With various racing series coming to a close this month, the Mustang has proven its worth on track by bringing home two major road racing championships. This past weekend Brandon Davis secured the 2009 SCCA SPEED World Challenge GT title in only his second season with a fourth place finish at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Davis, who was racing in the new 2010 ACS Mustang that debuted a few weeks earlier at Road Atlanta, only needed to finish in eighth place to guarantee the championship and beat out Porsche driver James Sofronas.
The circle is now complete. Following a couple model years after the redesigned F-150, Ford has taken the wraps off the new 2011 Super Duty model at the Texas State Fair today. The new Super Duty debuts with a new look, new diesel engine called “Scorpion” 6.7-litre Power Stroke V8, and an all-new 6.2-litre gas-powered V8 (NOTE: This should be the same 6.2-liter V8 destined for duty in the F-150 SVT Raptor). Ford has still not released power figures for either engine, but the Power Stroke diesel does have the ability to run on B20 biodiesel.
In June, we told you that Ford was receiving requests for a crew-cab version of the 2010 F-150 SVT Raptor high-performance, off-road pickup (which we recently drove in the Anza-Borrego Desert).
In just under ten months, this blogger has gone from not having been inside a Mustang in 13 years (and a used one at that), to driving, in this order, a 2010 Mustang GT, a Mustang GT with the Track Pack, a Shelby GT500 Mustang and a Roush 427R. That sequence also defines our order of favorites; every successive steed has made us say “We have a new favorite!” In Monterey, we were handed the keys to the brand new 750-horsepower Shelby GT500 Super Snake, and when we gave them back we not only said: “We have a new favorite,” we declared “All hail, we have a new king!”
Further proof that Cash for Clunkers is fueling sales of small cars comes today by way of Ford. The Blue Oval is reportedly cranking up production of the Focus compact in order to satisfy demand. Shortly after the government’s scrappage plan was launched, news came that the Ford Focus was the top-selling nameplate on Cash for Clunkers trade-ins, though it was subsequently replaced by the Toyota Corolla and Ford’s own Escape.
We’re not going to say we told you so – because we didn’t – but we are going to go ahead and say we’re totally not shocked that former Indy 500 champ Kenny Brack just won some X Games gold. After all, we’re still a touch weak in the knees from our little ride along with him and his atomic weasel Ford Fiesta rally car last Thursday.
Most Americans still have a much higher opinion of the one Big Three automaker who didn’t ask for a government bailout, while views of the two companies that did get bailed out continue to go down.
