Drag test: Ford Mustang R-Spec v Chevrolet Camaro ZL1

Ford Mustang R-Spec versus Chevrolet Camaro ZL1. It’s a drool-worthy contest.

Yep, the carsales.com.au team has been out and about assessing these two supercharged V8 heroes on backroads, byways and the Heathcote drag strip.

Our Bathurst 1000 champion Luke Youlden let rip to see what both coupes could do in a straight line.

On a cool-ish day, Luke achieved a 4.759-second 0-100km/h dash in the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, while its 400-metre time was 11.892sec at just over 191km/h.

In the Ford Mustang R-Spec and Luke posted a 4.86sec best to 100km/h and a 12.529sec 400m time, reaching the mark while running at a tick under 190km/h.

Both cars were manual and after some experimentation, Luke opted to make his attempts without any launch control assistance from either car.

You might be looking at some of those figures a bit curiously. After all, both these cars produce well in excess of 400kW and 800Nm.

Intriguingly, Luke’s R-Spec times were about the same as other media outlets have achieved in the same car at Heathcote.

That was no solace to Luke, who certainly wanted to go faster; There’s no doubting the competitive desire or skill of a bloke who can launch a tall-geared V8 Supercar off the uphill start-line at Bathurst laden with a full fuel load!

But he found hooking up on the slick Heathcote surface was no easy task. It was wheelspin city in both cars!

“I feel like I am launching faster but not recording better times,” he said. “It’s so surface dependant. Pretty frustrating.”

The Mustang proved the finickier to launch and clearly there was a time gap to the ZL1 across the 400m sprint. But the closeness in km/h tells us the R-Spec was coming on strong at the end.

The cause of the time gap was likely a failing shift fork in the Ford’s Getrag MT82 gearbox, which didn’t help the critical 2-3 shift in the 400m run.

Luke had to be slow and deliberate and even then it sometimes locked out.

Unsurprising really, this gearbox has widely acknowledged issues and the unit in the sole R-Spec test car had definitely been worked hard prior to our test.

After a couple of runs the R-Spec also slightly retarded its engine performance. Not dramatically, but just enough to take the edge off.

carsales.com.au understands that’s the result of factory protection settings for oil temperature kicking in. The settings are pretty conservative, but that’s the requirement of a five-year Ford warranty and selling the car out of Blue Oval dealerships with full homologation rather than from a modifier’s garage.

As Rob Herrod, the Ford Performance tuning guru who worked with Ford Australia to set up a secondary manufacturer business to build 500 R-Specs – and sell them all before one had been built – puts it:  “It’s a proper production car with all the bells and all the whistles and it goes alright.”

In fact it goes better than that… as you’ll read in our full R-Spec versus ZL1 comparo coming soon.