Probing The Limits
Rod Millen takes a box-stock Probe, cranks up the boost to 14 pounds, paints it plumb crazy and turns us loose in it for a cross-country romp
By Mark Vaughn

Sure, you could just buy a regular old Ford Probe - a fine, sporty two-door hatchback that has been a favorite among Ford buyers since 1988. But then what would you have? That's right, you'd have a regular old Ford Probe that about 341,000 other people in the country already have. Your friends might say things like, "Hey, nice car," but you'd always wonder if they really meant it. For genuine adulation you have to go beyond the showroom, to a place where they understand both visual appeal and performance. We went to Rod Millen Motorsport in Newport Beach, Calif.

Rod Millen is the ace New Zealand rally driver whose California shop builds his winning rally cars. A walk through the shop reveals several race cars in various stages of manufacture. A recent tour showed one 323 body sitting on a paint stand, stripped to its bare shell, waiting to be painted and built back up into a rally contender. Other cars Millen had piloted in series around the world sit gathering dust in corners of the shop. Kenny Anderson, the sales manager in Millen's showroom, pointed out two-and three-rotored RX-7s and 323 GTXs in full-race plumage. The world's only four-wheel-drive RX-7, which had seen rally competition in 1983, holds court along one wall.

When we arrived to pick up our test Probe, Millen had just shipped an awd 323 and two 40-foot containers of spare parts to New Zealand for the upcoming Asian Pacific Rally series. Millen won that title for Mazda in 1989 and finished third last year. To tune up the 323 for this year's series, Millen had entered the SCCA's Rim of the World PRO Rally in Lucerne. Calif., and won it.

So the racing heritage from which our Probe sprang was clearly evident in the shop. The engineers who design and build Millen's cars are the same ones who design the suspensions and tweak the engines for the shop's aftermarket Mazda kits, including Miatas, RX-7s and-now that Mazda is building Fords - for our Probe. For the Ford Probe GT package, they tune the car's suspension to the outer edge of comfort and tweak the engine to just about the maximum horsepower a daily driver 2.2-liter four is capable of. And they'll try to keep it within the limits of "a car that works well in everyday use."

But they won't choose the color for you. That you do yourself, and we chose purple. Millen's shop will say it's "plum" but despite all that racing heritage, to most of the world it just looks purple. And there is no way to be subtle about driving a purple car, not even at night.

Take this incident on the CB radio while delivering the Probe from Newport Beach to Detroit, sometime after midnight in the vast, black deserts of southern Utah:

Trucker: "Was that you passed me in that Probe just now'?"

Probe Driver: "Yep."

Trucker: "What color is that thing, anyway, red'."'

P.D.: "No, it's, uh, purple."

Trucker: (Silence. Conversation ends.)

It probably wouldn't have mattered to him that, technically, the car was plum, that it put out 50 percent more hp than any other Probe made and that Rod Millen had won several rallying titles. When you're making a styling statement, not everyone is going to agree with you; nor will they appreciate the variety of colors your customizer offers. But in our experience more people liked it than didn't, and if purple turns out not to be your favorite you're not limited to one color.

"We can paint it any color," said Anderson. "There are color charts that are hundreds of pages thick and you just go through them until you find one you like."

Say, teal, maybe, or electric mauve. Whatever the color, this is no Earl Scheib quickie. Our paint job alone was an extra $3,000, or roughly 15 percent of the cost of the car, which should quickly separate the truly fashion-conscious from the merely fashionable. Thankfully for wallets across the country. Millen Motorsports doesn't require a new paint job as part of its Probe package. It will be happy to sell you as much or as little of it as you may want. (All of Millen's rally cars, incidentally, are plain white beneath the decals.)

The real meat of the package lies under that purple skin - where upgraded componentry produces more horsepower and better grip-the substance behind the style.

An HKS electronic boost management system, basically a pop-off valve that doesn't pop off quite as easily, wrings 220 hp out of the same engine Ford lets out the door with just 145. It can be adjusted from the cockpit to provide either the six pounds of boost Ford originally intended or, with a touch of the appropriate button, it will twist nine, 12 or a maximum of 14 pounds into the engine's four cylinders. At the stock six pounds, the turbo boost is noticeable, a good kick in the rear bumper after a short lag. At 14, it's downright thrilling. Fourteen pounds of boost really come in handy when passing on mountain roads or driving at high altitudes, both of which we did on the delivery drive from L.A.

Torque steer wasn't as much of a problem as it could have been with all that power going to the front wheels. With a full tank of unleaded premium and a road full of Rocky Mountains in front of us, the Millen Probe felt in its element, passing non-turboed rivals up steep mountain canyons with ease.

The boost is also handy coming away from stoplights. We have no reason to doubt the Millen shop's claim of a 6.6-second 0-60 time. When we AutoFile'd a Probe GT with the stock turbocharged 2.2-liter four, we got a 0-60 time of 8.0 seconds. The 1.4-second difference could conceivably be increased even more with practice.

Four buttons on a console-mounted panel control the amount of boost. The only concession necessary for this extra kick is that you can't use the 14-pound setting without unleaded premium, which we didn't. Otherwise it's Smooth sailing.

A high-flow exhaust system adds another 20 hp and creates a rumbly exhaust note that enhances the performance character of the car. At first, anyway. After several hundred miles of throaty roar, a simple, quiet sputter would have been appreciated, even if it meant 20 fewer ponies.

Despite the fact that engine modifications boosted the Probe's power output by a maximum 75 hp, it still returned 26.4 mpg across the country and 22.4 mpg when we drove it around Detroit. Our AutoFile Probe GT returned a high of 23.3 mpg when track testing figures were subtracted.

Millen engineers didn't do much to alter the stock "Handling suspension package" Ford includes on all Probe GTs, which Anderson called "a pretty good place to start." Ford's package includes adjustable nitrogen-gas shocks, stiffer-than-stock springs and larger antiroll bars front and back. To this Millen adds an even-shorter set of springs that lower the car an inch and increase the spring rate by 15 percent. Millen also adjusts the camber on all four wheels, toeing them out enough to handle more aggressive cornering.

"About what you'd do for a slalom car to go weekend club racing," Anderson said. But not so much that you couldn't go cross-country in a weekend and still have kidneys. Of the three settings the Ford adjustable suspension offers, one was way too floppy, another a little too harsh and one, in a Goldilocksian way, was just right.

That was where we left it for most of the trip. Among the exceptions was a run up Boulder Canyon just west of the college town of the same name in central Colorado. There were no tight, slalom-like turns there but there were a lot of wide-open canyon-blasting-style curves. The Probe waltzed through them unruffled, with only an occasional reminder that, like almost all front-drive cars, it has a tendency to understeer.

Not as much as the stock Probe, thanks in part to its lower-profile Goodrich radial Comp TA 205/55R-16 tires, a new set of which (about $800) was affixed just before the trip. They, offered little to complain about the whole trip. Of course, we didn't have to pay for them, which would have been a complaint. The 16-inch Momo Quasar Road Wheels on which the TAs were mounted cost $1,400. Like the purple paint job, you'll have to decide for yourself if the adulation they bring is worth the price you have to pay to get them.

A $225 Momo steering wheel is also supplied so your hands get as good a grip on the wheel as the BFGoodriches are getting on the road. And our car received a $600 Pioneer 550 CD stuffed into the dash to keep our ears happy.

The package is well-engineered, nicely balanced and lives up to Millen Motorsport's claim that it "works well in everyday use." But as tested, it will add a cool $7,240 to the sticker of your roughly $15,000-plus to $20,000 Ford Probe GT (though thankfully, as previously mentioned, you can buy just the Millen components of your choice).

For that amount of money you could get a well-appointed Thunderbird Super Coupe (the next logical step for performance-minded Probe buyers), a fully decked-out Pontiac Firebird Trans Am convertible, a Mazda RX-7, or any number of other comparable performers.

Unfortunately, none of them come in purple. So you'll just have to decide how badly you want to be noticed.