There's always something to discuss around Mustang brakes, and with Ryan's car, the stopping was fine, with minimal brake dive (greatly reduced brake dive is a torque-arm character-istic) and no fade. The pedal was soft for a race car, however, and maybe a bit different to modulate depending on what sort of vacuum the booster was seeing at the moment. Maximum Motorsports, which has been working with Ryan, says several combinations of master cylinder and rear brakes have been tried, but in the end, they probably prefer the more consistent, firmer pedal offered by Hydraboost systems. We've found Hydraboost brakes OK on the racetrack, but don't think we'd go to the trouble of retrofitting them to a Fox Mustang. If anything, we'd likely go with no booster at all. That gives a hard, heavy pedal.
Well, no matter. The brakes in Ryan's car stopped with authority. Anyone stepping into one of these cars from a street Mustang would be amazed at how deeply into the corners they can go.
Ryan cautioned against hammering the shifts, as his T5 transmission is at the ragged edge with this sort of power. Hard shifts aren't desirable in road racing, anyway, so this didn't seem much of a limitation, other than the knowledge that the T5 is going to be something of a consumable item that needs freshening occasionally. The shifting was expectedly light and smooth, while the clutch effort seemed a bit higher than stock, but hardly out of line.
We didn't get to ask Ryan about his instrument placement, but we'd be tempted to reorient the instruments higher in the dash, or at least redirect them due to line-of-sight troubles with the steering wheel. In the cut and thrust of tight American Iron racing, there isn't time to peruse the dash like the Sunday paper anyway, but it would be nice to consult the tachometer out of the corner of the eye rather than having to look down at the transmission tunnel.
Pulling into the pits, we had found Ryan's Mustang leaner, more responsive, faster, and far more fun than imagined. It drove with light arm movements-fingertips, really-giving the feel of a smaller car with great power. We rate its combination of power and poise as perfectly suited to both challenge the beginner without overwhelming him and to keep the old hand well entertained. You could race this car for years and never get tired of it. That there are many other pony cars to mix it up with is only icing on the cake.
Going ExtremeIf CMC has proven popular, and American Iron is rocketing into the lead, American Iron Extreme is, well, there and waiting for the all-out sort of racers. Extreme, as AIX is normally referred to by NASA people, is similar to American Iron, but the power-to-weight limit is not in effect.
As Ryan puts it, "AIX takes the few [American Iron engine] limitations and puts them away. Anyone who loves to modify Foxes or F-bodies can go crazy." As any racer will quickly explain, going crazy costs considerably more than simply dissipating a fortune via racing, and so the Extreme ranks have been thin. In fact, at press time there were but a handful of cars running, though we can say those driving them were grinning ear to ear. Furthermore, with just one year behind the class, not many people were either ready to move into Extreme or had time to build a car.
The big attraction, of course, is more power. Ryan Flaherty's racing and business partner in NASA is John Lindsey. John has chosen to run his Fox chassis in Extreme, and as with Ryan's, John's car uses a Maximum torque-arm suspension, but it is powered by 425 hp worth of small-block rather than Ryan's 303hp 5.0 engine. Just after we visited with John, he fitted a dry sump to his engine, which conventional wisdom says adds another 25-30 hp, so you can see how an Extreme car is ready to rumble when the loud pedal hits the stop.