Who Says You Can’t Have Power and Grip in the Corners?

By Patrick Morgan - October 6, 2016

grip

Generally speaking, throwing big amounts of horsepower at a car like the Mustang means it has to take some compromises when it comes to lateral forces. Grip in one direction (side to side) is sacrificed for other grip (forward momentum). But what if there is a happy medium without spending thousands on a race suspension? In the video below, Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire finds that Goldilocks balance with this Paxton-supercharged Mustang GT.

Pushing out about 580 horsepower to the wheels, and about 500 lb/ft of torque, you’d expect this to be a bit more of a handful than your standard GT. But even with all that power, this car stays remarkably well planted around twisty canyon roads. How does it do it? Well, it started life as a GT with the Brembo package, with the factory-tuned sport suspension. And surprisingly, almost all of that was left in place. The only thing done on this car was simply changing the front and rear sway bars. As Matt discovers, that one little bit of fine tuning makes a very noticeable improvement and wakes the car up to new levels of potential.