The Ford Mustang Dark Horse Is a Perfect American Track Car
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The Mustang Dark Horse rolled into the pits not quite on fire, but smoking enough to make us wonder about it.
There is a lot to say about this vehicle. It makes 500 horsepower. It has a manual shifter, a manual handbrake, and rear-wheel drive. It also weighs 3975 pounds, and after even a relatively short if intense session on Thunderhill West, our test track for this year’s Performance Car of the Year evaluation, its brakes had been put to work. We knew it with our noses, and we knew it with our eyes, and we asked the driver to drive around the pits for a bit to cool it down. Smoky as the car was, we didn’t want it to actually go up.
I was, as you could say, intimidated. I didn’t rush to drive the car in the same way that I did the BMW M2 or the Nissan Z NISMO, cars I could trust to be steady and reliable and up to the task of running on track. Skeptical as I might have been, I watched on as the Dark Horse ripped through that first timed run, and then many more laps that day. I started getting a little jealous every time I heard it bomb past the pit wheel. Maybe there was something to this car.
And then I saw the posted lap times. The Dark Horse didn’t just survive its time run, it came in two and three seconds faster than the BMW and Nissan, respectively, on a not-quite minute-and-a-half lap. What was the secret? Why was the blue-collar Ford faster than something as studied and refined as the BMW? A clue comes from a criticism: My coworker Aaron Brown’s initial thoughts were that this Mustang needed more power. That’s a funny thing to say about a 500-hp rear driver. I mean, the car has a great powerband, with lots of good torque and a 7500-rpm rev limit. Pretty lofty for what it is! Why would anyone want more power?
Well, the Dark Horse is rather grippy. For all its power, it doesn’t drive like it’s on casters. Ford sends this thing out the door with 305/30R19 front tires. The backs are 315/30R19s, both ends being Pirelli P Zero Trofeo RSs. A full replacement set will run you about two and a half grand. In a way, it’s the tires that overwhelm the engine rather than the other way around.
How does that straightforward question of traction translate to the experience of taking this thing on a track day? Honestly, this is an easier car to read than the M2 or Zismo. At least, it’s an easier car to come to grips with, to get familiar with, to get comfortable with, and quickly. You get an immediate feel from those gigantic tires, even if the electric power steering is virtually dead. It’s a hungry car, the Dark Horse, and it wants to gobble up track time.
Once you’re in a comfortable place, though, the Dark Horse lacks the body control of the rest of the dedicated two-door sports cars we brought along to compare it to. The BMW M2, the Nissan Nismo Z, these vehicles don’t heave you around and settle like this Mustang. A lot of that is the weight of the Mustang, though some of that has to do with Ford sending us this particular car without its optional deeply bolstered Recaro seats.
Some moments of ungainliness come from the physical size of the vehicle. Again, this is a large machine. Ford puts a Mustang badge on the front but it just as well could put Grand Torino on there. It is big and it feels big, commanding a much greater view from the driver’s seat than the actual five-door family car we brought on this test, the Acura Integra Type S. There’s nothing that Ford’s performance team can do about that. It’s nothing that even the largest tires on Earth could hide.
What am I saying? On the track, when all I’m thinking about is turn-in and power-out and carrying speed, sure, the tires dominate the experience. I am focused on grip and handling. On the road? No. Wheeling up and down California’s Coast Range, all the tires are doing is keeping me alive as I get greedier and greedier with the throttle, all to hear the engine run out.
This 5.0-liter Coyote gets twin intakes, two big nostrils gulping in air. The noise is addictive. It’s so good! It was in tight competition with the Lamborghini as the best-sounding car here, regularly turning people’s heads as it tore by.
Forget lap times. Forget exact specifications and tire compounds and horsepower figures. This car is fun. You drive it laughing and screaming, daring yourself to push harder. And I did drive this car hard. On roads that tight, on mountain passes that narrow, that this Mustang was able to keep up with a very expensive pack of cars was not a given.
The Dark Horse sounds too good for me to say anything bad about it. The intake washes over everything else about it. I loved this car at 4000 pounds. I would have loved it at 5000 pounds, 10,000 pounds if it still sounded like that, pulled like that. If it had that grip and that roar and that third pedal, I would have loved it if had a steering wheel out of a bus. On a good road, the Dark Horse drags you to its side. Driving the car hard, you don’t wish that you were in something smaller or lighter. It doesn’t make you yearn for a Miata.
It operates in its own world, its own time. Big weight, big power, big engine, big tires. Car real big. Everything big. It’s big boy season in the Dark Horse. Everything else can steer clear.
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