Super Charge

So the right foot is aching for hundreds of kilowatts of blown V8 – and a driven rear axle. Have we got a treat for you

- David Morley

TALK ABOUT deja vu: back in 1989, HSV built a model called the SV89. It was based on a VN Commodore and it was white with a fuzzy, veloury, vaguely burgundy interior called Mulberry. Sounds awful, but it was kind of cool. Different. Unusual. So you can understand why I thought I might be having a junk-food flashback when I stepped into the W557 and clocked the burgundy Alcantara that stretches across the dashboard and door trims. And I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not, but I’ll be damned if the W557 doesn’t even smell like an SV89. Spooky.

The Herrod Mustang has a familiar interior, too. As in, if you’ve ever sat in a US-market car, you’ll be familiar with the crook layout and half-arsed graphics that remain probably the biggest grizzles with the basic Mustang package. This, of course, has nothing to do with the Herrod treatment, but it’s still a feature you can do nothing about, short of handing the ’Stang over to a reality TV show for a quick, sponsor-approved ‘makeover’. No thanks. But the Mustang will become even more familiar, trust us. Now that the Falcon lives in an urn on the mantelpiece, fans of Blue-Oval performance will be gravitating to the ’Stang en masse.

We’ve tested a few Walkinshaw Performance modified HSVs in recent years, including the W507 which, as the name suggests, is packing 507kW. Big news. But now, in response to what Walkinshaw calls “overwhelming demand” from LSA owners, there’s an even bigger stick available. And it’s this monster, the W557. Guess how much power is claimed for it. Go on, have a stab...