By Jerry Backlicker

I have driven so many cars, but this one might be the best. It is the single dumbest idea the SCCA has ever cooked up. There is no reason it should work. Yet it might be the most fun per dollar car on the market.

It is a heavy, brute of a car with nearly no visibility, a drive base the size of Rhode Island, and a rear end that kind of just does whatever it wants. Even according to the SCCA, it kinda sucks. For the Solo II series of events (autocross for the uninitiated) different classes of car are assigned a modifier to scale how good the car is. The closer it is to 1.0, the faster the car. Club Spec Mustang gets a modifier of 0.800, which translate to “this car is slower than a 90s miata.” Which well, it is. First gen miatas are fiesty little creatures though so cut it some slack.

Club Spec Mustang is not quite like a normal class in autocross, or even a normal spec class. While it does accomplish the goal of creating a collection of cars with very similar modifications that all should perform about the same (with the exception of bullshit at the national championship last year), Club Spec Mustang and its sister class Club Spec Miata don’t just apply to one sport. As of right now, Club Spec is a viable class in both SCCA Time Trials and Autocross, with the potential for more competitons to be added as they figure out how. Now this might soundexpensive, but the other major achievement of the Club Spec classes is they’re seriously low cost of entry, with a fully prepped (roll bar and everything) Mustang potentially costing under $20k, and a similar price for the miata class. The biggest challenge is finding an appropriate car for these classes, as only specific versions are allowed. In the case of the mustang, the easiest way to find the legal ones is to look or the 3 valve, 4.6L V8.

In theory this car should work on the open road just fine, it uses ordinary Goodyear Supercar 3s. It gets about the fuel economy you’d expect of a 20 year old muscle car, which is to say it drinks gas like an alcoholic in a brewery, and once prepped it is really not comfortable.

Of course I didn’t test it on the open road, I autocrossed it because I can’t drive like a reasonable person. On course it feels big, mostly because it is. For my first few runs, they pretty much stopped counting the number of cones I hit, either out of pity or I overloaded the system. Once I got used to the size, I discovered why I love this car so much.

The Ford Mustang, especially the 5th generation one, are know for their unfortunate interactions with large crowds of people. It’s a cheap car with a lot of weight, some power, and most importantly a rear end that just will not cooperate. Combine that with the fact that people will just not maintain the suspension and you have a machine that is good to spin through 2, maybe 3 crowds.

The CSM Mustang on the other hand, handles nothing like that. It’s a bit loose in the rear, and you can feel it always doing something (often that something is not what you want), but it’s not difficult to drive. This was probably the second rwd car I’d ever driven and it only took me a little bit of time to get comfortable with it. I did one practice run with traction control on, and the owner of the car said that I was doing well enough and turned it off. This car always wanted to go harder, and it could. I could take every corner just a little bit faster, I could always use just a little bit more throttle or a little less brake, and it just kept going. I did manage to spin the car, mostly due to my shit driving, but it took me going way to hard into an element designed to spin cars to make that happen.

With the exception of the soupy transmission, everything handled more like a sports car than a 20 year old pile of Detroit detritus had any right to. It’s a bit down on power compared to today’s muscle cars, but it’s a fraction of the cost. And that extra bit of power it has over a miata just feels so refreshing compared to the miataforms it competes with. It’s a fun car, and it knows it.