So you think you’re hard on a car? Imagine the abuse a car would get being flogged day in and day out at the hands of students in a high-performance driving school. Then imagine that that driving school was located in the stifling heat of Phoenix, Arizona, where summer temperatures regularly peg the thermometer above 100-degrees F. That should give you a glimpse into the hardships suffered by the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving’s fleet of race-prepped Ford Mustang GTs.
The renowned school operates a fleet of about 50 ’94 and ’95 Mustang GTs, powered by the last of the venerable pushrod 5.0L V-8s and was in the process of upgrading to ’99 and 2000 GTs with 4.6L modular V-8s when we attended a three-day high-performance driving course last fall. The school also maintains a fleet of about 53 four-valve, ’97-’99 Cobras that are used by students in advanced road racing courses. All of these cars, which are provided by Ford Motor Company, are prepped by Roush Industries in Livonia, Michigan, before being delivered to the school. While other students took a long lunch, we hung out in the garage, where a team of 26 mechanics works seven days a week keeping the fleet in tip-top shape.
The first thing we noticed when we saw the fleet of orange Mustangs lined up in the paddock was their funky wheel alignment, with the tops of the tires tilted inward and slightly toed out. We thought this knock-kneed look went out when the era of skinny bias-play rubber ended, but we learned from our instructors that the wacky specs substantially improve the handling characteristics of the cars by keeping more of the tire’s contact patch on the ground when the suspension is compressed in a turn. Aligning your daily driver like this would eat through a set of front tires in short order on the street, but tire wear is kept to a minimum because the straightaways on the school’s tracks are relatively short, so tire scrub isn’t a big problem. Besides, we did more damage to our tires making brutal oversteer slides through corners than any alignment specs could ever cause!
The bulk of the rest of the modifications are aimed at ensuring the safety of the students in the case of an accident (a rare but dangerous possibility during wheel-to-wheel hot-lapping sessions) and enhancing durability in the face of the harsh climate and driving conditions. Considering that these cars spend almost every operating moment at wide-open throttle, the fact that we never saw a temp gauge move past the halfway point is a testimonial to the cooling systems, which are beefed up using off-the-shelf factory parts. Brakes are the other major issue at a driving school, and the Bondurant Mustangs are updated with current-issue Cobra binders. The only upgrades are the addition of cooling ducts in the front air dam and racing compound carbon-metallic Performance Friction pads. Still, brake life is short, with pad changes coming after every other three-day class and rotors being replaced about once a month.
Suiting up with a helmet and firesuit, and strapping into a car with a full ’cage, window nets, a fire system, and a racing seat is a manly experience, and we had a blast driving these virtual race cars up to the limits of our ability, which of course was nowhere near theirs. So what happens to these hardened warriors when the school is finished with them? We were dying to take one home with us, but to our dismay, the Bondurant staff told us that Ford mandates that each car be crushed at the end of its service life. Bummer.