From the February 1993 Issue of Car and Driver.
Never mind that the term “pony car” has been around for 29 years—probably inspired by the secretary’s Mustang featured in advertising back then. The expression is icky enough to clog the printer, not to mention the editorial arteries, so we intend to avoid it.
Besides, the three cars assembled on these pages—the Camaro Z28, the Firebird Formula, and the Mustang Cobra—have nothing in common with the secretary’s anything. These are full-house performers, optioned for that one-in-ten buyer who wants all the go and grip the catalog offers. Ford will build only 5000 Mustang Cobras. GM reckons only ten-to-twelve percent of buyers will opt for the package that includes the extremely high performance Z-rated 50-series tires, performance gearing (3.23 instead of 2.73), and 150-mph speedometer. If, after hearing of this non-pony intent, you still can’t shake the equine metaphor, then think of this group as the war horses.
These war horses remind us of what the class stood for in its first decade of life, beginning with the Mustang’s 1964 intro. The secretaries’ rides, with their skinny tires and in-line-six engines, were everywhere, and Chevrolet followed as soon as it could with a similarly cute and thrifty Camaro. We looked right past them in traffic, searching for the relatively few that were packing the go-fast options. It was these few that inspired SCCA’s Trans-Am series—in its early days, some of the best door-slammer racing that ever was.
These few powerful versions represented a new reach for Detroit, a thrust in the direction of sports-car speed. The muscle-car intermediates were faster in a straight line. The war horses were meant to be Euro fast, fast when the lines weren’t straight, fast on roads where a demanding, discerning driver could enjoy a well-balanced machine.
Model-year 1993 does, in fact, finish out the third decade of this American class of sporting cars—29 years of Mustangs and Mustang emulators (bow heads here in a moment of silence for the Barracuda, Challenger, and Javelin comrades that fell along the way and for the Cougar that grew up to be too bulky and mature to entertain war-like thoughts). America 29 years after Mustang Job No. 1 is a very different place, with a much richer selection of sporting cars. Now, in addition to the American interpretations of Euro fast, we have interpretations from afar—Corrados, Eclipses, Preludes, Probes, and others that weren’t even dreamed of back then. So our expectations now are based on a true international standard.
More international than domestic, in fact, because Detroit’s efforts in recent years have been pretty much simmering along on pilot light—no new cars and no new tricks. But the burner is on high again for 1993. The Camaro and Firebird are all-new and as provocative as sheetmetal Madonnas. Over in Dearborn, Ford has enlisted its most enthusiastic car guys (and at least one car gal) into the Special Vehicle Team. Their job: inject enough hormones into the Mustang so that Ford dares to call it Cobra.
What’s become of the fast American after all this time? We can hardly wait to find out.
Comparison-test stations, everyone!
Third Place: Ford Mustang Cobra
Ford promised that the Cobra wouldn’t be a rocky-riding, ill-tempered hot rod that only a go-fast addict could love. And Ford lived up to its word. This car is quick but relaxed, an unusually gentle war horse.
The Mustang body is old, first introduced in 1979, yet the Cobra seems less of another time than of another place. You sit upright inside, surrounded by black cloth and vinyl, looking out through a windshield that’s relatively vertical. The mood is BMW.
Except that there is one inescapable and thoroughly wonderful detail—the sound of a good old American V-8 working happily under the hood. The V-8 is really the signature of this class of sporting car, the burble of the exhaust, the smoothness of the frequent power pulses, the right-now torque of big displacement. And the Cobra’s engine is as sweet as they come. This is a special powerplant just for this car, retaining the bore and stroke of the usual Mustang 4.9-liter V-8 but upgraded with larger ports and valves, new roller rocker arms, and better-flowing intake manifolding, injectors, and tubing headers. Output is up by 30 horsepower with no noticeable loss of flexibility. It’s as happy pottering around town as any Mustang in memory.
And its good-natured demeanor remains at full power, too. It pulls to its 5800-rpm redline playing musical sounds all the way. Acceleration, particularly in top gear, is a bit behind the others, as you might expect from its smaller displacement. But with quarter-mile performance of 14.3 seconds at 98 mph, this is a strong horse.
Ford told us early that the Cobra suspension would be calibrated for road driving rather than skidpad numbers, an unusual emphasis given Detroit’s wide-tire-and-stiff-shock approach to handling. And, in fact, the changes from the Mustang GT are generally in the softening direction. Rear springs are substantially softer, as is the front anti-roll bar, and the shocks have reduced resistance to very high-speed suspension motions. The idea is to let the suspension move more freely and provide more gradual changes in tire loading.
Don’t disturb the tires when they’re working, in other words. And these are extremely capable tires: 245/45 Z-rated Goodyear Eagles mounted on 7.5-by-17-inch alloy wheels.
If you parachuted into the cockpit and therefore had no idea of the tires, you probably wouldn’t guess the Cobra was a high-performance car from the way it normally behaves. The ride is loose, floaty, and rather disconnected in its feeling on undulating blacktop. Yet the grip is there, 0.85 g on the skidpad.
For all-out, roadcourse performance, this car falls behind the other two, although it easily outruns the Probe GT class of front-drive coupes (December 1992). At its limits, though, it takes more driver skill than all of the others. This is an old and relatively unsophisticated chassis, and it needs very smooth, confident control inputs as you approach the limits.
Otherwise, you get untidy transitions from strong understeer to tail out that make the car wider than one lane. And you’re left on your own for late braking into turns because there is no ABS to cover for you if you lock a wheel. The suspension’s softness may be off-putting for the unconfident driver too, because this car never gives the hard, quick, direct response of the usual performance car.
That’s a plus, or a minus, depending upon your expectations. This is one of America’s quickest production cars at the moment, with a fine engine and most of the equipment you’d expect of such a car, including full instruments on the panel and enough lateral support in the seat to be slightly better than the GM cars for hard driving. But it goes about daily driving in a relaxed, accommodating way that’s definitely out of character for a war horse. If pushing the limits is less important to you than everyday manners, you might rate the Mustang Cobra well above our third-place positioning.
1993 Ford Mustang Cobra
235-hp V-8, 5-speed automatic, 3248 lb
Base/as-tested price: $19,990/$20,529 (est.)
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 5.6 sec
1/4 mile: 14.3 @ 98 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 181 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.85 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 20 mpg
Second Place: Pontiac Firebird Formula
What you see is what you get with Pontiac’s version of this GM F-body, and what you can’t see is mostly identical to the Camaro. For powertrain, exhaust sound, and chassis tuning, they are tuned identically.
Yet the Firebird was unanimously behind in our balloting, in part because its styling produces real, functional differences—for example, the Firebird dash-top padding rolls off more toward the driver than the Camaro’s, and in the process makes greater reflections on the windshield.
There were differences of driving feel too, caused, we think—or more accurately, allowed—by production tolerances. The Firebird came out on the less desirable side of tolerances in several instances. For example, steering feel on very fast sweepers. Imagine a bend in a two-lane road that can be taken at 90 mph with very low lateral forces. Skidpad numbers and understeer-oversteer balance are unimportant here, far outweighed by the sort of steering accuracy that enables you to keep confidently within your lane. For jobs like this where the small cornering forces caused little buildup of steering effort, the Firebird tended to make unwelcome lateral shifts on its own with no change in steering-wheel position. At speed on narrow rural roads, it felt to be a very “wide” car.
All three of the war horses have tires of aggressively low profile. They’re excellent for very high-performance handling—on the skidpad and on the racetrack—but they’re a mixed benefit on the road. They ride hard, although suspension engineers are learning to tune out harshness: the Camaro and the Firebird have taut control of body motions, yet manage to soften the bumps’ sharp edges to an amazing degree. These tires also tend to self-steer over grooves and troughs in the road so minor that you can’t even see them. And they respond incredibly quickly to steering inputs, with the effect that the transition from straight path to curve often seems too quick—a problem exaggerated by the fast-ratio steering standard on Camaros and Firebirds with V-8 engines. This tire quickness remains, even as lateral force builds toward the adhesion limits. Higher-profile tires lose their quickness much more obviously, thereby signaling their limits. Approaching the limits with the tires in this test requires more driver expertise to avoid surprises.
All of this should be taken as a commentary on the nature of high-performance cars today rather than a criticism of these cars. To get the big performance numbers these war horses deliver, low-profile tires are absolutely necessary. The behavioral quirks that come along with the performance capability are simply part of the personality.
Do you want the numbers enough to put up with the car? Every potential warhorse buyer should ask himself that question. Because the Camaro Z28 and Firebird Formula optioned with the 50-series tires as tested here really aren’t just sexy shapes with rumpity-rump exhausts. These are high-performance specialists.
To some degree, these are young men’s cars, too. Young men need strong flavors and loud noises to know they’re having a good time. Take exhaust sound, for example. Both the Camaro and the Firebird make a V-8 rumble that becomes intense on the Interstate. We don’t know exactly at what age this becomes a damn nuisance, but our guess is that anyone beyond his mid-thirties will wish for something else after just a few mile markers.
And yet much of this car can be appreciated by drivers of any age. The six-speed shifts beautifully, and the LT1 V-8, borrowed from the Corvette but burdened with a more restrictive exhaust, is a thrill producer. Track performance is excellent—0 to 60 mph in 5.5 seconds, top speed of 152 mph, and 0.89 g on the skidpad.
Because of an engine oiling problem, we did not run the Firebird much on the roadcourse, but the machinery is the same as that of the Camaro, so its performance should be the same within close tolerances.
The seats definitely aren’t up to the car’s track performance. Lateral support is inadequate for the car’s handling, and we thought the lumbar support—not adjustable—was too prominent. This particular car carried few options, hence its low estimated as-tested price of $18,600. The Formula’s standard driver’s-seat track has an additional adjustment (beyond the usual fore-and-aft and backrest angle) that allows the cushion to be raised in front for more thigh support. This is a thoughtful addition, but it still leaves the driving position lower than some drivers will prefer.
With its lean equipment list, though, this Formula shows how much performance you can get today for the buck.
1993 Pontiac Firebird Formula
275-hp V-8, 6-speed automatic, 3434 lb
Base/as-tested price: $18,000/$18,600 (est.)
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 5.5 sec
1/4 mile: 14.2 @ 99 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 172 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.89 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 20 mpg
First Place: Chevrolet Camaro Z28
This car demonstrates how good the new F-body can be when everything is right. We found the sealing of the side windows excellent at speed. Control efforts were agreeable. The body structure is amazingly solid compared with the previous generation, an improvement that gives a quality feel by eliminating creaks and squeaks. And any 3452-pound car that clears the quarter-mile in 14.0 seconds at 100 mph and circles the skidpad at 0.92 g is a tremendous performer.
We like the Camaro’s look better than the Firebird’s, too. The rear spoiler has been deftly integrated into the rear quarters. The instrument panel also presents itself in a particularly agreeable way, although the high-level vents over the cluster are assertively goofy and the bright yellow switch-and-gauge markings, instead of the traditional white, suggest a styling department trying too hard to be different.
Some of the Camaro’s appeal is right down at the basic bad-boy level, too. Around town, the exhaust sound is a perfect replay of our high-school ideal, snarling at full power, popping and snapping on the overrun. The grin it brings is involuntary, and it is wide. We’ve grown up enough to judge it too loud on the Interstate though—way too loud.
This car seemed a bit more comfortable than the Firebird. It has a leather-wrapped wheel, nicer to the touch than the Formula’s plastic rim, and the seat has a less intrusive lumbar support. But much of the difference has to do with the optional four-way power seat that allowed each of us to tailor his own driving position.
Criticism of the driving environment was similarly subjective—the horizontal seam around the ball-shaped, leather-wrapped shift knob was deemed too prominent, for example. And there is another nagging concern that applies to the Firebird as well. The streamlined exterior shape is achieved in part by including steeply sloping glass front and rear. The slope contributes to an exciting cockpit feel, but there’s a price—you must look at the world through reflections on the glass. The slope multiplies the vision loss due to the normal accumulation of bugs and road scum, too. The Camaro’s dash-top shape, and its nearly black interior, minimized the reflections in our test car. But as dust accumulates on the dash and as pits, abrasions, and clouds accumulate on the glass with age, these cars will lose some of the driving fun. We notice, too, the appearance of aerodynamic slipperiness is not backed up by the wind tunnel—the Camaro’s drag coefficient is 0.34.
The performance numbers produced by this car are outstanding, and its roadcourse behavior when approaching the limits is quite good by today’s standards, with predictable transitions from understeer to tail out. The standard-equipment ABS gives good stability under braking, too.
Just as a .44 Magnum is harder to handle than a .22, so is this class of car much more demanding of driver skill than the Probe GT class of front-drivers. In moving up the g-force scale from one to the other, it’s easy to see why we call these the war horses—getting the most out of them is serious business. Serious fun, too.
1993 Chevrolet Camaro Z28
275-hp V-8, 6-speed automatic, 3452 lb
Base/as-tested price: $18,000/$21,000 (est.)
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 5.3 sec
1/4 mile: 14.0 @ 100 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 165 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.92 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 20 mpg
Chronicles of Immoderation
This magazine has always embraced immoderation because that’s what car enthusiasm—any kind of enthusiasm, for that matter—is all about. And over the years, this pony-car class has been a smorgasbord of immoderate machines.
Turn back to the “Z/28 Camaro vs. `Tunnel Port’ Mustang” comparison test in July 1968. SCCA’s Trans-Am series was terrific racing then, a factory-car showdown with Mustang and Camaro as the top guns. For equipment to be legal on the track, the rules said, it had to be sold for the street. Of course the best stuff never was. But the factories could hardly admit—certainly not to a national magazine—they were racing cheaters. So the editor got copies of the SCCA homologation papers and ordered one each thundering Mustang and Camaro just like the factories said anybody could buy. And on the intended week, they came!
The 302 Mustang had intake ports so big they were tunneled around the pushrods, hence the term “tunnel port.” Plus the first set of 60-series tires I’d ever seen-70-series was then the state of the art. The Camaro had a two-four-barrel crossram intake manifold that every Chevy street racer would have risked a felony indictment for.
The performance of this pair ruined us for showroom cars for about two years after. The 3480-pound Camaro ran the quarter in 13.8 seconds at 107 mph, compared with 14.0 at 106 mph for the Mustang. Horsepower in those days was way ahead of the tires, as you can see from the weak ETs.
As primitive as the tires were, they were way ahead of knowledge about handling. Fords in general, and Mustangs in particular, were notorious for understeer, which surprises me even now because Ford’s Dearborn handling track has a series of constant-radius corners that ruthlessly expose an under-steering car. I remember a 1969-model 428 Cobra Jet Mustang that pushed its front tires so hard I could see a plume of smoke stream up past the passenger-side window from the right-front tire. It was common in those days to scuff the front tires clear down the sidewall to midpoint on the letters and barely knock the corners off the rear tread.
The first pony car, actually the first Detroiter in my memory, that didn’t understeer ferociously (the Corvair aside, of course) was the midyear 1970 Firebird Trans Am. It had a beefy rear anti-roll bar (amazing technology in those days) and a torquey, 400-cube engine. The tail could be flicked out with a tickle of the gas or a flick of its black, fat-rimmed Formula 1 style steering wheel. All other Detroiters then had skinny, shiny plastic rims. The Trans Am’s rim was self-skinned plastic foam, not leather, but it wasn’t slippery. And it looked right for a serious performance car.
In recent years, Pontiac has made a point of telling people it builds excitement. With that Trans Am, no words were necessary.
In those days, every performance-oriented Pontiac we tested came through Jim Wangers at Pontiac’s ad agency, and they all had tweaked engines. Our first test Trans Am ran 14.1 seconds and 103 mph in the quarter. It was really fun for me—never mind that no reader ever got one that good—and I had given up on ever driving the pulse-revving equal of it.
That was before this issue. I promise you, the new F-body is world-class immoderate. —PB
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Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com
