Hi there
OK so today the car had its first motorway experience as I drove down to Pumabuild Ltd in Birmingham for a rolling road run. I was expecting this car to hover around 25mpg on a run in the 60-80mph region, well reality is it is far better:
Really impressed with what it can return on a run, it really does the cruising thing superbly well and even though 6th is very tall geared, it will pull quite well from 60-80mph quite effortless for overtaking in 6th, drop to 5th and acceleration is superb.
The attention the car got on the motorway was surprising, people are all ages pulling alongside giving an approving nod or thumbs up, they might not be as rare as they once were but it still attracts huge amounts of positive reactions on the road.
So the car stock is 416PS which is 410BHP. I chose Pumabuild as they have a Maha MSR 500 dyno which has some pretty cool features, such as:
- Single contact patch rollers
- Motor in front roller so no need to disable traction systems or get ABS faults
- Can switch of front motor etc. giving good flexibility.
I like maha dyno's because they don't just use an operator set formulation to work out flywheel power, they do it quite accurately by calculating from coast down.
Car strapped down:
We did three runs, couple of videos:
The car should be run in 5th as closest 1:1 gear but we did first run in 4th as safer to check that nothing was at risk of getting too hot etc. Problem with running in 4th is you will get lower torque figure, the results were as follows:
Run 1 (4th gear): 410BHP / 360lb/ft
Run 2 (5th gear): 422BHP / 399lb/ft
Run 3 (5th grear): 415BHP / 403lb/ft
So the car is right on the money is ever so slightly over, very happy with results as car is making factory claimed figures or marginally better.
Got to love 160lb/ft at 1200rpm, more than many cars make peak, V8's for you.
Was also great and lucky that a guy who has spent a lot of time working on Mustangs in the US was there and gave me a lot of very good insight on super chargers and what to consider. He did let slip that Ford track key is coming for sure which should result in around 440BHP and maybe higher rev limit and carry a full Ford warranty. Also there is a limit of only 1400 UK Mustangs per year, which could help boost re-sale values as only half of those will be manuals of which around half will be V8's. Though V8's are still the more popular choice right now!