talltrini10 said:
almost $40k and still can't get IRS. No thanks
Don't get stuck on IRS.
Shelby said that they got their target numbers on the cars handling with the live rear axle. The new chassis is so dialed in they could bypass the IRS which would have added a few K to the price of the car and were able to save nearly 100 lbs on the car. It's being leaked out of the SVT camp that the cars getting 2000 Cobra R numbers in it's current trim. So figure near or at 1.0g on the skid and possibly faster in the slalom which was around 69mph with the Cobra R. All that with a live rear axle and on 255" for tires and a high 11 sec 1/4 time.
How can anybody bag on those numbers for a 40K price tag.
Don't forget Shelby was never a straight line guy. He's a road racer. He's always made sure his cars could turn into the corners. That being said and with Thai-Tang the head of SVT stating that their new goal of the division was for their cars to handle with M3's, Vettes etc I would expect their first new car coming out after that statement to be a real performer. Their not going to hamstring it with a live rear axle if they couldn't get the desired results. If you can get a live rear dialed in with a good chassis and get great numbers out of it you got a real winner because you got best of both worlds, good off the line performance and good turn in performance, a substantial loss of weight and a reduction of costs in both R&D and in the final production costs.
Here is a clip from Fords web site
Thai-Tang and his team aimed for a better-controlled ride than the GT, particularly at low and medium speeds, with better body control (included in Thai-Tang’s stable of test cars is a Pontiac GTO—the 400-hp version, as well as a C6 Corvette and a BMW M3). Front brakes are 14-inch cross-drilled rotors with 13s in the rear. The car should weigh about 3600 pounds, 200 more than a GT, Thai-Tang says.
By the way, Thai-Tang has a message for those of us bummed out about the live rear axle: “Drive the car first,” he says, “and you’ll see it’s a nonissue, because the chassis is dialed in so well.”
“I didn’t know what to expect before I drove the car,” said Carroll Shelby. “I knew the car looked good. Then I drove it. Wow. It’s everything I hoped it would be.”
