With spring almost in the air, the idea was to round up the various four-seat convertibles available at the $30,000 luxury price threshold and see what you get for that kind of money. Through several days of testing, our people wondered which car was better. The Mustang is skittish, but handles big drops better, especially ones that touch the front of the Camaro. The Camaro’s front suspension geometry may also be less affected by the tight radius. It was a combination of the Mustang’s superior steering precision versus the Camaro’s tighter chassis.

He would have loved the 700-foot slalom in which the tired, stiff Camaro zipped through the cones at about the same speed as the smaller, less-suspension Mustang. By throwing a couple of different weight chunks from some predecessor of the Empire State Building, he showed that an aluminum cylinder head and a cast iron cylinder head would fall at the same rate. Our test drives were reminiscent of Galileo’s gravity experiments. This could also prove that four disc brakes are better than two discs and two drums.

The Mustang locked the rear brakes at the start of braking and then locked the front brakes as the car slowed to a stop. It has larger tires and better brake force dosage, which provided slightly shorter stopping distances. With the test equipment still attached, the brakes were applied. The Mustang, of course, gives the driver a choice of 5-speed or automatic, and the round black knob between the seats is a lot of fun to play with, although getting off the line properly requires the right combination of clutch slip, gear slip, tires. and mash the accelerator. However, there is a distinct difference in technique due to the Camaro’s automatic transmission and the Mustang’s 5-speed transmission. Despite the similarity of results, Mustang and Camaro drivers will be able to spend entire days racing on a race track without determining a clear winner, which should make many racers and spectators happy. These two have been polished by 20 years of competing with each other on city streets and race tracks of all shapes and sizes.

Top speed was the first test and the closeness of the results would persist through tests of acceleration, handling and subjective evaluations. The Mustang was also the better passenger car of the two, with its 302 more powerful than ever and its revised bodywork. On the icy bumps of Michigan back roads, we found the Mustang provided a noticeably better ride. Our testing was completed at Ford’s Romeo Proving Ground north of Detroit with a new engine.

He died 100 meters from the groundhog. That was the end of that engine that had gone through many hard miles of magazine and Ford testing. The needle was somewhere very close to the 5,900-rpm redline, he said, when the strange noises started. The message was duly passed on to our driver, who also has a penchant for big numbers. He just so happened that our Mustang GT prototype was in the hands of product development engineer Arch Cothran when he came to TRC. The Ford was geared higher with the 5 speed and only ran at 4200 rpm in 5th gear. On the backstretch he had a chance to play groundhog dodge at about 145 mph.

As our mighty engineering editor whistled around the 7.5-mile bowl every 3.0 minutes, he was able to casually press the button on the two-way radio and tell us the water temperature was normal, as was the oil pressure. Just as impressive is the stability of both cars at those speeds. One hundred and forty-eight miles in one hour. The Mustang stays tight all the way. The Chevy V-8 is tuned to produce that particularly American fizz emitted by every V-8 that ever received a set of twin pipes and glass packs.

The Mustang is quieter at most cruising speeds, but makes more noise at wide-open throttle. It’s more stable under braking and those King Kong Goodyears have more traction. Only the timing lights in front of us could attest that the Camaro was more enjoyable to drive. The buzz became WHO as the Camaro approached as fast as Colonel Gaddafi’s worst nightmare and then disappeared. Click on the image above to see it in high resolution. Not to mention that all three were black. What a great photo. To our knowledge, this is the only time and the only place the Detroit musclecar trio have ever been caught on camera together. Antoine was leaving the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego, two bogies pulled up: the Dodge Challenger SRT8 and the Ford Mustang.