The alpha Mustang

The alpha Mustang
Powerful '07 Shelby GT 500 a runaway winner
08:55 AM CDT on Friday, June 30, 2006

My middle-aged back should be killing me.

Last week, for three memorable days, I more or less lived in the black leather seat of a 2007 Shelby Mustang GT 500, driving 1,300 miles from Dearborn, Mich., to Dallas in a white-hot pony car with blue skunk stripes, a pit-bull stance and 500 horsepower.

It sure beat being stuck in the daily scrum on the Dallas North Tollway. My days on the road began with a view of a long, bulging hood festooned with stripes and two big racing-style vents.

Despite Ohio's best speed-busting efforts, I made it through there and four other states with no tickets or major incidents in a car that oozed illegal. Best of all, I wasn't sore, even after 10-hour driving days.

Simply put, this is the best, most capable Mustang ever built – whether we were sailing lazily through lush green farm country in northern Ohio, dodging crazed 18-wheelers everywhere or crawling through construction zones from Michigan to Texas. For the record, I did get a couple of opportunities to test the $42,000 Mustang's, uh, capabilities.

And they are far greater than the original Shelby GT 500's in the late 1960s. This Shelby is powered by a supercharged 5.4-liter V-8 wearing the four-valve-per-cylinder heads from the Ford GT. It arrives at dealers this summer.

The car rides on the new Mustang GT platform, complete with an old-fashioned solid rear axle aided by revalved shock absorbers and stiffer springs and anti-sway bars. (In April, I said that the car had an independent rear suspension. I was wrong, and I apologize.)

With massive tires on 18-inch wheels, efficient Brembo brakes and a decent – albeit notchy – six-speed transmission, the GT 500 is a serious grand tourer. The car feels about 10 percent stiffer in ride than a Mustang GT but is much more refined, with more precise steering and a tight, silent cockpit. It blazes to 60 mph in less than five seconds and blasts through the quarter mile at more than 115 mph.

Thanks mostly to the larger engine and bigger tires and wheels, the GT 500 gains a staggering 350 pounds or so over the regular GT, porking up to a Lexus-like 3,900 pounds. Amazingly, though, I got 19.8 miles per gallon in my first half-tank or so of gas – and that was with long spells of cruising at 80 to 85 mph. In my last tank of the trip, with 1,800 miles on the odometer, I got 22.9 mpg.

My main complaint about the GT 500 is the way it delivers its 500 horsepower. If the gauge in my car was right, I rarely got the maximum 9 pounds of boost from the supercharger. In fact, I could drive for hours with the gauge dead on zero, moving only when I booted the accelerator hard.

Hau Thai-Tang, Ford's director of advanced product creation and Special Vehicle Team engineering, said the Shelby was designed to deliver more linear power than I experienced.

"Certainly 500 horsepower is the peak number, but the car is designed to have power throughout its range," Mr. Thai-Tang said. "It's not peaky."

Maybe my car had an overly conservative computer chip. Even with that possible limitation, the Shelby generally felt big and lusty, pushing through the gears much harder than a regular GT – which, of course, it should, since it costs $15,000 more.

Bottom line: If Ford asked me to hop in tomorrow and drive the car back to Dearborn, I'd do it.

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