2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R — Track Ready, Street Capable

Last spring, I took a spin behind the wheel of the new 2019 Ford Mustang GT350 — one of no fewer than nine performance variants of Ford’s sports car that the company now plans to offer for 2020. And I did enjoy my experience — pondering whether the GT350 is the best Mustang ever made. Its mix of stellar track performance and decent daily livability was a winning combination, but if you intend to use your GT350 on the track more than you plan on using it to commute, Ford has something new for 2020 that you might be interested in: the 2020 Shelby GT350R. Not that the basic GT350 is any slouch on a road course, but the improvements Ford made for 2020 (based on lessons learned from development of the still-to-come Shelby GT500) make the R version even more ready for the track.

Related: 2019 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 First Drive: Is This the Best Mustang Ever Made?

Ready, Steady, Go

The changes from GT350 to GT350R aren’t all that dramatic. The main goal here was to reduce some weight and improve the car’s livability for 2020. To cut weight, Ford engineers deleted the rear seat in the GT350R, and made the super light carbon fiber wheels standard. The total weight savings is about 88 pounds, which is not insignificant when shaving ounces can improve lap times. More dramatic are the handling changes that the lightweight wheels effect, in combination with a new front suspension setup that has new steering knuckles. These are pieces influenced by the upcoming GT500, say Ford engineers, and are designed to make the GT350R less susceptible to tramlining on the streets (steering being influenced by grooves, ruts and imperfections in the road surface).

Combined with a new steering gear, the difference is subtle — on my brief street drive of the GT350R in suburban Detroit, there was still plenty of tramlining, but I was not being knocked all over the lane like the previous car. My last spin in a GT350R was a long-distance drive from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Eldora Speedway in Ohio in August 2017 to do some hot laps in a Ford Raptor with NASCAR driver Tony Stewart. Powering through rough construction zones at highway speeds was a white-knuckled affair at the time, made even more so by the addition of pouring rain and track-ready tires.

While the 2020 car’s Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires are still very much track-focused meats, they’re surprisingly tolerable when mounted to the lightweight carbon fiber wheels and a MagneRide electronic adaptive suspension that’s standard on the GT350R.

This isn’t to say that the GT350R would make a great commuter, as it would not, unless the roads you drive to work are glass smooth and free of blemishes. The ride is quite stiff, and the Recaro seats in the Mustang are skewed toward support; there’s no extra padding in them at all. The lack of a backseat also limits the Shelby GT350R’s usefulness as a daily driver, but all told, that’s fine — that’s not the car’s purpose at all.

Track Monster

You can commute in the GT350R, but its real reason for life is to be driven to the track. Once on the track, it’s just as glorious and rewarding as the regular GT350. The standard 526-horsepower, flat-plane-crank 5.2-liter V-8 engine impossibly sounds even better in the GT350R, inside or outside the car, thanks to the elimination of the exhaust resonators. If you plant your foot, you are gifted with bountiful torque, copious acceleration and an amazing noise from the free-flowing, lightweight exhaust. The GT350R doesn’t have the explosive acceleration that you’d find from a supercharged Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat, but the Mustang is a far better-balanced car overall than that Mopar monster.

The Shelby GT350R’s balance is front and center when you’re negotiating a road course. It features direct, beautifully responsive steering with sharp turn-in that makes the car feel far lighter than it is. The grip provided by the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires is tremendous — overdriving the tires, once they’ve got some proper heat in them, is actually difficult to do. The brakes haul the big coupe down from speed with gut-wrenching force, and do so over and over with no fade whatsoever. Gone are the slotted rotors as well; they’re now smooth, with Ford citing customer feedback that longevity and durability were more important than any slight extra performance boost that slotted rotors might provide. The weight balance is fantastic as well, again contributing to that feeling of lightness that belies the Shelby’s actual portliness.

Does the 350R feel appreciably different from the regular Shelby GT350? No, it really doesn’t. It looks a bit different, inside and out, with its unique red accents, red pinstriping, red brake calipers and badges, and red stitching throughout the interior. Both the Shelby GT350 and GT350R are outstanding track cars right off the showroom floor, and both are extremely enjoyable to toss around a road course. But the differences between the two have more to do with weight and slight changes to aerodynamics, and those differences really only start to manifest at much higher speeds than I saw in my track time at the private M1 Concourse track in Pontiac, Mich. The bigger question is how much different does the GT350R feel from the GT500? That’s a question I’m going to be able to answer in just a couple of weeks, when I will be getting behind the wheel of Ford’s supercharged ultimate Mustang at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

More From Cars.com:

• Ford Vs. Ferrari 2? 760-HP 2020 Mustang Shelby GT500 Boasts Italian Supercar Sprint
• 2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500: No Manual, No 10-Speed, No Problem
• 2019 Ford Shelby GT350 Mustang Is Tweaked for Speed
• Performance Package 1 or 2: Which 2018 Ford Mustang GT Is Right for You?
• 2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500: The Blue Oval Has a Cure for the Redeye

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