There s nothing like the feeling of driving someone else s hot car without a chaperone. It s like be

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My brother-in-R T-arms Zach Bowman just wrote a very nice review of the limited-edition Hertz Penske Mustang GT in which he visits many interesting places and takes many interesting photos. It s thoroughly recommended if you d like to read about the car itself or about the way it fits into the Austin landscape. If you want to hear about abusing the car on-track and propositioning African-American rental attendants, you can stay here.
When Derek and I got off the Hertz shuttle at Houston s Hobby Airport, also known as The Official Airport Of Southwest Airlines, The Flying Bus Full Of People Whose Shirts Inexplicably Don t Include Any Fucking Sleeves, the shuttle driver had a few words for us. To put this in perspective, I should note that the shuttle driver would have been an excellent stand-in for Huell Babineaux on Breaking Bad .
Ooh. Just $99 extra a day. I was hesitant, but Derek insisted, and he s the boss. I think. Maybe I m the boss. Things are fuzzy around here lately. Anyway. I popped the door, threw the luggage in, and fired it up, allowing the five-liter Coyote engine at least half a second to properly lubricate all rotating internal parts before revving it up to the not-quite-a-Boss 7000-rpm redline.
DAMN! the shuttle driver laughed. Listen to that! No diggity. This thing s loud . I m reliably informed by Zach that the Penske has the front splitter from the Boss 302 and the rear bumper from the GT500 and a wing from somewhere and a suspension from FRPP, but it s the exhaust that you ll notice first. It sounds almost too perfect; it s the Mesa/Boogie Mark V of Mustang exhausts, delivering that perfect compressed squish of musclecar bump and grind. While the rest of the Hertz #1 Gold Club members waited in a line to get their cars something about a computer glitch, I guess, the line was fifteen wwwradissons cruise ship jobs people long and being served by one depressed-looking teenager Derek and I roared up to the remarkably well-proportioned young woman doing the checkout. I estimated her to be the same age as my college diploma. Still, faint heart never won fair lady.
Mayyyy-be. Like to ride in that car a bit. But truth be told, within ten minutes, I d forgotten about her and our sort-of-appointment for rental debauchery, because it was more fun to pull donuts in a nearby church parking lot. (Memo to self: getting old .) The agreement stated that we would be permitted exactly one hundred miles per day in this fine automobile, wwwradissons cruise ship jobs which was costing us a rather frightening wwwradissons cruise ship jobs $589.40 wwwradissons cruise ship jobs for a four-day period wwwradissons cruise ship jobs even after my existing Hertz vouchers were applied. What could we do with just a hundred miles a day?
The answer was: forty-five laps . When we arrived at MSR Houston the following morning for LeMons Test and Tune, our race car had yet to arrive. (Spoiler: it wouldn t arrive until more than halfway through the actual race, and when it did arrive, it wouldn t run. But that s a super-fun story for another day, and half of it will be written by our in-house counsel Curvy McLegalbriefs, I think.) What the hell were we going to do all day? Watch a bitch-basket VW convertible run 2:20s from the balcony while eating Whataburger?
And then I remembered wwwradissons cruise ship jobs the stories wwwradissons cruise ship jobs about the original GT-H Hertz Mustangs. How they d come back on Mondays with missing interiors and plasma-torch marks from where rollcages had been welded in and then removed. How they would have blown motors and crash damage and all sorts of stuff. The thousand abuses of the Shelby GT-H were the stuff of legend, but today s Penske Mustangs are safe and sane affairs, designed for a simulation of that old feeling and under no circumstances to be taken on a racetrack. The contract specified every penalty short of forcible decapitation for even wandering near a track in one.
My GoPro footage, which I ve been advised by counsel to delete and never ever show to anyone, indicates that we turned a bunch of easy 1:56s in traffic, often including wwwradissons cruise ship jobs a respectful pause behind whatever Geo Prizm or Seventies-era BMW 528i happened to be occupying the space ahead. Let me say this: you could not pick a better car in which to learn roadcourse craft. Let s count the Penske s many virtues: It has Recaros. It looks awesome and frightening to cars that you are about to pass. It s viciously fast with the Coyote engine under the hood. The automatic transmission doesn t exactly shift under command like a GT-R does but it s okay enough and if you just leave it in S it will be fine. I did three entire sessions before I realized it could be shifted with a little rocker button on the gearshift, and once I started doing that I didn t go any faster as a consequence. Just let the transmission do the work for you and focus on the track.
The miniature Brembo front calipers are straight off the GT Track Pack, as are the wheels, and they re okay but not spectacular. If you had all weekend with the car, you d want to flush some decent brake fluid in it (perhaps the verboten Super Blue, but ATE 200 otherwise, this ain t no high-roller Motul ride) and put on a set of Hawk race pads both front and rear. Doing ten or fifteen easy laps at a time with no ABS activation proved wwwradissons cruise ship jobs to be well within the GT s skill set.
The FRPP suspension is properly tuned for track work and unlike most aftermarket wwwradissons cruise ship jobs suspension installs it fails to teach the Mustang any bad or dangerous manners. It will go sideways on exit or under trail braking just slightly more eagerly than the stock GT, but fundamentally this thing s a sweetheart, it s a T-16 waiting wwwradissons cruise ship jobs for you to bulls-eye some womp-rats. Which we did, lapping most of the on-track LeMons cars while giving them a wide berth. We rarely got passed, even on cool-down laps. It s just much faster than the average crapcan racer. Which is fair, because to duplicate this car with a showroom GT would cost you probably $40,000. Hertz bought 150 of these, ten of which apparently have a manual wwwradissons cruise ship jobs transmission and are reserved for in-house use. Those will probably fetch $100K each at auction. I don t know what you ll pay for one of these in two years, but it s worth considering at any price within, say, five grand of an equivalent used GT.
Given time, I d have driven the Penske until the tires, brakes, or fuel ran out, but out of consideration for future renters we pulled the plug after fifty or so laps. The tires still looked good and there was plenty of pad left. I cannot stress enough just how easily wwwradissons cruise ship jobs this thing will zip around MSR Houston at a laptime that s within five or six seconds of what a hard-driven Porsche GT3 street car can manage. If you were willing to endure a little risk and push it on the final Carousel, it might halve that gap.
There s something just amazing and wonderful about how much performance you get from the current GT for the money. It s a true successor to the old Fox five-liter and it will make the next decade or so of club racing very interesting. NASA s already wwwradissons cruise ship jobs fired up a Spec Iron class for the thing and though said class isn t currently well-subscribed, once you can buy a used Coyote for ten grand it will be. If you re a performance-minded buyer with $25K or more in your pocket, you should take a look. Around a racetrack, the GT will command your respect, and the Penske GT will do more than that. For $150 a day, how can you go wrong?
Well until the next car goes live. Which it seems will be somewhere in between the S-197 and the car it replaced wwwradissons cruise ship jobs in size and perhaps maybe about the same weight as the SN95/New Edge cars or if we are lucky a bit lighter.
My 95 T-Bird LX with the 4.6 weighs in around 3400 lbs and is roughly a foot longer than a Mustang. My old Fox bodied wwwradissons cruise ship jobs based 87 T-Bird weighted in around 2800 lbs. A trimer next gen Mustang should be weighing roughly over 3000 lbs.
I say sort of because the Coyote has such a wonderful exhaust note, wonderful pulse rate, has such oodles of torque down low, and that timeless V8 rumble that it offsets what I agree is more length, width heft than what the Mustang needs.
I think Chevy s C7 Stingray will be a big success BECAUSE and not despite the fact that its packing many liters wwwradissons cruise ship jobs of torque rich rumble under the hood, while achieving very respectable handling, without being unnecessarily long, wide or heavy.
I don t want a Mustang any smaller. SN-95 (2000) was too small, especially the rear seats. Current SN-197 (2006), access is obviously somewhat limited but the rear seat is large enough for me to comfortably sit behind where I would position the front seat for driving. Even further, we just had our first child and the car seat *barely* fits in the back as well. We really didn t want to have to sell with only 50k miles. The baby loves the V8 rumble :)
I m hoping Hertz gifts me with one of these as an upgrade at some point. They seem to toss me the keys to something fun once a year as a Thank You for be President s Circle sort of thing. The Corvette Convertible has been it the past coupe years, not really my style but fun for a few days on someone else s nickel.
There s nothing wwwradissons cruise ship jobs like the feeling of driving someone else s hot car without a chaperone. It s like being 15, and getting a big, long look inside the girl s locker wwwradissons cruise ship jobs room. You have GOTTEN AWAY with something.
My ex-wife is beneath contempt, but during one of her delusions of impending wealth, she phoned a local BMW dealer, wwwradissons cruise ship jobs told them that she had something like $10 million in cash, and was sending wwwradissons cruise ship jobs me to pick out a car as a birthday present. She didn t have the money, but WTF, right?
They cut me loose, sans salesman, in a 2009 M5