Wild Ones: BMW M2 CS vs Ford Mustang Dark Horse

I wonder how far you must drive from Dearborn, Michigan, to find roads like these. Nine hours southeast to the Appalachians, or double that to the west and the Rockies? Probably less. There must be some hills nearby harbouring wriggly little back roads like these. After all Michigan, home to the Ford Motor Company, is bigger than the entire United Kingdom. It can’t all be wide interstates and arrow-straight county highways.

But they couldn’t be exactly like these. Welsh mountain roads are just different – endlessly twisty, often wet, normally subsiding somewhere along the way, always littered with weird tramlines, strange cambers, bumps big and small, sudden surface changes and potholes that lurk around unsighted bends.

So no, the Mustang Dark Horse was never going to feel in its element in rainy Ogmore Valley. This isn’t where it belongs. But if you could have seen the grin on my face, and heard me laugh as the big V8 bellowed its tune into a rock wall, you’d have thought I was driving the car on the very same roads it had been developed on.