This Dark Horse is one of the cars of the year
This muscular Mustang and its six-speed manual gearbox stands out among the crowd of EVs and hybrids and reminds us all what it’s like to have fun behind the wheel.
Six brusque blokes, 25 cars, five days and at least 14 hours of ill-mannered shouting. Who wouldn’t want to be a judge for the Car of the Year award at a legendary motoring magazine, other than me?
It is often said that the human body can’t remember pain, a truism that is proved by the fact that so many people have more than one child, and that some even sign up to breed again after parenting a teenager.
It had been more than a decade since I’d last braved this event and my memories of it were dim but dark, which is to say I remember creeping out to the car park towards the end of an exhausting week, removing a tyre iron from the back of a car and slapping it repeatedly into my palm as I considered which one of my fellow judges I would hit with it first.
I’m not saying that my esteemed colleagues are bad people, just that their level of anal retentiveness is such that they can infuriate me. So why did I agree to go back? Well don’t tell my wife (she thinks I left her to fend alone for fistfuls of cash), but I fear it was ego.
This year, in an effort to inject some vigour, vim and voltage into the affair, it was declared that all of the judges would be former editors of the magazine, thus setting up a clash of egos that I could not miss (and yes, I was flattered to be asked, despite the fact that my editorship would best be compared to the reign of former British PM Liz Truss).
It was around the start of the third day of driving around the Ride & Handling Loop at the Lang Lang track in Victoria (where Holden used to test its vehicles) that my unfortunately limited patience started to fray, but I held it together because I was fascinated at the fight that was unfolding about which six cars should be voted through to the next stage.
Standing out amid a crowded field of electric vehicles and hybrids like an NBA player in a penguin colony was a car that I previously thought implausible – a Ford Mustang that is genuinely fantastic to drive. It’s called the Dark Horse and among its many fabulous features are a six-speed manual gearbox that is so puritanically perfect to use that it must surely have been stolen from a German factory and shipped to the US, where cars this good are almost never made.
It also has a Track mode for its booming, bass-thumping exhaust, which is amusingly accompanied by a screen-warning telling you it’s so loud you can only use it at race circuits (as if this will stop anyone, ever), a 5.0-litre V8 engine (making 350kW and 550Nm) that must have been stolen from a muscle-car museum, and rear-wheel drive.
Sure, no one could get the Dark Horse Mustang to 100km/h in less than five seconds, which meant that it was shamed and openly mocked by other favoured entrants like the all-electric Hyundai Ioniq 5 N (3.4 seconds, thanks to 478kW and 770Nm). And yet the Ford was, in ways that are hard to express in pure scientific or even engineering terms, just so much more fun to drive than any of the other cars. Yes, the gearbox was a huge part of that, but so were the superlative sounds it made as you changed gears, and its muscular steering, which felt like it might want to take you to a bar and challenge you to an arm-wrestle.
There were many solid, anally retentive reasons why it shouldn’t go through to the final six – but value was not one of them, because $98,017 for this much performance, and the car’s collectability, seems a bargain.
Personally, I did argue that it seemed unwise to allow a car that no one can really buy (only 1000 will be imported, all of them are sold, and there’s a waiting list in case anyone drops out) to win, but rumour has it that Ford Australia might find a way to herd some more Dark Horses our way.
More than any logical argument, however, all of us clearly wanted it to go through to the next stage of testing so we could spend a day driving it around a fantastic road loop and enjoying the fact that it wasn’t an EV.
Unfortunately it was there I discovered that while the Dark Horse is an unusually excellent Mustang, it’s still a Ford, with all of the reliability issues that entails. In this case it was a sensor that continually determined my hands weren’t on the steering wheel and shouted and flashed at me to put them back, even though they bloody well were holding on, and very tightly.
Even that factor couldn’t make some of my colleagues fall out of love with the muscular Mustang, though – perhaps because many of them lived through the era when a Ford or Holden V8 on the cover of Wheels meant a guaranteed sales boost for the magazine.
Sadly, I’m not allowed to tell you which car won Wheels Car of the Year in the end, but I can tell you that, against all odds, and despite all the shouting, it was a unanimous decision. I wish them all luck next year.
Ford Mustang Dark Horse
ENGINE: 5.0-litre V8 (350kW/550Nm)
FUEL ECONOMY: 13.6 litres per 100km
TRANSMISSION: 6-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
PRICE: $98,017
RATING: 4/5
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