ITS Ford Mustang(s) Build - Stripper Stang Part II

[Ron Earp]

The really good: Sucker has great basic handling characteristics. Corners flat.

The brakes are freaking awesome.

Power is I'd say average to above average for ITS right now, but here's the

The needs to be worked on: The car clearly works the front end too hard and kills the front tires too fast.

These guys did a great job with these cars. I think they will be fantastic S cars and I hope we see more of them out there.

I we agree on most of these points. The brakes are really damn good, despite the weight, and if these are "bad" brakes on a 27XX lb car then I envy the folks that have even better brakes in ITS. Coming fom the Z background of having to worry about brakes all the time, these are fantastic.

Power is definitely average, but we have the dyno sheets to show that in comparison to the other cars we know. It has a broad power band but it is shy of the power brokers or base cars in ITS - RX7s, 280Z, TR8s, etc.

Right now we're understeering a fair amount but I think we can dial it out, as well as the steering effort and vagueness. Development will continue and we'll get them right. Still, I'm pretty damn happy a couple of days later and optimistic that we'll have a strong running ITS car later this year.

These cars are particular though and like any ITS car take a lot of time to develop, so, while the initial buy in of a Mustang isn't expensive I don't want someone to think that these cars are inexpensive to build and develop. The truth is they are probably more expensive to work with than other ITS cars that are better known quantities.

I fell into that trap somewhat as the Mustang parts are cheap, that is the replacement parts are cheap, but you don't use many replacement parts, or, off the shelf parts for suspension and so on. And, the Mustang outfits are of little use to a road racer, plus, specific to these cars, V6 engine work and development out there is basically of no use since it is geared toward drag racing and illegal modifications. So, what I'm trying to say is I like the cars because I like Fords, Mustangs, and fabrication work, but, if you don't like that then beware. There isn't an outfit that you can call that can tell you exactly what to do like you can with a Z, RX7, Miata, and some other IT cars. Fair warning, you might be in uncharted waters....