At Speed With The 2019 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350: A Properly Track-Tuned Pony
I nervously shifted around in my seat, anxious to get the show on the road. The forecast called for thunderstorms throughout the day, but the sky had yet to unleash its fury on M1 Concourse.
While wet pavement is an annoyance out on the street, it can be downright sketchy on a road course, especially when you’re behind the wheel of a 500+ horsepower, rear wheel drive pony car on track-spec rubber. But aside from a brief bout of drizzle during our technical briefing, Mother Nature seemed to be listening to my internal pleas for dry tarmac.
Ford invited a group of journalists out to this private track facility in Pontiac, Michigan to get some seat time behind the wheel of the updated Shelby GT350. The changes are difficult to discern from a cursory glance at the new model, and they probably won’t cause a specifications sheet to spontaneously combust.
The engineers at Ford Performance instead took a surgical approach to their revisions, applying a number of subtle yet key changes to the Shelby that result in much more than the sum of their parts. But none of it would mean a damn thing if we had to hobble these things around on a soaking wet track. Drive now, talk later, I thought to myself.
