DickRasmussen wrote:
Chuck Branscomb wrote:
Dick,
I guess you decided to visit our neighbor club event yesterday.
I was looking forward to checking out the new ride. We rented a 2015 Ecoboost coupe on the west coast a few weeks back in San Diego, and after a few days there drove the PCH most of the way from Malibu up to Monterey on our way to SF. This was from Avis by the way, and the Mustang was $12/day more than the standard issue Camry -- nice deal, and by far the best rental car I've ever had.
Chuck -
Glad to hear you like the Ecoboost which I assume was an automatic. The GT is even nicer. Last time I drove the PCH was in a Datsun Z a very long time ago. Great highway for driving and enjoying the view . . . but not necessarily at the same time.
Sorry to miss the THSCC event but I wanted to try a new set of Bridgestone RE-71R's plus a bigger rear anti-roll bar on a site with lots of slow 90's and 180's like LJVM. Plus the Feeny's were there with Michael's 2015 on ZII** to benchmark against (Matt was faster than me and Michael was slightly slower than me). Plus the Danville surface is relative hard on tires and 275/35x19's are not cheap.
I'm not up on Mustang specifics, but yeah, it was 6spd auto with paddle shifters. It was actually one of the most impressive automatics I've driven too (although I've not had much contact with automatic transmissions recently thankfully). Whoever programmed (and designed) the auto allowed it to do exactly what you want when it's in sport manual mode -- i.e. not upshift at redline and not downshift if you go to WOT in any gear you've chosen. That second part was especially nice on the PCH as I'd leave it in 3rd or 4th depending on the road, and then just use the large fat torque curve of the turbo motor pulling away from corners.
The moment I drove through the large Avis parking lot at LAX, I could tell this was unlike any Mustang I'd ever driven/ridden in before. The stiffness of the body-in-white was immediately apparent -- clearly it has a decently high torsional stiffness value, as it's apparent right away. The other thing that impressed me was how well the IRS worked over rough pavement, cornering with bumps, etc. Ford has done an excellent job with the spring rate and damper tuning on this car. It might have had some level of sport package but not the highest one (i.e. it had 245/50-18 Goodyear Eagle tires, which btw were pretty decent, nice and grippy, good total stick, etc).
Get this...on one tight entrance ramp, probably 40mph or so, I purposely overcooked the entry a bit (car nannies disabled) to see how the car behaved. It was understeering (as expected) a good bit with mediocre (at best unfortunately) feel of the front tire's contact patch, but I did a pretty big lift off the throttle, and the nose tucked right in and the tail rotated nicely such that after a short pause I could get back onto the throttle hard and power out of the corner. I had a huge smile on my face thinking "damn, this is the best rental car ever."
One thing I couldn't get over even after 9 days of driving it and right at 1000 miles (it only had 1200 miles on it when we got it btw) was the size of the car and especially the high and very long hood. It's impossible to know where the front corners of the car are, and the view from the driver's seat reminds me of driving a boat as it's coming up on plane. If Ford could build a car like this one, but in sedan form with a nice, tightly wrapped-around-you body design....oh well. Hence the body design/proportions/long doors/hood/etc kind of put the binders on thoughts of a GT350.
Oh one other thing on that auto. I had it in sport automatic mode a lot, and it did a great job almost knowing what I wanted/needed at various times. At one point it was in 3rd gear (it will hold a gear a long time if it senses you're driving aggressively enough) going into a rather tight left hander, and I had the thought that I'd like it if it was in 2nd instead. Without even thinking about it, I just did a quick jab and back on the throttle, and it immediately rev-matched downshifted into 2nd and was waiting and ready. In this case, I used 2nd's engine braking on turn-in and then blasted out of the corner. Nice programming since if you use the paddle to downshift in sport auto mode, it switches into manual mode which I didn't want.
Only issue of note was a horrible creaking/cracking like noise coming from the left rear window area. It mainly did that when it was cooler outside.
PCH was incredible as you noted. We mainly enjoyed the views which were unreal. Great experience. From San Diego to SF, we stayed in Malibu, Morro Bay and then Big Sur. I wish we had more time to do the path than 3 nights, so we could do some hiking and exploring various spots.
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