Our formal testing was done by the Motor Trend road testers at California Speedway in Fontana, California. This gave us state-of-the-art radar test data at what is now MT's standard test facility. Dodging rain, we ended up with a beautiful day with standard temperatures, no wind, and sea-level barometer-in short, little to skew the numbers.
We also conducted informal testing-piling on the miles while picking up and dropping off the cars, some extended time in the Mach and Cobra for real-world evaluation, and, finally, rolling start Second-through-Third gear acceleration tests with all three cars to see how they fared in typical user modes. Standing-start blasts to more than 100 mph are not typical mission profiles for street cars, after all.
Let's begin by taking a look at the formal tests.
Acceleration
The heart of a comparison such as this is how each engine moves its car. Always a good sign, opinions among us were varied in the beginning as to who was quickest, and it was an amazingly close race all the way. Regular test driver Chris Walton did the honors, with the following results.
How's that for surprises? Who'd have thought a Cobra was slower than a Bullitt? And dig how the Mach 1 is more than a half second quicker to 60 mph than the Cobra-no wonder SVT put a blower on the '03 snake.
Some considerations need to be made, however. For starters, Cobra acceleration didn't benefit from the slightly shorter, stiffer BBK springs. These inhibit weight transfer, making the already relatively high-strung Cobra a tougher customer off the line. Chris spent a little extra time finding what this Cobra wanted, saying, "It turns out this Cobra likes a little wheelspin and doesn't produce any axlehop. About 3,200 rpm was all it needed to break the tires loose, but unlike the stock tires, these didn't spool up uncontrollably-they were tractable and responded to 'pedaling' the throttle. Short-shifting one-two and [the] two-three [shifts] (at 6,000 rpm) made the best numbers. I let it rev in Third to make the quarter-mile."
The overachiever of the bunch is clearly the Bullitt. Its Two-Valve engine is obviously biased to produce more low-end thrust than the Cobra-and maybe equal the Mach-and it shows in the 60-mph time. The relative lack of top-end charge is also indicated by its 3-mph-slower trap speed, even if this was a stellar set of Bullitt acceleration numbers. Chris' take on it was, "I had one magical launch that made this the quickest and fastest Bullitt we've seen yet. A 1.767 0-to-30 time exactly matched the Mach 1, but then the Mach 1 pulled away. Still, Miles owes me a lunch for getting his car deep into the 13s!"