The cornering attitude of the car can be altered by suspension adjustment.  As set, this one had strong understeer.  It had terrible understeer until we discovered the front tires had only 26 pounds of air.  These were pumped up to 36 pounds (the rears were left at 22 lbs.) and by golly, it would turn and corner after all.  We would have liked still less of it as even with relatively light steering pressure, it took a lot of horsing and a very hot approach to get hung into a drift that would allow the power to be turned back on.  Otherwise,  throttle-application only produces more of the "let's-go-straight" attitude.

Straight-line performance is something out of this world.  Playing around with a couple of quarter-mile runs, we hand-timed it at 12.3 seconds.  Set up for dragging, it could probably better that considerably.  Above 130 mph, the wind buffeting lets you know it's aerodynamically a big brick, but the only instability is when slight bumps produce wheelspin.  Top speed is reportedly in the 180-mph category.  The equal of any big production sports car in a corner, it will get around even the tight circuits in impressive lap times.  Miles has logged laps in the 1:35 category while testing at Riverside; a very solid Production car record and a little over six seconds below the absolute track record.  We would have liked to have tried for lap times with this unoptioned version, but four places on the track were dug up to put waterlines.  (Yessir, we said "water."  There's even a square acre of green grass in the infield now).  Even the unoptioned car has to be as quick as the best 289 Cobra, and, since both are classed by SCCA in A-Production, it will soon make the latter somewhat obsolete.  It's pretty hard to argue with 480 horses, which is roughly what the tuned 427 puts out with complete reliability, and with torque like a dump truck.