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and/or complete 2019 catalog.WWW.MUSTANG-360.COM OCTOBER 2019 59Rumbling back to the M3 garages,
the GT350 passed an impressive lineup
of its Mustang stablemates. Ford has
really developed a Mustang for almost
every niche, from the new High-
Performance EcoBoost package to the
giant-slaying GT500. In the middle is a
trio of manual-trans driver’s machines:
Bullitt, PPL2, and GT350, each with its
own personality and performance level.
Having enjoyed all three for different
reasons, I could be happy with any one
of them, but there is a clear hierarchy
when it comes to carving corners on
the road course.
“The PP2 closed the gap to the
old GT350, and delivers impressive
lap times for a base Mustang,” Billy
Johnson explains. “The Bullitt is more
powerful but does not have the track-
focused tire of the PP2, so it’s a little
more well-rounded than the more lap-
time focused PP2, which is still great
on the street. The 2019 GT350 keeps
a nice, sizable performance gap from
those base cars, which is a good thing
to see all around. The new base cars
get closer to Shelbys, then new Shelbys
go even faster. That’s the name of the
game!”
It’s a game that we are glad to see
the Blue Oval still playing. With Ford
Performance using racing tech to push
street car performance forward, the
fruits of that development continue to
keep the 2019 Shelby GT350 relevant
amongst its performance peers. If a
pure driver’s Mustang is what you seek,
the GT350 is that car. And, thankfully,
it continues to get better with age.
Pure Performance
While the 2019 Shelby GT350
gained numerous updates, they were
largely geared toward improving its
handling and braking. It did not gain
the digital cluster offered on the base
Mustang, nor did it garner auto rev-
matching, like the 2019 and newer
Mustangs with manual transmissions.
“There wasn’t a high want to put
rev match in it,” Ford Performance
Chief Engineer Carl Widmann says
in regard to the absence of the auto
rev-matching found on the base cars.
“There was a high want to really push
the track performance setup. And so
rev matching is fun when you do this
concepts and stuff, but for us coming
in doing an update on this, it was really
tires, chassis, and aero that were the
focus. We wanted to stay really focused
on pushing the performance of it
and then the intuitive nature of
the driving of it.”