Over the last couple of months, I pestered the fine people at Ford so much and so often about getting my mitts on a Mustang GT with a 5.0L engine and stick shift transmission, I was left with two possible outcomes. The first was that they’d file a restraining order against me and that would be that. The second was that I’d end up with a 2014 Mustang GT in the driveway and the keys in my hand for a few days of test driving. Thankfully, instead of being served papers, I was served a Mustang. That being said, I was a bit taken aback when the car arrived as it was a convertible and it was slathered in Ford’s screaming shade of green called, “Gotta Have It Green”.

I have never been a convertible guy, I just don’t like the aesthetic of the cloth roof that’s normally black or tan against a brightly colored body. This isn’t isolated to the Mustang only, it is my personal preference. That being said, I was not about to judge this thing before getting in it, using it, and putting a bunch of miles on it. The color was a pretty shocking situation at first. I can tell you that after a couple of days and seeing how (largely) positive the reaction to it was, I came around. Women absolutely loved it. For real. There’s something dialed into that blazing color of green that gets every female in a quarter mile radius to stare at the car and many to comment on it. Initially I thought this was a bad sign for obvious reasons. It was looking like the mighty Coyote and slick shifting six speed were wrapped in a chick car’s exterior…until the guys who came into the contact with the car started telling me how much they liked the color. After discerning that they weren’t breaking my chops, I was surprised. As photographer Dave Nutting put it, “Hey, if you are going to go with a car like this, you may as well go all the way.” I can respect that logic.

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 So first impressions aside, I was super excited to hop in and grab some gears in the Mustang. Reportedly there is a redesign on the way for 2014 and a half as that’s the 50th anniversary of the Mustang’s 1964 and a half introduction by Ford. I think I was most interested in drawing some comparisons between this car and the Camaro we recently tested. Immediately upon entry…actually during the physical entry itself, the differences started to stack up. Simply put, the Mustang is a far easier car to get in and out of. That goes for when the top is up or when the top is down. You sit physically higher in the Mustang so you don’t get the sensation of “falling into” the car like you do with the Camaro.

Once inside, I took stock of the nicely appointed interior and immediately noticed something missing. This was the first test car we have had fome anyone that wasn’t equipped with the top shelf touch screen navigation info-tainment system in the dash. This was a welcome sight. The radio and HVAC controls were all easy to operate and functioned great while I had the car.

The leather seats were nice and nicely bolstered. They held me in place fine during some aggressive maneuvers with the car while testing its limits of grip and launch capabilities. The seats were heated and that heat comes as part of the $650.00 optional “comfort package”. I’d spring for it because I dug the look and quality of the seats both front and rear. Aside from some hard plastics on the dash, the interior felt nice and not overly stuffy. In some sense, it was as grown up as it needed to be but not a drop more. Unlike the Camaro which felt VERY classed up, the Mustang was a far less formal vehicle in terms of the interior. The $44,000 sticker price is certainly not chump change, but the car “feels” as though it should live in that financial zip code. But that’s enough about the interior, right?

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Getting right down to brass tacks, this things hauls the mail. Our tester was not equipped with the Track Pack or any other factory performance upgrades so we really had a base GT convertible. In the “fun to drive” column, this car absolutely blew the Camaro right off the map. Now, the Camaro was an automatic and this car was a six speed stick but outside of a couple of areas (which we’ll get into in a minute) the Mustang felt faster on my butt dyno. While you can wind the motor to 7500, we found that grabbing second hard right around 6,000-6,400 rewarded us with lots more than a dinky chirp. It would spin the tires hard into second when shifted there (with traction and stability control off).

The sounds emitted by his car, even in factory form are fantastic. The 302ci engine really sings when the revs start to climb, but like the Camaro, the first thing we’d do off the showroom would be to bolt a cat back exhaust on it to really let that engine wail loud enough for everyone to enjoy it. Hooked to the six speed transmission, it has as much or as little personality as you want it to have. It’ll lug along at 1500 RPM if you want it to with enough torque to make cruising OK, or you can rev match gears up and down through the pattern for maximum aggressive fun. We did find that making the 2-3 powershift was difficult and inconsistent. Maybe it was us, but that thing didn’t want to go into its gate when we really put the lumber to it. An aftermarket shifter would quickly follow the cat back exhaust.

Drag strip glory eluded us once again as time constraints and the last minute nature of the loan precluded us from laying down any laps on the asphalt aisle. Interestingly, the car has its own built in testing equipment. You can choose settings on the dash to time you for a quarter mile shot, and eighth mile, etc. Also, there is a G-meter that registers both lateral and front to back g-forces on a screen in the dash. We may have tested both of these functions successfully.

If there is an area where the Mustang felt outgunned by the Camaro it is in the handling department. The Mustang is a fine handling and cornering car but the Camaro we tested with the larger 21″ wheels that were also wider than would normally be found on an SS would walk this car in stock form on an autocross or road course. The Mustang feels much lighter when throwing it around but it has a tendency to push earlier than the Camaro did. If this car were equipped with the track pack and some of the other optional goodies, the field may be even, but it wasn’t so that’s our honest opinion. The good thing is that with the six speed if you are in the right gear it is easy to rotate the car with throttle. Easier than we found with the Camaro. Not to be redundant, but there’s plenty of car under you with the Mustang. When compared to even the last Mustang I owned which was a 1999 Cobra, this thing is a road handling rocket ship.

The brakes on the Mustang are great. Without seat belts you could totally human torpedo someone through the windshield when you really hammer the WOAH! pedal. Up front are big Brembo calipers which are part of a $1695.00 package that equips the car with said calipers, nice looking 19″ wheels and 255/40/19 Goodyear F1 meats. The tires are predictable and grip breaks away gradually, not all at once making the car super fun to push at those grip limits.

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 Before we go into a lot of great detail photos and more information, there’s one more area to address where the Mustang out shone the Camaro by a wide margin and that’s the popular culture angle. While lots of gearheads were impressed with the Camaro, lots of non car loving “normal people” were falling all over themselves to go for a ride in the Mustang. Neighbors greeted me with, “WOAH, you got a Mustang?!” My wife wanted me to stash the car in the woods and not give it back. Even my mother in law, who I scared the sweet screaming ba-Jesus out of with some high speed handling tests was lamenting the fact I didn’t have the car any more the other day. In that sense, the Mustang really makes a driver feel like a rock star, more so than the Camaro did.

I have been trying to figure out why that was my experience. I keep coming back to the fact that over the last 50 years so many people have owned a Mustang in all of their various forms that seeing a new one brings ’em all back to when they had a car they loved driving instead of one that they just tolerate as an appliance now.

The car was really fantastic, but the public reaction among my friends, family, and community was astounding.

NOW, ONTO THE GREAT PHOTOS AND THE STORY WILL CONTINUE WITH THEM!