#Boss302

My cruise was set at 68 mph. For my very last drive in my Boss 302, not only was I driving on a relatively straight and flatter-than-Taylor-Swift interstate, I wasn’t even doing the posted speed limit. It was a stark contrast to the way I had spent the previous forty-two months in the Recaro driver’s seat of what was likely the best pony car that had ever been built on the day it rolled off of the assembly line in Flat Rock.

For forty-two months, every time that I made the 90-degree left turn out of my failed, half-empty subdivision onto the curvaceous country road that intersected the neighborhood’s exit, I did it in a full drift, burning up the excessively overpriced tires with banshee-like screams that acted as a rubber alarm clock for the entire street’s residents.

For forty-two months, I revved the Boss’ motor all the way to its previously unheard of 7,500 rpm redline with every launch, creating a soundtrack that was equal parts Beethoven and Stravinsky in its cacophonous composition.

For forty-two months, the speedometer’s needle rarely saw the left side of 85, and set up a near permanent residence to the right of a hundred any time that the Boss’ retro-inspired nose had an open road in front of it.

But not on its last day.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping track, I’m now a little over one quarter of the way through my 24-month Fiesta ST lease. It’s hard to believe that I’ve had the car this long, but it’s true. I just clicked past the six-thousand-mile mark on the odometer, and I’m just about to make payment number seven, so I’m driving it a little less than I’m permitted to by my lease. That being said, I have driven it more than double the amount of miles that I’ve put on my Boss 302 during the same timeframe.

As I was driving it to Ohio this week from my Old Kentucky Home, chewing up the hilly I-75 North route between Lexington and the Greater Cincinnati Area, a terrible thought occurred to me:

In just about seventeen months, I’m going to have to give the FiST back, and I absolutely don’t want to.

“Just passed this on Michigan Avenue outside of Dearborn. Manufacturer plate.”

The above picture of a GT350R in the wild and the accompanying text found their way across the LTE network to my phone last Thursday. My good friend — let’s call him Acd — and I have a habit of supporting each other’s addictions. In the therapy world, they call such people “enablers.”

In the car junkie world, we call them “kindred souls,” and I’m fortunate to have more than a few of them in my life.

On the rare occasion that my schedule gives me the flexibility to do so, I am always thrilled to pick my son up from school. It’s such a treat to see the little ones with their faces pressed against the glass of the exit doors, bursting with the excitement of the end of the school day, counting down the seconds until their teachers finally open up the proverbial floodgates and unleash them into the waiting arms of their parents.

My son is usually among the first to bound out of the building, and when he sees that I’m the one who has the happy job of retrieving him for the day, his eyes always light up just a little bit more. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with his love for dear old Dad.

And if I, for just one second, happen to think that he might be particularly excited to see me, he always puts an immediate pin in my balloon with the following question:

“Did you bring the Mustang today?”

When we last saw our hero, he was debating between keeping his Boss 302 or selling it and downsizing to a little pocket-rocket Fiesta ST for a year or so until the Shelby GT350 hits the showrooms. Wait, let’s leave that writing-in-third-person nonsense to NFL wide receivers and people with delusions of grandeur. Reset.

I spent much of last week crunching numbers and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Like our fearless leader (Obama, not Derek)—to those of you who voted in the comments section, I heard you. For those of you didn’t vote, I heard you, too. I read all of the reasoned opinions. I calculated. I planned. I schemed.

And then I said, Eff it. Let’s do both.

I may have lost my damned mind, but here it goes:

I think I want to trade my Boss 302 for a Fiesta ST.

(The Mustang in that photo isn’t just here for irony — it’s for sale! Down to $799 OBO… it’s a GT and the seller is a well-known decent guy in Ohio. Contact us for details — JB)

Embargoes be damned. There’s not a soul on the planet who cared about the 2015 Mustang who couldn’t have told you everything you wanted to know about it before today. Independent Rear Suspension. Fastback. EcoBoost 2.3 liter four-cylinder option. No room for the beloved (or maligned, by ZL1 fans) 5.8 supercharged Shelby motor. The first Mustang to become global under Mulally’s pet project, One Ford. Either god-awful ugly or beautiful, depending on the eye of the beholder. It’s hard to remember a pony car that generated this much buzz.

(Let’s all welcome Zombie McQuestionbot back to TTAC. He’s a well-known and well-loved writer who is now writing for “bigger” and “better” and “more easily recognized” and “less thoroughly despised” outlets than this one, but we managed to convince him to write a few questions for us — JB)

Mustangs. I know, right? I almost bought a Mustang once. Actually, I did buy a Mustang. I was in the American South on my way to see an actual underground bullfight, with a bull and everything. But it turned out that the two-year-old “Mustang” that I agreed to pay five thousand dollars for in a back room of a Mexican restaurant was actually a Mustang.

You know, a horse.

The good news is that “Trigger” and I had plenty of good years together before I let him retire to a farm in Oregon. For “plenty of good years” subtitute “one drunken night”. And for “a farm in Oregon” substitute “the glue factory”. Oh, how I cried when they led Trigger away. Mostly because he’d stepped on my foot. But that isn’t the kind of Mustang we’re talking about here. The retro Mustang’s been around since 2005. What’s your favorite one?

Hey there, autocrossers! Aren’t you tired of explaining to that stacked little “administrative assistant” down the hall that you race on a parking lot, not a racetrack? Would you like to change that in a way that preserves your car and your own scaly hide? Would you like to face off against TTAC’s only most feared racers? Of course you would.

She is twenty-seven or perhaps thirty-one, long-limbed and lithe with clean blond hair pulled straight back – though not in a severe way – from a fine-boned, small-nosed face. That which is not honed by either Pilates or Bikram is flattered by the lycra of her Lululemon yoga capris, the fabric caressing as it flexes. As she bends over to soothe an adorable tow-headed toddler in a six-hundred-dollar ergonomic jogging stroller, I have just one thing on my mind.

Damn.

That is a really nice stroller.

AutoGuide states that

In many ways, the 1LE is to the Camaro SS what the Boss 302 is to the Mustang GT.

Sure, and in many ways Silver Side Up was to Nickelback what Zep II was to Jimmy Page and the rest of the boys. And just like Silver Side Up, the Camaro keeps selling like there’s probably no tomorrow, and certainly no trackday tomorrow. Let’s see what 1LE customers will get.

Ford’s Jim Farley is well-known among autojournos for off-the-cuff remarks, but as he stands in a Laguna Seca garage, facing approximately twenty members of the Press As A Whole, he manages to deliver a real bunker-buster, one which speaks directly to this humble writer’s heart.

“This car… it isn’t meant to be stored in a garage somewhere. It should be on YouTube… maybe doing something illegal.” Oh, yes. Let’s immediately go out and do that. It isn’t until I’ve reached the top of a Monterey canyon, my ears and eyeballs vibrating from the past few minutes’ violent, screeching, Pikes-Peak-style run, that I come to my senses and delete the footage from my Android camera. We’ll let someone else lose their press-trip privileges following the big man’s advice.

That turns out to be a smart move, because an hour later I’m sitting at the pitlane entrance with a broken, smoking BMW M3, a dashboard full of warning lights, a squawking handheld radio, and a feeling that I will need to use all my accumulated goodwill in this industry, whatever miniscule amount that may be, just to survive the afternoon.

The 1970 Mustang Boss 302 is a legend. Created specifically to compete against the Camaro z-28 in the Trans Am championship, the Boss 302 is a much rarer pony than its nemesis. Only 1628 were built in 1969 and 7013 in 1970. Its claim to fame was the unique pairing of the Windsor 302 block with the biggest Cleveland heads possible, the result rated (conservatively) at 290 hp. Somewhat surprisingly, CR bought and tested one in 1970. And since they just finished comparing the 2011 Mustang V6 against the Camaro, CR pitted the stats of the two against each other. Let’s just say that the forty years have brought some progress: