2007 Ford Shelby GT500 Coupe Touring

The traffic's heavy as we pound east into Ohio, and the radar detector squawks constantly, so it's a relief when we turn south off I-70 before Columbus and cut across the back roads to meet Frank Markus and Todd Lassa, who've brought a Dodge Charger SRT8 and Pontiac GTO down from Detroit for a back-to-back comparison test (see sidebar). This much is clear already: For a base price of $41,950, the GT500 offers a helluva lot of bang for the buck.

It pours as we run all three cars through Ohio's Hocking Hills and won't stop until we reach New York. The clouds hang low over the Appalachians as we head toward our final stop before the Big Apple: Bethlehem. There's a direct link between the Mustang and this old Pennsylvania steel town: Lee Iacocca, who pushed the original Mustang past the objections of the Dearborn beancounters and even Henry Ford II himself, grew up in nearby Allentown and went to Lehigh University a few miles from the giant Bethlehem Steel steelworks. They stopped making steel at Bethlehem in 1995, and the giant blast furnaces that once made the steel that built most of New York City, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the USS Lexington stand like silent ghosts mourning a lost era. We head on through the rain into New Jersey and a saturated New York City. The GT500 bucks and bounces over the lumps and potholes as we work our way across Manhattan to Brooklyn and up to Flushing Meadows.

The 1964 New York World's Fair cost hundreds of millions of dollars and attracted over 51 million visitors, but little remains to show for it. The site of the Ford pavilion, made of enough steel to build a 125-foot-tall building and where visitors rode along a giant track in Ford convertibles (including the new Mustang) past Walt Disney dioramas, is just a vacant lot across the Grand Central Parkway. We pull the GT500 under the giant 140-foot-tall stainless-steel globe, the Fair's central motif, and take a photo.

In addition to the Mustang, the New York World's Fair also hosted the launch of the IBM Selectric typewriter and the Rambler Marlin. Yes, the Mustang's a survivor, despite, at times, the best efforts of Ford. But after 3479 miles, it's clear the GT500 is more than just a digitally remastered reminder of an era when the world seemed a simpler, more certain place. That GT badge is the real deal: No raw-mannered musclecar, the Shelby GT500 is a fast, civilized, yet uniquely American grand touring coupe. No one in the world builds a car this charismatic, this accomplished, with this much performance, for the money. The greatest Mustang ever? No question.