How many sub-£100,000 cars can you name with more than four cylinders and a manual gearbox? It’s slim pickings. There’s the BMW Z4, BMW M2 and Lotus Emira. A last-of-the-line Porsche 718 GTS or Toyota GR Supra, maybe? Good news: there is one more option, which has, instead of a piffling six cylinders, a full eight of them, and neither a supercharger nor a turbocharger. It is, of course, the good old (new) Ford Mustang.
It might seem ironic that this manual straw to clutch comes from the country that embraced the automatic transmission before the rest of the world. But the thing is, the Americans still love a stick shift in their performance cars, and if it weren’t for their appetite for manual Porsches and M cars, the Germans would long have made those auto-only.
This isn’t the first time we’ve driven a seventh-generation Mustang in the UK: we road tested the Dark Horse version in November last year, but it failed to convince, precisely due to its clunko-matic 10-speeder – that and the mismatch between the Mustang’s core character as a bruiser and the Dark Horse-specific track addenda.