M/T: 2018 Mustang EcoBoost
Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2018 6:59 am
http://www.motortrend.com/cars/ford/mus ... 09E5DFD1AD
This car does strike a good middle ground between the Camaro and Challenger but anyone who says the Mustang is on par with the Camaro in the chassis department is smoking crack.
They basically recalibrated some stuff to make the car feel sportier but it doesn't work like that.
Evidence of a poorly sorted car:
I kind of feel like they dialed a little Focus RS into it. Hard edged, hard to drive at the limit, to trick ignorant owners into thinking those feelings mean it is going faster than anything else. I don't want to be tricked. I want to go faster than everything else.
This car does strike a good middle ground between the Camaro and Challenger but anyone who says the Mustang is on par with the Camaro in the chassis department is smoking crack.
They basically recalibrated some stuff to make the car feel sportier but it doesn't work like that.
You must be careful with the throttle in tight corners; it will try to put all 350 lb-ft down at once and pop you sideways. Leave the stability control on until you’re familiar with the car because it’ll let you rotate more than you expect before it steps in. This car now requires a delicate touch. Manhandling it turns a race horse into a bucking bronco.
You can make life easier on yourself by staying away from the Sport+ and Race driving modes. Both make the throttle hyperaggressive and the steering too heavy, making it needlessly difficult to drive the car smoothly. Those modes also lock out the selectable steering settings, so you can’t customize the car to your taste. Sport or Custom modes are best but don’t let you change the firmness of the optional magnetorheological dampers, which work best in Sport+ and Race. In Sport and Custom, they leave the car underdamped and a little too bouncy for serious driving.
I also feel there is a large group of people that would be like "the EcoBoost is basically as fast as any V8" or some total garbage like that. Look at the trap speed difference there. Miles apart. It's like comparing my STS to a C5 Z06. Not even in the same solar system.This was born out at the test track, as well. At 5.3 seconds to 60 mph and 13.9 seconds in the quarter at 97.2 mph, this is the quickest EcoBoost Mustang we’ve ever tested and nicely reverses a trend we discovered and reported of EcoBoost Mustangs getting slower. Our test team found Drag Strip mode, unsurprisingly, returned the best results, though it surprisingly doesn’t have launch control. A little brake torque up to 1,500 rpm netted the best launch. If you’re curious, the last V-8 Mustang we tested hit 60 mph in 4.4 seconds and ran a 12.6-second quarter mile at 115.1 mph.
Evidence of a poorly sorted car:
I guess it's hard to fault an 8/10ths car for street driving but with the (superior driving) Camaro available, I feel like I do have room to fault it.Things didn’t go so well in our handling tests, though. Pulling 0.96 g on the skidpad and lapping the figure eight in 25.1 seconds at 0.75 g average, it did about as well as the last EcoBoost with an automatic transmission we tested. Thing is, it’s significantly slower and pulling a lot less g than the best EcoBoost Mustang we’ve tested, and it’s not just the numbers. The test team reports things started out all right, with great braking, good road holding, and strong traction coming off the corners, but the laps were still nearly a second off the pace. Going for another try, everything “went pear-shaped,” as the notes have it. “Times did not improve, and the transmission started really hiccupping,” our test team wrote. “A couple of times, after pulling the paddle for a downshift, it literally freewheeled, no throttle response, as if it was in neutral. Then it popped into second and the revs jumped (no matched revving), and it totally upset the car. Also, I don’t think the LSD was working properly because going to throttle at the same rate in the same place spun the car once—a really slow-mo spin, but still it was a surprise.” No doubt, our Figure Eight test is very hard on cars, but these sorts of things don’t usually happen.
The test team’s notes end with, “Feels like a good eight-tenths car, but ask ten-tenths and it won’t like it.” Which, really, kind of jibes with our road impressions. Although we had no mechanical issues on the road, the car did not like to be driven to within an inch of its capability. My own notes read, verbatim: “This thing grabs you by the collar and screams in your face, ‘I’m sporty, mother******!’ It’s like trying to wheel a classic Mustang hard. You’ve gotta know what you’re doing.”
I kind of feel like they dialed a little Focus RS into it. Hard edged, hard to drive at the limit, to trick ignorant owners into thinking those feelings mean it is going faster than anything else. I don't want to be tricked. I want to go faster than everything else.