Many tuners in North America and the UK will tell you that buying the overpriced Mustang Shelby GT500 doesn’t make sense when you can get a regular GT and tune it instead. With its latest episode, Carwow illustrates the fallacies of such an approach.
This particular race is held between a stock GT500 (insofar as it can be called that) and a Ford Mustang GT boosted by Clive Sutton. A larger supercharger and overhauled internals enable the five-liter V8 to pump out 860 PS (847 hp / 632 kW), a hundred horses more than the rival in this race has at its disposal.
To justify the spoiler in the title, let us just cut to the chase already: why did the tuned Mustang GT lose both runs? The first one was a standing race, so it could be the case of manual transmission being inferior by design to the GT500’s seven-speed DCT. Nailing the launch could help, but it seemed close to perfect, anyway.
The other one was a rolling race, and the manual ‘Stang had even more going for it. We cannot say whether transmission losses were to blame or changing out of turn. For all we know, the fault could lie with the suspension, which is far more track-friendly in the Shelby version.
And the takeaway is, not every performance tuning is good, so be sure to test and compare!