'95 Ford Mustang Cobra R Vs. '65 Shelby GT 350 - Road Test - A

About 15 seconds after the original Mustang hit the street on April 17, 1964, Carroll Shelby was at work developing its road racing counterpart: the Shelby GT350. With a hairy 289 V-8, muscle-bound suspension, no back seat, and blatty side-exiting exhausts, this fastback flier was nothing less than a race car for the street-built for men with bulging biceps and crumpled packs of Pall Mall reds, and a dawning free-love nation awaiting conquest.

On the racetrack, Shelby's blue-striped 'Stangs were true ponycars on steroids, dominating the SCCA B-production road racing world and delivering a fiery-hot performance image to Ford showrooms across the nation. Of the 562 GT350s built during the inaugural '65 season, 35 were techno-morphed into full-competition versions, known in the Shelby vernacular as "R-models." Powered by a race-prepped 289 producing close to 400 horsepower, shifted by a Borg-Warner T-10 ironman four-speed, and connected to the tarmac by magnesium wheels and Goodyear Blue Dot high-speed rubber, the GT350 R-model delivered a handful of oversteer, a flailing pedal dance, and the deafening roar of victory.

Now, 30 years later, there's a new Mustang R-model on the scene. Developed by the gearheads at Ford's Special Vehicle Team (SVT), this iteration is a big-motored, tautly suspended, fat-braked, super-'Stang built to ruin the reputations of Camaros, Firebirds, and most other machines that cross its path. But here's the catch: Only about 250 will be produced, and they'll be sold only to bona fide racers for competition use, via the 720 Ford SVT dealers; so, it's first come, first served.

Mustang mavens will recall that the harbinger of this special car debuted in very limited numbers on the previous Mustang platform as the '93 Cobra R-model. Rock hard and track tough, with radio delete, no air conditioning, and a loose piece of cardboard where the back seat used to be, it was a lousy commuter car, but by far the best handling, best braking, most race-ready Mustang ever crafted by FoMoCo and sold to the general public. Now, residing atop the much improved FOX IV platform, the '95 Cobra R-model is an even faster, better-handling package, and you won't need a back brace, an intravenous-drip, or Dr. Kevorkian's home phone number to deal with it.

When we first gave you a sneak peek at this thumpin' brute (Sept. '94), it was in prototype form, with some minor tweaking still to come. Now we have the finished product, replete with its transplanted 5.8-liter V-8, tough new Tremec five-speed gearbox, and rip-your-face-off attitude.

First things first: the furnace. Stoked with a steady supply of premium unleaded, fanned by modified SVO GT40 intake components, and exhausted through low-restriction pipes, this is 351 cubic inches of American V-8-the tenor of which hasn't been heard in a factory-built Mustang since '73. The powerplant basics are the same as those in the Ford F-150 Lightning pickup, but tuned with a specific camshaft, roller rockers, intake manifold, and a fuel injection system for increased mid- to high-rpm power. To help keep its poise during a 24-hour enduro, an aluminum two-row radiator was installed and augmented by an auxiliary coolant "de-gas" tank designed to trap and exhaust air in the cooling system. A 20-gallon fuel cell provides extra capacity (versus that of the stock 15.4-gallon tank) to lengthen the time between pit stops.