LEMON & LIME

IT’S KIND OF NEAT WHEN YOU PUT the BMW M4 Competition into its sportiest mode and its exhaust note deepens and on the overrun – there! – you can spot the occasional, distant boom. Then you fire up the Shelby Mustang GT500 and the roar from its tailpipes almost knocks the BMW over. In the film version, the M4 is the punk in a soon-to-be-shredded jacket and the Mustang is Crocodile Dundee grinning and saying ‘That’s not a knife…’

I love a thunderous V8 as much as any enthusiast and the Mustang’s supercharged V8 is a doozy. There’s a savage horsepower bite to back up that bark, too – a stupendous 760bhp, making it Ford’s most powerful production car ever. Add ‘Grabber Lime’ paint and a full set of stripes and if this was your first encounter with the GT500, you’d wonder if was all mouth and no trousers.

Regular readers will know that it isn’t. It has a lot of features designed to deliver dynamic performance, including magnetorheological adaptive dampers, Brembo brakes (the biggest ever fitted to a production Ford), Michelin Pilot Sport 4 S tyres and structural carbonfibre too. It’s already impressed us (Driven, evo 290) but does it have the depth of ability to challenge the new M4 Competition, one of the best performance coupes currently on sale?

Aesthetics are always