[I wrote most of this while still in LA but never finished it....]

Most of the eight years I've owned it, the Mustang hasn't been running well enough to drive hard. It's spent months at a time in my garage, parked and gathering dust. I've sworn at it, cursed its name and dumped money down its gullet.

The supercharger was a mistake. I've known that for a long time, of course. It was a necessary mistake, one that's allowed me not to make the same mistakes with the Lotus. It was part of an evolution; a realization that strapping on a shit ton of power won't magically make one faster around a race track. To top it off, Apex couldn't tune it so I couldn't really use it. And it still broke the car. Money pit. Bile. Spite. Resentment. Hate.

And yet I've never been able to bring myself to sell it. I feel like I owe it to the dumb lump of metal to DO IT RIGHT. Even if it's just once.

And now, holy shit. It's FIXED. It's there. It's ready to be tracked. And it ought to be, since I've had so many mechanical fixes and upgrades performed in the past year. It turns out that the real, finishing touches were a steering rack adjustment, a solid alignment and a corner balance. The alignment that had been on the car was a joke. It was so bad I thought that the suspension was broken. Caster, camber and toe were all off by wide and meandering margins. The corner balance was better, but was still off. It came in at 3420lbs with a nearly full tank and some crap in the trunk.


(Corner balancing @ Dietsch Werks)

In LA traffic, well, the nicest thing that I can say about the 'Stang is that the A/C blows cold and hard and that without the supercharger, it has some basic idea of manners. Don't get me wrong, I hate driving it in stop and go traffic. The heavy clutch punishes me. The race brake pads squeak constantly when they're cold, which is 100% of the time in normal street use. The suspension squeaks and the cheap plastic in the interior rattles. That glorious canyon-filling Italian V8 howl becomes a homing beacon for any traffic enforcement within several city blocks.

But who cares what it's like in traffic? It's not really a...traffic...sort of car now, is it?


(Holy twisties @ Latigo Canyon)

I had a blast taking it out into the LA hills for a pre-track shakedown run. I got in behind some locals and we had good ol' time swapping the lead back and forth. I can honestly say that it was the most fun that I've ever had driving a car on the street. The brakes got hot, shut up and started to really work. The wander in the steering rack vanished. To my astonishment, there was grip. Using my piece of shit Mustang which I hadn't driven hard for years, I was able to easily keep up with a local and his S2000, who knew the road and was very fast. WITHOUT making my tires talk.

What it comes down to is pretty much this: if you don't mind driving a track toy on the street, it's fine. If - and this one is key - you can BEHAVE, well then it's fine. If that's not your cup of tea, well this isn't the car for you. It's an interesting novelty to have it on a road trip but damn, where's my GTi?

And here's another sobering admission: the gas mileage. I've gotten 18-20mpg in the pure freeway driving that I've done, depending on the amount of stop and go and whether I ran the AC. That's *almost* respectable. But the last tank, the only one I've had that's pure, 100% LA commute? TEN miles per gallon. Yeah, sure, that includes the ~22mi of twisties from my fun in the hills, but 10mpg? Shudder.

So yeah, having it on a road trip was a major success but my clutch knee is very glad to be home to the GTi.