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Ford Mustang Dark Horse's mission: Sydney to Hobart in 24 hours

Could you get from Sydney to Australia’s southernmost capital city in 24 hours? It’s not as easy as it looks given that 10 of those hours are on board a ferry. We try it with Ford’s muscle car of the moment, the Mustang Dark Horse.

06 Sep 2025 12:50 PM

AndyEnright

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Twenty-three hours and 59 minutes. That’s what Google Maps claims it takes to drive from where we’re sitting, overlooking the Sydney Harbour Bridge at Blues Point, to Hobart, on the Apple Isle. That factors in fuel stops, traffic at peak hour near Melbourne, the Bass Strait crossing on the Spirit of Tasmania and it also observes all speed limits. Theoretically it’s possible. Practically? That’s a whole different matter. What’s not subject to speculation is that we have aFord Mustang Dark Horse that needs to be with its owner – and our publisher – Matt O’Malley in Hobart and the clock’s ticking.

There’ll be no ‘HO Down The Hume’ style heroics here, no teasing at that point where aerodynamics rout horsepower, no eyes scanning the far horizon for police cruisers. Painfully, heartbreakingly, as ideals give way to reality, we need to accept that times have changed. Maybe we just need to pick our moments.

Right now, I’m just following the nav. Somewhat shamefully, I know my way round Damascus better than I know Sydney, so after crossing the Harbour Bridge, I’m sticking to the Eastern Distributor and hoping that I’m distributed somewhere on a south-westerly vector. Traffic’s strangely sparse as the car rumbles through the piggyback tunnels beneath Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst, the big Pirellis slapping on the expansion joints.

The Tremec six-speed manual still feels new, tight and a little gritty, the odo on this car showing a tick over 1000km. Likewise the clutch has a sharp edge to it that could use a little chamfering off to make more friendly. That’ll come with use. Better cooling, forged conrods from the Shelby GT500, tauter suspension and a trick active exhaust differentiate this Dark Horse from a garden-variety GT, and while the power uptick is a mere 5kW or so, everything about this car feels incrementally more focused.

Photographer Ellen Dewar is crook with a non-stop streaming cold. She motors down the window to grab a shot of a shiny B-double and the dewdrop hanging from the end of her beak atomises all over me. I sit and stew, pondering how I’ll return the favour. Bing bong, says the car, flashing up a message to keep my hands on the wheel. It keeps chiming. I give a little waggle of the wheel to let it know that I’m still here. The chimes continue. After some experimentation, it seems that weaving in lane like a Super-G skier is about the only way to stop the car thinking I’ve expired from numbat flu or whatever exotic Footscray disease Ellen has been stricken with.

Sydney expires feebly along the Hume, finally giving up at the exurbs around Campbelltown, notable residents: Samantha Azzopardi (con artist), Paul Denyer (serial killer) and Jai Waetford (X-Factor finalist). We don’t stop, targeting Mittagong for the first refuelling break and the opportunity to sample some of the district’s finest mechanically recovered meat. There’s a bakery opposite the BP and I’m genuinely amazed at how one pie casing can hold so much gravy, much of which I manage to drop on my shoe.

Something else rather unwelcome happens while we pause in Mittagong. Take the on-ramp back to the Hume and the surface switches from bitumen to concrete. With the engine tickling along at 2000rpm at an indicated 112km/h (a satellite-verified true 110km/h), the din in the cabin is such that you wish it was fitted with some sort of noise cancellation tech. On the other hand, it does drown out the warning chimes, so on balance, I’ll take the open-pore concrete.

I love the Hume. It’s an unpopular opinion, but every time I travel on this road, I’m always embarking on some sort of adventure. As the scenery opens up beyond Mittagong, the big sky and gently rolling hills punctuated with stands of conifers reminds me of something I can’t immediately summon. After some searching, I realise it’s a memory dredged from my childhood, of escaping the overcrowded armpit of south-eastern England and driving across rural northern France. Those early road trip memories return in snatched recollections, like scattered sectors on a recovered disk drive: the same desaturated colour palette, the same trees, albeit without the occasional clearcut at the end of which stood Commonwealth war cemeteries, gravestones standing like perfect white teeth among the pines. For a moment, I’m a child in shorts again, who still believes in Father Christmas, skin stuck to the black vinyl in the back of dad’s Lancia, passively smoking all the way down to Spain, Italy or wherever his flaky route finding would deposit us.

There’s a curious ‘End Motorway 1km’ sign just beyond Berrima, a legacy of a lovely piece of historical pedantry. As it wends its way out of Sydney, the M31 is the Hume Highway, but between the Cutler Interchange and this point near Berrima, the Hume is referred to as a Motorway, becoming the Hume Highway again until it reaches the Victorian border, whereupon its official name is the Hume Freeway. So yes, the motorway really does end, as indeed does the concrete surface, temporarily at least, returning as we skirt Marulan, the only town in the world on the 150th meridian east. We don’t stop.

Ellen’s fretting about photography. She’s snapped just about every road sign and truck along the route, but declares that we can’t drive this route without photographing the famous Dog On The Tuckerbox statue just outside Gundagai. We pull in to this charming little roadside retreat and as she starts swapping lenses, it’s clear that there’s some revisionist history at work here. The ‘Bill The Bullocky’ ode to rough luck by Bowyang Yorke was substantially rewritten at a later date by Jack Moses, a travelling salesman and bush jingle writer. The line “and the dog sat in the tuckerbox” was a more family-friendly version than Yorke’s original, which featured a past tense word that merely rhymed with ‘sat’.

Back on the road, the chimes in the cabin have temporarily subsided and I run a quick mental checklist of how the Dark Horse is faring as a makeshift gran turismo. The boot was big enough to swallow Ellen’s photography gear, the MagneRide dampers have enough compliance to cover big miles and the seats are good. Although the gear ratios are generally shorter than a GT, sixth is a proper overdrive-style gear.

Downsides? The tyre noise is intrusive, the rear-view mirror doesn’t tilt enough for taller drivers and the starter button and handbrake position irk me, smacking of a slightly complacent factory right-hook conversion. Overall it’s doing better than expected.

The 61-litre fuel tank is a tad too small for a car with a big V8 engine though. Try as I might, I can’t get the average fuel consumption to dip down into the nines, with 10.2L/100km the best we see during some particularly feather-footed highway driving. This tends to translate to a real world, mixed use range of around 480km on the open road, dipping to less than 300km if you start throwing physical relief and a bit of enthusiastic pedalling into the mix.

You also learn that the long sixth gear can run out of urge when tackling inclines, requiring a flick into fifth. No great hardship.

We pull into the next fuel stop at Albury North. I’m parked at the servo next to a Nissan Patrol that’s towing a caravan called a Dirt Roader, above which some horror has inscribed the word ‘Rectal’ in the road grime. As I go to pay, I stand behind the driver and I’m tempted to draw his attention to this act of petty vandalism, until I notice he has a hand tattoo that reads DILLIGAF, and decide that perhaps he doesn’t need to know. Mrs Rectal Dirt Roader is smoking a dart next to the bowser while wearing a silvery shell suit that looks like a punctured goon bag. I make eye contact with her as she suffers a moment of acid reflux. She inhales a couple of dim sims and clambers back into the Patrol. Road trip glamour, eh?

After another roadside excursion to the Ettamogah Pub, made famous by the Ken Maynard comic strip in the old Australasian Post, we cross the Murray back into Victoria and set the nav to a brief detour via Winton raceway. It’d be lovely to run a slow lap and get a couple of pictures, but there’s a Supercars test day in progress, and a couple of the old hall-of-mirrors Mustang race cars are circulating. I’m reminded of how casually elegant this S650 shape is in comparison with their gawky glasshouses and pinched stances.

The road car’s chiselled rear end treatment and sweep of the character line in profile work beautifully. I also approve of the way that the Dark Horse wears its battle dress without being too overt. There’s a subtle but definite aura of ‘if you know, you know’ about it.

And it pays to remember that it remains a very rare sight on Aussie roads. Only a thousand were earmarked for import. Some will have been crashed and many will have been squirrelled away into the lock-up garages of speculators looking to flip them as soon as they thinkFord Australia won’t blacklist them for doing so. That seems a shame, given how much fun this thing is to drive. I’m ruining the overall fuel consumption figures by using every millimetre of the throttle travel when I have to run a few passes for the camera. It’s an intoxicating thing this Coyote V8, hardening above 4000rpm into a complex, multitimbral bellow, where intake and exhaust sounds are volume-balanced, the metallic ball atop the gear lever feels alive with zizzing vibrations and your ear becomes minutely attuned to where the redline resides, without ever having to glance down at the dash.

Victoria’s Hume isn’t as beautiful as that of New South Wales. Aside from the views south to Mount Buffalo as we skirt the high country, it’s mainly just a strip through surprisingly dry-looking paddocks and serried gums. I idly wonder how many Ti Tree Creeks there might be in all of the country as yet another blips by, and we blare past Seymour and the military ranges of Puckapunyal.

Melbourne beckons, signalled first by an accumulation of windblown trash stuck to the fences on the windswept plains near Beveridge. Speed cameras gaze implacably at us as we near the Victorian capital and traffic inexorably builds. It’s neither a scenic nor a welcoming approach, the Hume looping past the functional architectural poverty of endless grey industrial estates as we join the M80 ring road, amid the crawl of pre-peak hour commuter traffic. Torrential rain has the wipers looking for a third speed to clear the water.

We’re falling behind the clock, and if we miss the Spirit of Tasmania crossing from Geelong, we’re hosed. Fortunately the traffic thins and we make good time down towards Werribee; enough to skip off the road to run parallel with it near Little River and the You Yangs, in the wheel tracks of the original Mad Max location shoot. We refuel as we arrive in Geelong, directly opposite the old, rather forlorn-looking Ford plant, before joining the queue to board. Good luck shines on us again, and we get fast-tracked straight into the bowels of the boat. I hear a conspiratorial whisper. “That’s a Dark Horse,” notes one of the security team as we get checked over.

I’d never travelled on the Spirit before, and was slightly apprehensive about getting no sleep in the teeth of a Bass Strait gale. The forecast for the crossing simply said ‘very choppy’ which I took to be Tassie understatement. I skipped dinner and retired to my cabin which, despite being seven decks above the sea was still being spattered with spray as we cleared the heads out of Port Phillip Bay. I don’t remember anything after that other than being woken by the public address at 5:30am to return to our cars. Best night’s sleep I’ve had in ages.

Reviews

In-Depth Review: Ford Mustang Dark Horse

Mustang-mad Aussies have made the new Dark Horse a sell-out success. Have they wasted their money or scored a future classic? Wheels took a deeper look in a recent issue.

January 24, 2025

Congested Ellen doesn’t look quite so perky when we return to fire up the Ford. She’s in better nick than the family in the camper van ahead of us, who arrive late and then can’t seem to coordinate themselves to get into the vehicle that’s blocking in about 50 cars behind them. A fairly terse reminder from one of the deck hands that they’re delaying proceedings sees them jump in and scurry off the vessel.

O’Malley’s waiting for us in Devonport and we grab a Macca’s breakfast. The pressure of having to deliver this rare car in good condition starts to leach away. Great roads beckon, as we check the route straight across the gut of the island, crossing the high central plateau. Matt had harboured concerns himself; whether we’d by stymied by the car’s lack of a spare wheel, whether the crack in the windscreen caused by an errant stone chip shortly after he’d taken initial delivery of the car would propagate across the glass, whether we’d make it onto the boat with any photography in the bag. He’s reassured on all three counts. Now we can finally drive rather than merely transit the vehicle.

Destination Deloraine, at least initially. I score a Neenish Tart the size of my head and a box of
Anzac cookies in the bakery of this sleepy town because we’re heading south into Terra Incognita and I’m told there will be no reliable service of sugary comestibles until Bothwell, some 130km distant. What are these people? Savages?

After the Hume, Tassie feels as if somebody’s whacked the scenery filter up to 11. Deloraine looks across a scarp of a million trees, 10 of which will, in a year, absorb the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted across 1000km in this Mustang. The Highland Lakes Road climbs from an elevation of 230m to a height of 1209m at its high point, and the road up is a gem, switchbacks punctuated by relief hugging balconies with views for miles. The biome starts deciduous, becomes coniferous and, as you crest the scarp, turns very sub-alpine, with low shrubs, the odd stand of pencil pines and a distant ring of high peaks, bounded to the north-east by the Great Western Tiers and to the West by Cradle Mountain and Lake St Clair National Park. The 2016 census stated a population of nil for the Central Plateau constituency.

Despite an 1822kg kerb weight, the Mustang never feels cumbersome, even on the tighter switchbacks. The joy of the manual ’box is that you never find yourself in the wrong gear for the corner, and the 550Nm of available torque does a great job in neutralising any perception of bulk. The steering’s alert too, with a custom map, but the 15:1 ratio is the same as the GT. It’s the suspension tuning that makes it feel a little lighter on its toes, with a unique tune for the dampers. There are also stiffer rear subframe bushings, wider wheels and a standard Torsen limited slip differential. Couple that with the shorter gearing, and the Dark Horse just feels more urgent, and notably more cohesive and immediate in its feedback loops.

Flicking it into Track Mode firms up the adaptive dampers, eases back the stability control, alters the throttle map and cleverly graduates the rev counter in the digital instrument cluster. Dewfall still lurks in the shaded corners, so I’m happy to leave an element of stability control in place, but after so much straight line schlepping, it’s good to feel the Mustang moving about beneath me, albeit subtly.

I’d long been quite wary of Mustangs, having seen Warren Luff perform more pirouettes at Phillip Island in a Mustang GT duringMOTOR’s 2020 PCOTY event than in any other car. Luffy’s a far better driver than I could ever hope to be, so if he found the old S550 V8 a handful, I’d initially approached the Dark Horse with a healthy dose of respect. Thankfully it’s far better resolved now, without the malevolent multiplication of vectors that would store kinetic energy like a spring and whip the car back in the stereotypical Mustang tankslapper. Instead, it feels almost buttery, as if you have the benefits of a virtual long wheelbase.

“Go on, give it some attitude,” crackled O’Malley over the radio. No pressure. Just get the boss’s new car sideways while he stands and watches. At that point, I must admit that I’d forgotten about the drift brake and other Dark Horse features that make initialising a slide a bit easier and just went with a bit of a bung and a quick ramp of throttle. Dewar’s snapping away from the undergrowth and it all seems very undramatic and controllable. Damn good fun too, although it’s usually the case that just when you think you’ve got something dialled, you’ll make an utter pig’s ear of things.

The road skirts around the man-made Great Lake, a body of water so ridiculously blue it even manages to make the cloudless sky look wan. It’s cold up here, and Ellen’s out by the roadside again, rugged up against the elements, perched in a pile of rocks that have plucked the humidity out of the westerly winds, glazed with rime ice like Krispy Kremes.

The nearby Liawenee weather station frequently records the coldest temperatures in the whole of Tasmania, and today it’s hovering around zero. South of Great Lake, the topography becomes pocked with pools and finger lakes, almost Finnish in its look and feel. Reindeer seem more likely to step out into the road than possums. The sleepy but scenic village of Bothwell comes and goes and before too long we’re descending the plateau’s softer south-eastern edge towards Hobart.

I want to stay, to explore the trails out to Quamby Bluff or around Pine Lake, to cosy up in a cabin and wake up to hoarfrost so deep that it crackles underfoot. I’m imagining the bark of that Mustang as it fires up and warms through, spending a driving day circumnavigating the Walls of Jerusalem National Park; out to Queenstown, up to the famous old Targa Tassie stages of Mount Roland and Cethana, and then back via Deloraine. Why haven’t we done this before?

Time is, once again, against us. There’s the comic relief of the cultural dislocation of travelling through Melton Mowbray to get to Bagdad, a snatched attempt at a car-to-car tracking shot in traffic as we cross the Tasman Bridge and then, a few corners later, we’re at the scenic Constitution Dock in Hobart. The clock stops, some final pictures are taken and we retire for a well-earned meal and a drink. The Mustang ticks cool at the dockside. It’s been brilliant; angry and focused when neeed, yet languid enough to work when pushed into a more relaxed touring brief. It now feels like a car with the chassis to match the charisma of its V8 powerplant.

We’ve covered 1421.2km at an average of 11.2L/100km. Road markings still strobe when I close my eyelids, fatigue finally catching up with me. Did we make it in 24 hours? It’d be romantic if we had. And it would certainly have grabbed the imagination of a young kid in the back of a Lancia, who loved a road trip, and who still believed in Father Christmas.

Spirit of Adventure

Perhaps you’re planning a Tassie road trip but would prefer to wait until the much-publicised box-fresh new ferries are commissioned? Our advice would be to get on with your trip now. While the bigger, billion-dollar Finnish-built vessels – Spirit of Tasmania IV and V – do indeed look the goods, the 3 East Berth upgrades at Devonport are required before the ships can fully be put into service, and these works won’t be completed before the summer 2026-2027 peak season. According to the ABC, the first of the ships is now en route and is scheduled to operate at a reduced capacity from the interim 1 East Berth.

A Darker Horse?

Blame Australian Design Rules for the Dark Horse not being even further differentiated from the GT. In the US, this car is offered with an optional Handling Package, priced at US$5495. The big draw – and the sticking point for Aussie approval – are the massive semi-slick tyres wrapping inch-wider wheels – 19 x 10.5” up front and 19 x 11” at the back. These are shod in Pirelli P Zero semi-slicks measuring 305/30R19 front and 315/30R19 rear. The package also includes more aggressive spoilers, stiffer springs, adjustable strut top mounts and other chassis tweaks. Sadly it’s not going to come to Australia as a factory offer, but ask nicely at Herrod Performance and they might just be able to help you out.