With spring almost in the air , the idea was to round up the various four-seat convertibles available at the $30,000 edge of the luxury-price threshold and see what one gets for that kind of dough. Throughout several days of testing our people kept asking one another which car was better. The Mustang is more skittish, but handles big dips better, especially the kind that bottom the Camaro’s front end. The Camaro’s front suspension geometry may also be less troubled by the tight radius. It was a match of the Mustang’s superior steering precision vs the Camaro’s tighter chassis. There’s no shortage in aluminium polish products out there to try out.
He would have loved the 700-ft slalom in which the fat-tired, stiffy sprung Camaro went through the cones at almost the same speed as the smaller, more loosely suspended Mustang. By throwing a couple of different-weight chunks from some predecessor of the Empire State Building, he proved that an aluminum cylinder head and a cast iron cylinder head would both fall at the same rate. Our handling tests were reminiscent of Galileo’s gravity experiments. This might also prove that four disc brakes are better than two discs and two drums.
The Mustang locked the rear brakes at the initiation of braking and then locked the fronts as the car slowed to a stop. It has larger tires and a better proportioning of braking force, which provided slightly shorter stopping distances. With the test gear still hooked up, the brakes were exercised. The Mustang, of course, gives the driver a choice of 5-speed or automatic, and it’s great fun to play with the round, black knob between the seats, though getting off the line right requires the right combination of clutch slipping, tire slipping and throttle mashing. There is a clear difference in technique, however, because of the Camaro’s automatic transmission and the Mustang’s 5-speed. Despite the similarity of results, the Mustang and Camaro drivers will be able to spend entire days making runs at a dragstrip without determining a clear winner, which should make for lots of happy drag racers and spectators. These two have been polished by 20 years of competition between them on city streets and race tracks of every size and shape.
Top speed was the first test and the closeness of the results would persist through tests of acceleration, handling and subjective evaluations. The Mustang also was the better commuter car of the two, with its more powerful than ever 302 and revised bodywork. On the frost bulges of Michigan’s back roads, the Mustang, we discovered, provided a noticeably better ride. Our testing was completed at Ford’s Romeo proving ground north of Detroit with a fresh engine.
It died 100 yards short of the groundhog. That was the end of that engine that had been through many hard miles of magazine and Ford testing. The needle was somewhere very close to the 5900-rpm redline, he said, when the funny noises began. The message was duly relayed to our driver, who has something of a penchant for the big numbers himself. As it happened, our prototype Mustang GT was manned by Product Development Engineer Arch Cothran when it arrived at TRC. The Ford was geared taller with the 5-speed and was running only 4200 rpm in 5th gear. On the back straight he had occasion to play groundhog-evasion at about 145 mph.
While our mighty Engineering Editor was whistling around the 7.5-mile bowl every 3.0 minutes, he was able casually to push the button of the 2-way radio and tell us the water temperature was normal, as was the oil pressure. As impressive is the stability of both cars at those speeds. A hundred and forty-eight miles in an hour. The Mustang remains tight all the way up. The Chevy V-8 is tuned to produce that particularly American burble emitted by every V-8 that was ever given a set of dual pipes and glass packs.
The Mustang is quieter at most cruising speeds but makes more noise at wide-open throttle. It’s more stable under braking and those King Kong Goodyears have more traction. Only the timing lights in front of us could testify that the Camaro was more enjoyable to drive. The whoosh became WHOOSH as the Camaro approached as fast as something in Col Kadafi’s worst nightmare, then disappeared. Click the image above to the view in high-res. Not to mention that all three were black — What a great picture. As far as we know, this is the only time and place the Detriot musclecar threesome have been caught on camera together. Antoine was pulling out of the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego, two bogies pulled up — the Dodge Challenger SRT8 and the Ford Mustang
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