Jack Daniel’s is a good friend of 2OceansVibe. Well, not the actual bloke himself, he’s dead. But the brand and it’s managers, who happen to be extraordinarily nice people, are helping 2OceansVibers live the holiday every Friday. Check that out here.

They’re a generous lot, Mr Daniel’s henchmen, and over the next few weeks they’ll be running a competition where you can win a brand new, customised 2011 Ford Mustang GT500 Shelby. We’ll break that down in just a moment. The good news is, I’ve just driven the thing. And it is marvellous.

If you were alive and even vaguely knew what a motor vehicle was in the 60s and 70s, then chances are your heart longed for a Ford Mustang. The brainchild of Caroll Shelby (the car still bares his name, he’s 82 now) the car defined the pony-car era. At one stage in the United States, they sold a new Mustang every 15 seconds.

The ’80s were not good to the Mustang. If you could stand it upright, it would look like a porta-loo on the Starship Enterprise. It came back fighting a little in the 90s but never really caught the imagination of the public quite like the original.

The '80s were not good to the Mustang.

Now I should point out that I didn’t have to google any of this. I am fairly obsessed with these cars. My dad had a classic 67 Sportback. Candy Apple Red with a big block V8. I grew up with that deep, bellowing engine idling in the driveway. Drives to school were moments of magic. It was sensational, and it instilled a deep love for the ‘Stang in me. Thankfully the era of weak Mustang incarnations ended in 2004.

Ford realised, along with a host of other car makers, that nostalgia was a very powerful marketing tool. And so they went back to the future. Re-interpreting the old Stang to create a car for the new millennium was a stroke of genius, and hell’s bells did they pull it off. It’s a car that manages to look aggressive and beautiful at the same time, capturing the spirit of the 60s and pulling it right up to date.

The version you can win is a right hand drive, which is handy because Ford only make left hand drives. Converted by Amcars in Durban, Jack’s marketing man went through a few companies before he settled on Amcars; he’d seen a few conversions and he believes this is the best. The attention to detail is remarkable, and honestly if no one mentioned that it was a conversion, you’d never know.

The 5.0 litre V8 has been breathed on by a Roush supercharger, which basically means it is faster. The end. With around 420hp (308kW) the Jack Daniel’s Mustang is perfectly comparable in power with the current BMW M3, Audi RS4 and other German saloons, as well as most Porsche’s and slightly older Ferraris. But it feels completely and utterly different.

Accelerating hard in the Mustang is at first a strange experience. There’s an old American saying: “There’s no replacement for displacement”. While German V8’s use clever tech to extract power from smaller engines, the Ford just uses good old fashioned brute force. A tidal wave of power and torque push the car through space in an almost unnatural way. It feels like it could accelerate like this forever, pinning you to the seat. Glancing down at the speedometer, the speed reading and what you’re feeling just don’t correlate. It’s a hoot.

American cars are often criticised for an ability to deal with a fairly common occurrence on the road: corners. And yes, the big Ford doesn’t feel nearly as nimble as its European rivals. You might even say it’s a bit primitive in the handling deparment, and it is, with a solid live rear axle. Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal unless you actually plan to race, but essentially it’s the sort of technology that would make a German engineer laugh, and you can imagine how many times per year a German engineer laughs.

You can’t help but feel that the Mustang couldn’t give two hoots about Friedrich and his multilink rear suspension. And to be honest, while I was driving it, I didn’t either.

The Mustang is not a car, it’s an event. Besides the fact that it is exceptionally rare on our roads, it provides the sort of pantomime and evokes the sort of nostalgia that most cars can only dream of doing for their owners. On our short drive around Cape Town, people slowed down when they saw us coming (quite dangerously!) so we could pull up next to them. A newspaper salesman nearly lost his mind just looking at the thing. And I lost count at the number of cellphone paparazzi.

Of course the best part is it could be all yours. Keep checking 2OceansVibe for competition announcements and be sure to enter the draw by purchasing a bottle of Jack (or ten) and entering via the promotional label.

Actually, please don’t. I need this car in my life.