The Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 and even-hotter GT350R were both built to attack track days. Today, Ford showed off another nifty little feature designed for track rats: a shift light that uses Ford’s forward collision-warning system’s head-up lights to tell you when to upshift.
-As Ford tells it, Shelby electrical engineer Mike Makled was inspired to design the system after triggering the forward-collision warning light in his personal Taurus SHO a few years back. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t we use that technology for our shift light on the GT350?’ ” said Makled. “With a few tweaks, it could have a big effect on high-performance driving.”
-After experimenting with the software and hardware in his own car, Makled perfected the system to work with the heads-up display that projects a string of LEDs on the bottom of the windshield of the new Mustang Shelby GT350 and GT350R. Standard on every Mustang Shelby, the shift light is configurable in three modes: Tach, where the lights illuminate progressively left-to-right as revs climb; Track, where the lights illuminate from each edge and meet in the center, which then indicates an upshift; and Drag, where the whole bar of lights flashes at the driver-chosen shift point. Drivers can alter the intensity of the shift lights, or turn them off altogether.
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- Reminder: The Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 Sounds Wicked
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- Watch Ford Track Test the Mustang Shelby GT350 at VIR
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Of course, Ford isn’t the first to include a shift indicator in its performance car—pretty much every driver-oriented vehicle with a multi-function gauge panel or heads-up display includes some form of shift light, and systems like the Corvette’s Performance Data Recorder have made racing-style driver displays and configurable head-up gauges almost a necessity in the sports-car realm. But we dig the way the Mustang Shelby GT350’s setup uses an existing safety feature as a performance-driving aid.
-from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1SEIwBJ
via Agya
