gearbox seemed likely to make a decent show on the strip and so it proved, the Clubbie being comfortably the quickest off the mark, the extravagantly overstuffed supercharged Mustang only coming past above 130km/h. We managed 14.5 seconds to 200km/h in less than perfect conditions. Away from the straight-line swagger, the 6L90E sixspeed auto isn’t quite as satisfying. Most of the time it’s still a better fit for the Clubbie than the Tremec manual, but that denial of downshifts as you lean on the brakes into a corner can be frustrating. After a while you give up on pinging the paddles and see if the software can make a better fist of things, which often feels – and sounds – clumsy.
The Clubsport promises real potency, but it can be caught surprisingly off guard for a supercharged car. Peak torque is at 4200rpm and peak power a heady 6150rpm. The net result of this is that it feels more significantly less linear in its power delivery than you might expect. The flipside of this is that it’s endowed with a surge to the redline that’s laugh-out-loud hysterical. I haven’t heard such a manic shriek since Uncle Martin snagged his scrotum in a split plastic sun lounger while on holiday in Milford-on-sea. For a car that’s so refined at cruising speeds, this unhinged duality of personality sets the HSV apart.
The supercharged Mustang doesn’t do bandwidth. Getting in this car at the start of a challenging road is like being thrown into a Central American prison. Your mouth goes a bit dry, you’re hyper alert and you know you’re going to have to wrestle it into submission before it escalates the violence out of hand. It has no benign side. That said, it shares the same suspension set-up as its atmo sibling, which is fantastic on the Lake Mountain road. Nothing can really live with the black car up here. Full throttle is something you need to work up to, and keeping the throttle pinned for even a handful of seconds sends a raucous caterwauling howl across the valley, overlaid by the shrill keening of the supercharger. It’s hilariously traction-limited, notching the sprint to 100km/h only four-tenths quicker than its naturally aspirated sibling, but it reaches 200km/h fully five seconds ahead. We don’t have many roads that really do this car justice.
Point-and-squirting up here in the hills will do for now, though. The steering feels best in its heaviest mode, working nicely with the MT82 manual ’box. The auto would make life easier, but the manual suits the blown Mustang. The rest of the car puts no effort into making life easy, so why not stick with three pedals? Besides, it sounds so much cooler when you blip a big flare of revs on the way into a hairpin when you know the HSV driver behind is flailing impotently at a plastic flap and hoping for the best. If you absolutely must win traffic light