LATEST MUSTANG LEARNS HOW TO TURN
Former drag strip specialist able to handle hairpins
Mustang enthusiasts are a fiercely loyal lot, as dedicated to their brand of oil-stained performance as any red-liveried tifosi or Zora Duntov-worshipping small-block loyalist.
Hardcore doesn’t even begin to describe how much more passionate ’Stang owners are than their Camaro-loving brethren. Ford never made a mockery of 50-year-old traditional styling cues by penning something that — let’s be honest about this — looks like it belongs in a comic book or some sort of roboticized King Kong movie.
The problem with such fierce — some might call it blind — loyalty is that anything defying those traditions comes with some equally fierce pushback. In the case of the Mustang, and more specifically the high-performance Cobra versions of it, the pushback means buying into the pony-car folklore that drag racing is everything, and that introducing anything that might require a steering wheel is somehow effete.
Mustang traditionalists, for instance, successfully lobbied against independent rear suspension until 2015 (except for a few SVT Cobras between 1999 and 2004) because they felt their smoky burnouts would be compromised. The 2013 Shelby GT500, for instance, was long on tire smoking (662 supercharged horsepower will do that) but woefully short on finesse, the result of trying to put those 662 horses through a differential design that was old 50 years ago.
Progress, shall we say, has come haltingly to the Mustang. Until now. The 2016 Cobra, wearing Shelby’s iconic GT350 badging, is a radical step into the future, for the Mustang crowd at least. OK, not quite future, but at least current. Perhaps even more radically, it’s a step away from the ’Stang’s preoccupation with straight-line acceleration as the be all and end all of high performance. It has been replaced instead with the — again, radical — notion that the Cobra should be equally adept at blazing hairpins.
Gone, for instance, is the GT500’s supercharger: good for burnouts and quarter miles, not so good for delicate throttle response. In its stead there’s a naturally aspirated 5.2-litre V-8 with “only” 526 hp, a deficit of some 136 hp compared to the blown GT500. More importantly, the importance of low-speed torque — the very raison d’être of big-block V8s and superchargers — has been sidelined in this latest Cobra, Ford instead tuning the 5.2-L engine for an almost European thirst for high revs. I can just imagine Mustang loyalists cringing. Primary in this evolution is a Ford-first flat-plane crankshaft. Essentially the same orientation used in the Ferrari 458 and 488, though with a different firing order, a flat-plane crank emphasizes revs over grunt, horsepower more than torque.
And man, does this thing ever rev. At low speeds, the 2016 GT350 fairly woofs along, throttle response woolly enough that Cobra loyalists will wonder where all the pistons have gone.
Then, at around 3,500 rpm, it wakes up, the obvious jolt in the powerband distinct enough to wonder whether Ford hasn’t sneaked in a caffeine, er nitrous oxide, injection system into the intake tract without telling us. And that’s only the beginning.
At around five grand there’s another step in the powerband, as if the Cobra is magically growing pistons. Gone is any semblance of the low-speed raison d’être mentioned earlier, replaced with an all-pistons-on-deck undiluted rush of horsepower.
If we’re looking to continue the illicit-substance injection metaphor, caffeine has been replaced with Sherlock Holmes’ “seven per cent solution.”
By the time the tach needle swings round to 7,500 rpm — with another 750 to go! — the damn thing is mainlining straight meth. Forget the booming bass of a traditional American big block, this thing blats out a sharp, crisp high-revving tremolo, not quite Ferrari-like (that firing order thing again) but the most entertaining exhaust note from an American V-8 since Gary Hooker first made headers for his 409 Chevy.
Even starting the “Voodoo” engine sees a little extra dollop of high test funnelled through the injectors, just so you can start your morning slog with a little whappa-whappa-brap! Flip the little exhaust system toggle, which opens a couple of baffles aft of the catalytic converters, and you get the full opera all of the time: the angry bark at low revs, the aforementioned warbling tremolo as the tach scrambles for 8,250, and the mad cackle of hydrocarbons well consumed when you back off.
Faults are few. The price paid for making a big American pony car (1,725 kilos in base GT350 form, 50 kilos lighter in more dramatic “R” trim) steer with precision is having huge 295/35ZR19 Michelin Pilot Super Sport front tires. According to Driving.ca’s own Brian Harper, track handling is sublime and understeer, a common plague for Mustangs, is all but erased.
However, those big front tires will follow any rut, crown or crease in the road. That said, the optional magnetorheological suspension works like magic, offering a setting that coddles on the street and rails on the track.
My other complaint — or rather suggestion — is going to ruffle more feathers. If the new Cobra has truly migrated toward roadracing technology — as the IRS rear suspension, magnetorheological dampers, the unceremonious dumping of the supercharger and the addition of the 180-degree flat crank would all seem to indicate — why not go all the way and offer, as an option at least, a slick-shifting dual-clutch transmission?
Hell, the Fiesta has one; why not the Cobra?
Besides, by American V-8 standards, the new Cobra is “peaky,” requiring lots of shifting to keep it on the boil, and the easier it is to row up and down the gearbox, the more you get to enjoy that operatic soundtrack. The engine deserves it. The road-racing crowd deserves it. And the Cobra, all new-found sophistication and ripsnorting performance, definitely deserves it.