Naming the best car stateside | Frankel’s Insight

The worst is easy: a 1980 AMC Concord with no redeeming features whatsoever. The most disappointing, too: the Plymouth Prowler, a car that looks like that, powered by a gutless 3.5-litre V6 running through a four-speed automatic gearbox? Give me strength.

But the best is harder. Instinctively I gravitate towards a 1968 Dodge Charger because it was one of my automotive pin-ups long before the Bo and Luke Duke started smashing them up, and the few occasions on which I’ve driven them remain seared on my memory, including a run up the Goodwood Hill in a Hemi with quarter-mile gearing. Fabulous stuff.

Maybe it should be something earlier, because while we have often laughed at how behind the times American cars sometimes seemed to be — and never more so than in the 1970s and ‘80s, before the war the US produced some of the most sophisticated, reliable cars of any country on earth. I once drove a 1938 Buick Special over 1,000 miles up the east coast of the US marvelling all the way at its coil-sprung suspension, all synchromesh gearbox and the smoothness of its 4-litre, straight-eight engine.

But what about a Mustang? Or a Camaro? I’ve driven a few ‘Stangs and the first racing car I ever bought was a ’67 Camaro and, no question, both are utterly charming in their rather different ways. I love the look of the Ford, but anything with a small block Chevy under the hood is always going to hold an early advantage for me. And neither of them is a ’68 Charger.

Probably the most startling American I ever drove was the first Dodge Viper (although they were called Chryslers over here). These were massively flawed cars; you could choose to take the hood or luggage with you but not both, which was why I once got rather wet driving one from London to Italy in a rainstorm.

Talking of bad weather, they were an absolute menace in the wet. I remember trying to drive one fast around a very damp Goodwood while talking into a camera and having the mother and father of moments going into St. Mary’s. But the closed GTS was far better engineered and even more beautiful, a wonderful piece of automotive theatre, but ultimately still not that scintillating to drive.

So I’m going to go more recent, to 2005 in fact, and the Californian launch of the then-brand-new Ford GT. I’ve been told Ford were desperate to call it the GT40 and understandably so, but were careless enough not to trademark the name in the 1960s and it got snaffled by a British company making GT40 replicas who were unpersuaded by the merits of letting it go again.

Anyway, the car looked incredible, so faithful and respectful to the original but large enough to accommodate all 6ft 3 in of me in complete comfort. So far, so good. I liked the sound of it having a twin supercharged 5.4-litre V8 motor, too, at least figuratively speaking. If there was one real disappointment with this car it was that, for reasons I still don’t understand, it just didn’t sound very good at all. I can remember sitting there, blipping the throttle and thinking: ‘here we go again — another ‘all show, no go’ American.’

How wrong I turned out to be. We’d also managed to borrow a Ferrari 360 Modena to make a meaningful comparison and very early one Sunday morning we took them down Highway One. And whoever was in the Ford just drove away from the Ferrari. It wasn’t just that it was faster, it was vastly more reassuring, too, a car you could really take by the scruff and boss about. Only the very brave and talented would take that approach with the Ferrari.

I’ll never forget it, nor the ‘Ford beats Ferrari’ story that resulted. Ferrari was predictably outraged and accused us quite rightly of using a car ‘of unknown provenance’ for the comparison, but there was nothing about it which suggest the car was anything other than entirely representative, so the story stayed.

Strangely, I never felt the same way about the most recent Ford GT launched in 2017. It fully delivered on its promise to be a racing car for the road (which in a very real sense is precisely what it was), but I’ve driven a couple now and both times came away thinking how much more I’d have enjoyed driving a McLaren for half the money or less.

So that’s it. My favourite American car is a 2005 Ford GT. Only problem is I’ll never be able to afford one. That Charger however, that might one day just be doable…

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