Top Gear's £30k coupe mega-test

There’s something eerie about an empty racetrack, and even eerier if you’ve known it crammed with people, noise, and action. We’re at Rockingham Speedway in Northamptonshire and, enveloped by the banking down in the pit lane, there’s not a breath of wind, so it feels spookier still. My parents brought me here as a kid to watch the British ASCAR championship. Yup, “asscars”. I’m not making that up. Think Diet-NASCAR for Midlanders. The seasons I watched from prime position on Turn One were won by a chap in a Territorial Army-sponsored camo-car called Ben Collins. Wonder what happened to him?

I’m shadowed by the desolate grandstand, peering over 20 feet or so of hood. Fine, bonnet then. It’s my first experience of a Ford Mustang. There’s a 1.47-mile oval ahead. Clutch in. Jab the engine starter. Oh dear.

Author: Ollie Kew
Photography: Barry Hayden

This feature was originally published in Issue 283 of Top Gear magazine.

Seventy per cent or so of Limeys who’ve bought a right-hand-drive 2016 Mustang have opted for the 5.0-litre V8 Fastback with a manual gearbox. The others, who’ve let their Yoo-ro-peen sensibilities get the better of them, have been landed with this 2.3-litre, turbocharged EcoBoost four-cylinder job – marooned north-south in the echoey engine bay like a distant atoll in the middle of the Pacific. Ford reckons as Mustang hype cools and buyers morph from enthusiast to curious new folk who’ve salivated as one of these fabulously hunkered Fastbacks slopes by, the EcoBoost will even out the split.

At £30,495, the Mustang is stunning value. That’s 312bhp, a limited-slip diff, an eight-inch screen, electric leather seats and heaps more for £4k–5k less than any pre-options rival. For that, I don’t care it smells like a taxi and the switchgear, in the context of rivals we’ll meet shortly, feels a touch Airfix-y.

But that engine will take some soul-searching. I had to keep explaining why it rasps into a dull, gruff idle on start-up, and when blipping the gas at a standstill, instead of gently rocking the body on its springs, the engine just whooshes a toneless drone of turbo whistle.

You could try convincing yourself this is basically a Ford Focus RS engine, driving the rear wheels of motoring’s most iconic baby boomer, but you’d never, ever know the two motors are blood relatives from driving it. There’s zero appetite for revs until a token charge over the final 1,000rpm. And, because of the sheer leaden inertia, the engine has taken so long to haul itself up to that sort of crank speed... why bother? Chasing revs is hardly in the character of a Mustang. Performance is satisfyingly rapid, but it sounds industrial.

I pass Turn One, where I used to stand on my seat as the grid rocketed past and feel the wall of 30 V8-strong noise knock me back onto the bench, crestfallen. Has Anglicising the ’Stang ripped out its soul along with half the required cylinders? The gurning snout of the new Lexus RC 200t in my mirror and two torque-heavy Germans should throw some light on that.

It’s odd how the Lexus appears to blend into the chocolate-box countryside better than the Ford, despite the fact it looks like it’s driven off the pages of a manga comic. The bodywork is a rolling piece of perspective art, all lights aligning, and new bulges looming and morphing into the background as you walk around the car. I happen to think it looks sensational. You might not. It’s certainly better in the flesh, though. In F-Sport trim, channelling some of the RC-F’s Godzilla bravado, wow.

Inside, it borrows the IS saloon’s handsome, immaculately finished cockpit, which also means the seats don’t drop low enough, visibility is pretty slim and, again, it’s design by Marmite, with touch-sensitive climate controls and a mouse-based infotainment set-up that’s a total pain in the… oh, what’s this? An iDrive-style clickwheel pinched from a last-gen M3? It is, for £1,995, an upgraded Lexus interface you don’t need the dexterity of a bomb-disposal hand to use. Good. It’s £6,000 more than the Mustang, the Lexus, but it feels 10 times that, right up until you click the mood dial into a promisingly named Sport S + mode and expectantly open the taps.

A tantalising straight unfurls ahead as 237bhp trickles through the eight-speed automatic. The RWD 200t is the 2.0-litre turbocharged alternative to the hybrid, CVT-shackled RC 300h, so you’d imagine it’d forge along with the verve of a car with proper cogs and boosty JDM gusto. Afraid not. The RC is the heaviest car here, at 1,675kg – and the least torquey. It’d struggle to shake a Toyota GT86, and the 312bhp Mustang would be in the next state, sorry, county by the time the RC’s auto had stopped doing arithmetic and found a powerband to exploit.

And yet, as you spend some time in the RC, at a less frenetic pace, you start to warm to it. Despite myself, I did. Outright performance just isn’t in the RC’s remit, but it cruises quietly, and the steering, which feels preposterously light after the Mustang’s macho heft, begins to weight up as the ride settles down. There’s no second act, though – that’s your lot. Get your kicks playing with the dashboard.

The Ford’s chassis might not be as primitive as feared, but its electronics are the definition of laissez-faire government. I drove it in the damp, not in Sport mode, nor with any of the aids switched off, and the big Ford was frankly twerking. Not alarmingly, but enough to give me the willies. In the dry, it’s utterly docile, but there’s a latent playfulness to it that’s absent in the Lexus. The RC looks the business, but doesn’t mix it with pleasure.

That’d be alright if it just had the BMW 4-Series to contend with. The BMW is an extremely sorted drive, but hasn’t got anything like the jewel-like richness of the RC. But against the seductive latest Mercedes C-Class Coupe, even the RC weakens. Like the BMW and Lexus, the Benz shares its cabin with a workaday saloon, though in this company that’s as much of a disadvantage as Serena Williams being your doubles partner.

You drop lower into the C-Class, onto narrower, more supportive chairs that adjust via electric metal sliders mounted on the sculpted doors. It’s got almost as much sense of occasion as the Mustang’s upside-down toggle switches and hooded binnacles, but without the disappointment of everything metallic you touch being plastic, or everything leather feeling plasticky. You can’t fault the Merc’s BMW rival for the rightness of its ergonomics and perfect driving position, but it feels so bereft of ideas. And rough ’n’ ready in places. Has the WWF investigated Munich for rhino hide poaching?

Unlike the BMW and Lexus, there is no four-cylinder petrol C Coupe for Brits. The sensible, non-AMG versions are diesels; a C220d or this C250d with 201bhp and 369lb ft via a standard nine-speed automatic. That torque figure looks monstrous, but the rapidity of its mountain-bike transmission means the Mercedes never swells into its stride like you’d imagine, on a massive wave of boost. This is the 2.1-litre diesel that’ll be pensioned off by the end of this car’s life. All the numbers are spot-on, and its teetotal refusal to drink verges on martyrdom. It’s joyless, but not shamed by the BMW’s younger motor.

The 420d xDrive came brandishing £515 of adaptive suspension, so the C250 brought its £895 five-mode air suspension to play. I’m still not convinced Mercedes’ obsession with Airmatic-all-of-the-things is necessarily A Good Thing. It can’t react quickly enough to damp out sharp stuff at low speed, and until the Dynamic switch (of course it’s a fab knurled rocker) is dialled up into Sport Plus, there’s more roll than the 420d, which reacts like its centre of gravity is skimming the deck trailing sparks.

Slower steering would help the C-Class. It uses a variable-speed rack that swings the nose in harder than a UFC headbutt to give punters that craved sense of agility, but the tyres and suspension fail to keep up with where the wheels suddenly point. It takes acclimatisation before you can pour the C250 through an onrushing bend without taking messy bites at the corner.

Eventually, I settled upon a tailored Comfort engine and gearbox, Sport Plus for the dampers, and the medium-weight Sport steering... and the Merc gelled at last. It’s responsive, easy to drive quickly, and more sorted on a twisting road than a C-Class saloon. It’s just hamstrung by that nagging feeling of a fundamentally fine car eroded by overkill technology.

The glummer, dowdier BMW can’t welcome you into its innards like the Mercedes, but it is about as entertaining a drive you’re likely to get in a turbodiesel four-pot. I agree, that’s as enticing a nod as “best foreign language art house film I’ve seen”, but for a real-world 50mpg car to have that verve is pretty handy. Enough objectively to win? Not quite. The new C-Coupe runs it close on driving once you’ve nailed the set-up, and it’s a disarmingly desirable product, so much so you could argue despite being another £30k 2+2 two-door, it’s barely on a Mustang fan’s radar, and vice versa.

Yet I can’t take my eyes off the Mustang in the mirror. It looks huge and ridiculous and confused by red telephone boxes and thatched cottages, like spotting The Rock struggling at a Waitrose self-service checkout. Ultimately, it lacks polish. The steering’s vague in all three of its modes, and the roly-poly suspension isn’t fond of fast direction changes. It’s lazier than the German coupes, more prone to understeer if you’re clumsy. But it rides pliantly enough, cruises happily and is more usable than you’d give its supertanker-footprint credit for.

Sunset glinting off the exterior, we pull in at the chromed American diner beside the A1 where the ’Stang looks truly at home, framed by neon. It’s a kitsch setting scoffed at by hoity-toity locals, but the portions are vast and tasty. It’s where the kid in me always wanted dinner. And the Ford’s the car he wants to drive away.