FPV GT Boss 335 Mark II 2012 Review

It’s easy to pick what were there to collect. All the visual cues are in place. The air dam hangs low. The wing rides high. The exhausts are big and four. The duco’s bright red. The stripes and decals are plenty. And it all sits on strip-shod, sparsely spoked 19-inch alloys showcasing big perforated discs with bright red Brembo calipers.

The bonnet bulge is no sock full of sand. It’s clever – the product of a $35 million spend by Ford Australia in convening a coterie of well qualified outsiders. The local arm of engineering giant Prodrive was given the task of integrating a supercharger into Ford’s Detroit-sourced Coyote 5.0-litre V8, found in atmo form in Mustang.

Under Prodrive’s stewardship, local engineers Harrop took an Eaton-sourced TVS (Twin Vortices Series) supercharger and integrated it with a new intake manifold, allowing them to mount it neatly on top of the engine, between the cylinder banks. Although it needs that bonnet hump, it’s pretty tidy in there, thanks in large part to thermal efficiency levels eliminating the need for intercooling. Put that down to a mix of Eaton’s sophisticated rotor design, then to the Harrop-designed manifold’s efficient use of the 1.9 litres of air forced into it with every revolution.

Ford is ecstatic with the result, and rightly so. It’s a doozy; among the most potent engines to emerge from an Aussie factory. Good for the advertised 335kW at 5750rpm, to which you travel through a massive torque band, serving up its peak 570Nm from 2200 all the way up to 5500rpm.

For years before this one arrived, Ford handed Holden the local V8 market by pitching a manifestly inferior mill up against the General’s terrific 6.2 Gen II and IV. The old atmo 5.4 was an unpleasant, high-strung affair needing 4750rpm to reach peak torque, pointlessly flouting the first commandment in the V8 bible.

Here, Henry finds redemption in a drivetrain that’s as happy trudging around the CBD and through 40km/h school zones as it is howling away from stoplights to its 4.9-second 0-100km/h threshold.

Climbing in, we find the heavily bolstered sports chairs are all old-school low-tech, save for the electric height adjustment. Like Mitsubishi’s Evo, it’s a reminder of the GT’s roots as an everyman’s chariot. There’s a perverse reassurance, pleasure even, in the interior’s failure to live up to the price. It reinforces where your money’s gone.

There’s more of same in the starter button, as big, red and redundant as the car itself. After weeks of German starter buttons demanding just a quick touch before the electronics took over, this takes a little relearning. You keep your finger down until a baritone woof announces it has discovered the secret of fire. It settles into that V8 burble, sending a pudding wobble through its whole being.

The stubby gearshift has that hewn-from-granite feel so important in cars like this. Yes, it’s actually hewn from material harder and heavier than granite, but so is an MX5’s, and no one would ever say the same thing about it. Incidentally, you can have the GT with a six-speed ZF auto if you prefer, at no extra cost.

Turning out on to the road reveals steering as meaty as the transmission. And of course there’s the soundtrack – here the eight-pot orchestra laced with the whirrs and whines that are half the joy of supercharging. It’s attenuated to a level that’s civilised but… there.

The great thing about supercharging is that its benefits are immediate on take-off. Because it’s belt-driven off the crank, there’s none of the lag inherent to turbochargers, which need a decent surge of exhaust to kick in.

Picking the GT up on a rainy day showed just how much muscle you have at your disposal here. Put your foot down more than a touch, let the clutch out and feel this Big Red Car wiggle.

On a dry surface it still doesn’t take much to call in the traction control in first, but from there the whack-in-the-back and the quad-pipe roar goad you to stomp up through the gears with the left-right march of a pedal-organist. The twin-plate clutch is nice and light, belying how near-impossible the motor is to stall. It pours all that torque to tar with the smooth linearity of AMG- and M-badged machines costing three times the money.

Come time to take your foot off on approach to a bend, the gift keeps giving with loads of snap, crackle and pop on the trailing throttle. The Brembo brake package -- six-pistons apiece up front, four at the rear -- washes off your overenthusiasm with the same speed and cleanliness as the engine serves it. The new engine gives the GT a 40kg weight advantage over its predecessor, helping get its beefy 1835kg (plus people and stuff) into corners with manageable understeer. The suspension delivers a decent ride/handling balance, absorbing the worst of the road surface without fuss, but staying nice and flat, even turning in with vigour.

The steering’s quite accurate, easy to point and communicative for a vehicle of its bulk (and heritage). And accelerating out of a good bend is what the GT’s all about.

It’s a joy to behold, in a 19.0L/100km kind of way. Our car’s fuel consumption readout remained glued in the 19s everywhere but on a pure freeway run, for which we reset it all. There, even making prodigious use of the overly high fifth and sixth cogs and consciously keeping our foot off the go pedal, the best we could get was 16.2L/100km. Thirteen point six combined? Dream on.

But that’s not what this car’s about. The GT is homage to the joys of redneck hoon mobility. So it’s a cruel god indeed who gives one a car like this on Wednesday and pushes one over on a slippery wet driveway on Sunday, putting one’s left arm in plaster and rendering one useless on a manual stick.

But for our purposes here, there was an upside to this. With your correspondent stranded for a day while medicos decided what to do, several others played ambo at the wheel of a machine that would normally be anathema to them. It revealed a side to the GT normally drowned out amid all the sturm und drang. Namely, how easy it is to drive sedately.

Recruited for hospital trips and the limp back to Sydney, our reluctant de facto focus group of fortysomething men and women was unanimous in its approval, beefy steering and all. And the compliments came without solicitation -- a nice reminder of the Dr Jekyll hiding behind the Mr Hyde.

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