The answer to all these problems is simple: Exercise. For the car, it means smashing your right foot through the floor and banging gears like an animal. Run it as hard as you can. For people, it's a Stairmaster, running, shooting hoops, racquetball. Whatever it takes.
Of course, taking the R to Philly was more than just an attempt to expense a lunch (although you have to admit, it is a pretty clever excuse). No, there was some science involved. Long has the debate raged over who has the better cheese steak-Pat's King of Steaks or Geno's. The two cheese steak powerhouses are within a block of each other and have kept an uneasy peace for years. For Smitty and me, there was no debate. We've been Pat's fans for a long time; when we found out that general manager Frank E. Olivieri was a die-hard Ford guy, well, we simply couldn't go anywhere else.
Funny thing about the residents of this city. They are hard to please. Former Phillies pitcher Bo Belinsky once said that Philadelphians would boo funerals, an Easter egg hunt, a parade of armless war veterans and the Liberty Bell. Hell, they booed Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt almost until the day he retired. So it came as little shock that the Cobra R, resplendent in its Performance Red paint, fully decked out with splitter and rear wing, drew nary a stare in downtown Philly. We might as well have been driving a Honda. And they say New Yorkers hate cars. But things got different when we got to Pat's. Perhaps the King of Steaks is in a more Mustang kind of neighborhood. Everyone there loved the R.
We must say we held nothing back when it came to ordering at Pat's-full on cheese steaks (Cheez Whiz favored over American or provelone) with onions and mushrooms, cheese fries and Cokes-your typical health meal. The steak was so killer that Heath and I celebrated by splitting another. So sue me. I'll do another half-hour on the Stairmaster tomorrow.
Myth vs. Reality
When it comes to the R, there is so much that is misunderstood. The overwhelming majority of Mustang enthusiasts have never seen one, let along driven one, so they have a hard time understanding just how unbelievable it really is. There's a lot of animosity about the limited production, the price and the performance differential between the R and the standard Cobra. We've been asked often by readers if the R really is truly as good as they've read. It is, and perhaps that's the rub. The Mustang is supposed to be the definitive blue collar performance car, but at $55,000 and limited to 300 units, the R is anything but middle class. In fact, we'd say it's fairly elitist. Except no snob in a Porsche would ever be caught dead in one. To them, it'll never have a pedigree, no matter how much faster the Ford is.
On the road, this car is a brute. The special compound BFGoodrich kd T/A tires pick up every stone on the road and kick them up into the inner fenders. Without a trunk mat or a stick of stitch of insulation, you can hear every last one of them, too. The ride, even with the independent rear, is extremely firm. Thanks to the ultrawide tires and aggressive front end alignment, the car tends to hunt over rutted and grooved East Coast roads.
The best part of this car is the engine. Unlike the earlier cars we've tested, this R was an actual production vehicle. SVT said it was either the third or fourth one off the line (numbers one and two went to Ford Special Vehicle Engineering for safe-keeping. The production intake cover is so imposing, so beautiful under the hood, that we wanted to remove it and hang it on our office wall. The massive torque simply blew us away. Get the engine over 3000 rpm and the 5.4-liter engine makes gutteral noises as it blurs the boundaries between time and distance.
For our dyno session, Smith strapped it down at Crazy Horse Racing (Clark, N.J.) Proprietor Chris Winter operated the controls and without so much as removing the air filter, the R spit out insane numbers: 371.8 rear wheel horsepower at 5300 rpm and 385 lbs.-ft. of torque at 4300 rpm. Gee, do you think Ford is underrating these things from the factory?
Thursday was our scheduled track day. Did we really need another test session? Theoretically, no. We had wrung out the R pretty good at Milan Dragway in Michigan last summer and went 12.58 at 110 (see "R Gang," Sept. '00). With the splitter and wing removed and drag radials installed, we worked this down to 12.40 at 112. Impressive to be sure, but we wanted to see if we could do better at Old Bridge Township Raceway. It's our home track, and hey, it's in New Jersey so it's gotta be better, right?