2015 Mustang EcoBoost Track Review
The folks around the office and the folks around the Internet have been giving opinions about the new EcoBoost Mustang ever since it was unveiled to the public almost a year ago. Everyone thought it was the death knell of the Mustang — the death knell of the sports car. How could a 2.3L four-cylinder turbocharged engine be as good as a good old-fashioned V8. Guess what: it is.
I’m going to first say that all fake sounds are stupid. I’d rather have a good exhaust noise any day. These, though, didn’t bother me. Why? Because the car is amazing. Because of the light engine up front, the car dances through the turns. I had all the sport settings on, the track mode on, and this thing handled like a beast … so much so that I was chasing down a BMW M4 with this little pony.
The interior of the car is quite nice as well. It felt less claustrophobic than its big brother. I have no idea why, but it did. I didn’t feel as cramped as I did in the GT. This might come down to the Recaros in the GT being a bit too high up from the floor. It almost felt like a Fiesta ST interior.
Out on the track, and that’s really where this car belongs, the little EcoBoost is a stormer. There is almost no turbo lag; you just press the accelerator and the car launches forward. This thing has torque, and then it has more torque, which you don’t expect, but then soon realize as you are launched into very illegal speeds quite rapidly.
Like I said earlier, the little EcoBoost was chasing down everything in its sights. While we couldn’t pass on the track drive in fear of one of us shunting the car, I could get right up on the butt of the M4 in front of me. If we were allowed to pass, and the car was fitted with a stiffer set of springs, this would have been the most surprising car of the day.
And really, in the turns is where its only flaw resides. The car still rolls and lumbers through the turns. It’s not exceptional body roll, but enough that it intrudes on the driving experience. I’m super confident this would be an absolute animal around a track with the right suspension setup.
But that’s the thing about this car as a whole. There are no limits to what you can do to a Mustang, and Ford knows that. While they set up the ST family as perfectly as they could, they knew Mustang loyalists would want to modify their cars themselves, and so Ford left a lot on the table.
The new EcoBoost is a fantastic step forward for the Mustang brand. It not only brings the car into the 21st century, but it also opens up a whole new market for the pony car in Europe. I drove both the EcoBoost and the V8 GT that day, and this might surprise you, but I’d have the EcoBoost — it was just that awesome.
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