2019 Ford Mustang spied

THE hot-selling Ford Mustang may only be a year old in Australia, but early prototypes of the 2019 model-year makeover indicate a new nose cone, revised rear end styling, and Shelby GT350-style quad exhausts.

Don’t hold your breath, though, because while the S550 facelift sprung here wearing swirly camo is set for the Detroit show after next in January 2018, production probably won’t start until later on that year, meaning early 2019 is a real possibility.

This is Ford, after all, and witness how long the Ford Edge SUV is taking to reach our shores…

The upside to all that waiting downtime is that Dearborn’s engineers ought to properly hone the sizeable changes earmarked for the Pony Car, as it takes on the popular Chevrolet Camaro as well as the next-generation Dodge Challenger that is also earmarked for Australia by the end of this decade.

These include an all-new dashboard promising better quality materials, the long-awaited 10-speed automatic transmission (consigning the current Mustang’s six-speeder to history), and the availability at last of adaptive dampers.

The latter is already available on the existing US range-topping Mustang Shelby GT350 in the form of the MagneRide Damping System, though these will most likely be offered as an option rather than standardised, improving both ride comfort and cornering capability.

More intriguingly, though the pictured prototype’s body kit points to this being a fairly stock Mustang, the quad exhausts poking from the diffuser underneath suggests Shelby GT350, so is a significant performance upgrade imminent for the standard V8?

Whether the 306kW/540Nm 5.0-litre unit in today’s GT will be massaged to top the current Shelby GT350’s 392kW/581Nm 5.2-litre flat-plane crank V8 outputs is unknown, but here’s hoping. Plus, the 10-speeder’s extra set of forward ratios ought to certainly bring welcome efficiency gains.

Finally, new alloy wheel designs and updates to the colour pallet should complete the 2019 Mustang facelift. Prices should remain in line with today’s models, meaning from $45,000 for the 2.3-litre four-pot turbo, to nearly $70K for the range-topping V8.

As the sole Blue Oval rear-drive performance offering after the demise of the Falcon XR6 Turbo and XR8, Ford’s image is now riding on the back of Mustang, so let’s hope Detroit gets it right.

Watch this space…

Have spy pics of your own? We'd love to see them. Just email them to wheels@bauertrader.com.au