Michigan test archive · Comparison 1

1983 Ford Mustang vs 1983 Ford LTD Crown Victoria S

Two of the five Fords in the 1983 Michigan test: a Mustang the book did not score, and the LTD Crown Victoria S that scored highest. The same acceleration day, the same road course and the same four lap drivers.

Meet the two cars

Why these two

They are two of the five Fords in the 1983 test and the two cars at the top of it: the Mustang has the quickest figures in the book, and the Crown Victoria S the highest score. With the same maker, the same acceleration day, the same road course and the same lap drivers, the gap between them is the gap between the quickest car Michigan tested that year and the car its scoring placed first.

Head to head

The run to 100 mph

Each point is a four-run average from the book’s Table 3. At every 10-mph step the Mustang got there first; by 100 mph it was 17.10 seconds ahead.

Under the skin

Each pair of bars is drawn to its own scale, from zero. The figures are the book’s, as in the table below.

Run by run

The Mustang’s four runs to 100 mph were within 2.01 seconds of each other. The Crown Victoria’s were 6.31 seconds apart: its second and fourth runs were 4.8 to 6.3 seconds slower than its first and third. The book runs two in each direction to allow for wind, but does not say which runs went which way.

Around the road course

Each car’s four laps that the book deleted for averaging are hollow in the chart and struck through in grey in the tables (“Shaded areas indicate times deleted for overall averaging purposes”). Floate was the quickest driver in both cars; his slowest Mustang lap, 1:27.11, was quicker than his quickest Crown Victoria lap, 1:28.94.

Braking in detail

Each bar is one measured stop as printed, drawn from zero. The stops began at 60.2 to 60.6 mph, not exactly 60 (see the table); the head-to-head table compares the book’s deceleration rates.

The Mustang’s first stop, 151.3 feet, was the shortest of the test; its second was 12.1 feet longer. The Crown Victoria’s two stops were 0.3 feet apart. The book gives no reason for either. The Crown Victoria had the larger brakes on paper: 385.8 square inches of swept area against the Mustang’s 286.6.

0–100 mph across the test years

Each point is the 0–100 mph figure printed in that year’s source, as held in the archive’s test results: the full test book, or for 1985 the scoring sheet and for 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991 and 1993 a bulletin; the 1986, 1988 and 1989 bulletins call their results preliminary. The table names each source. For 1985 the scoring sheet heads its column only “ACCEL sec”; the 1985 page reads it as the 0–100 time because the specification’s category is “0 – 100 Acceleration”. The tests ran on different days in different weather, so the lines show what each source printed, not a controlled comparison. The entries are chosen by a rule, not by the books: the Mustang line is the 4-speed in 1983, the only Mustang that year, and the 5-speed from 1984 to 1993; the automatics, and the electric Mach-E entries of 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2026, are in the test results but not plotted. The Ford line is every entry whose printed name includes “Crown Victoria” and that has the 351 (5.8-litre) engine, 1983 to 1991; the Crown Victorias with the 302 (5.0-litre) engine in those years, and every Crown Victoria entry from 1992 on, are in the test results but not plotted. A line does not say the car was the same from one year to the next. The break in the Mustang line is 1985, which the archive holds only as a scoring sheet of four sedans, none of them a Mustang. Lower is quicker; the scale does not start at zero.