Test Drove an '03 Mach 1...

October 17, 2005, 03:42:22 AM

... Without the sales guy riding shotgun! He tossed me the keys and said “have fun”, so I got to play for about a half hour. Anyway for anyone interested, here are my impressions.

I gotta say first that to me the 03-04 Mach 1 is visually my favorite Mustang and I’ve wanted one since they came out. Getting into the car, the drivers seat felt good, but no better than my Turbocoupe seat. In fact I preferred the seat control layout on my T-Bird. On the Mach the controls are below in front of the seat. The steering wheel was fine and I thought the round shifter felt good. It is a very small car inside though, almost closterphobic. I’m 6’4” and had to take my hat off, without the hat my head didn’t touch the roof (barely). The other thing that was bad about the interior was the cheesy hard plastic door panels. As long as I kept both hands on the wheel I fit ok in the car. But if I dropped my left arm the door panel actually pushed on my shoulder and crowded me.

However, the confined interior started to matter much less when I fired it up and looked out over that bitchin shaker hood scoop. That car has to have the coolest hood out there from the drivers perspective. The exhaust note sounded awesome too. I never even turned the stereo on. Had a nice deep tone to it. But again, it didn’t sound any better than my Bird with headers and Magnaflows. The shifter felt good. It just clicked into gear and the clutch was nice and smooth too. It was really easy to drive. The car felt tight, as it should for an 03 with 19K on the odometer, but I did notice a faint rattle coming from somewhere (probably having to do with the cheap interior). The suspension was tight and it cornered pretty flat.

So on to the acceleration. I took it up to 100 MPH on the highway service road and I gotta say it got there pretty quick! One thing I found interesting was that the engine didn’t start to pull hard until about 4000 RPM. But once it hit 4 grand it shoved me back in my seat to redline. I think I shifted between 6000 and 6500. The brakes are nice too. Those 13” binders didn’t break a sweat slowing the car from 100. I think I would rather have a well built 5.0 than a 4 cam 4.6 though. Just for the fact that the torque seems to come on sooner with a 5 liter.

All in all I think I would have bought the car if we wouldn’t have been so far upside down on my wife’s van. Yes, she actually was going to let me trade the family van for a Mach 1! But hell, it wasn’t a total loss. I still got to take a Mach 1 on an uninhibited thrill ride! I told her that next week maybe we should go check out a GTO… heheh…