62 wheelsmag.com.au
keen drivers is that the Clubbie not only gets the Bosch
torque vectoring set-up as seen on the GTS, but also
beefs up the stoppers with chunky four-piston calipers.
Six-piston AP Racing items are an option.
Parked next to the Redline, the HSV looks
enormous, the bulkier chin and butt mouldings, lower
ride height and more pronounced lateral lines making
it look half a class bigger. It’s not a car that shrinks
around you on a tight road either, but it’s astonishingly
lithe for such a hefty unit. The torque vectoring helps
here, although that requires some fairly focused
throttle commitment to generate that degree or two
of yaw to fire you out of a corner in vaguely the right
direction. The front end takes longer to trust than
in the Redline, largely due to the stiffer sidewall
hysteresis of the OE fit Continental ContiSportContact
5P tyres, which grip harder but are a little more
taciturn than the Holden’s malleable Bridgestones.
The only car here with an automatic gearbox seemed
likely to make a decent show on the strip and so it
proved, the Clubbie being comfortably the quickest off
the mark, the extravagantly overstuffed supercharged
Mustang only coming past above 130km/h. We managed
14.5 seconds to 200km/h in less than perfect conditions.
Away from the straight-line swagger, the 6L90E six-
speed auto isn’t quite as satisfying. Most of the time
it’s still a better fit for the Clubbie than the Tremec
manual, but that denial of downshifts as you lean on
the brakes into a corner can be frustrating. After a
while you give up on pinging the paddles and see if the
software can make a better fist of things, which often
feels – and sounds – clumsy.
The Clubsport promises real potency, but it can be
caught surprisingly off guard for a supercharged car.
Peak torque is at 4200rpm and peak power a heady
6150rpm. The net result of this is that it feels moresignificantly less linear in its power delivery than you
might expect. The flipside of this is that it’s endowed
with a surge to the redline that’s laugh-out-loud
hysterical. I haven’t heard such a manic shriek since
Uncle Martin snagged his scrotum in a split plastic
sun lounger while on holiday in Milford-on-Sea. For a
car that’s so refined at cruising speeds, this unhinged
duality of personality sets the HSV apart.
The supercharged Mustang doesn’t do bandwidth.
Getting in this car at the start of a challenging road
is like being thrown into a Central American prison.
Your mouth goes a bit dry, you’re hyper alert and you
know you’re going to have to wrestle it into submission
before it escalates the violence out of hand. It has no
benign side. That said, it shares the same suspension
set-up as its atmo sibling, which is fantastic on the Lake
Mountain road. Nothing can really live with the black
car up here. Full throttle is something you need to
work up to, and keeping the throttle pinned for even a
handful of seconds sends a raucous caterwauling howl
across the valley, overlaid by the shrill keening of the
supercharger. It’s hilariously traction-limited, notching
the sprint to 100km/h only four-tenths quicker than
its naturally aspirated sibling, but it reaches 200km/h
fully five seconds ahead. We don’t have many roads that
really do this car justice.
Point-and-squirting up here in the hills will do for
now, though. The steering feels best in its heaviest mode,
working nicely with the MT82 manual ’box. The auto
would make life easier, but the manual suits the blown
Mustang. The rest of the car puts no effort into making
life easy, so why not stick with three pedals? Besides, it
sounds so much cooler when you blip a big flare of revs
on the way into a hairpin when you know the HSV driver
behind is flailing impotently at a plastic flap and hoping
for the best. If you absolutely must win traffic lightTHE SUPERCHARGED MUSTANG DOESN’T DO
BANDWIDTH. IT HAS NO BENIGN SIDE