It's difficult to see how Saleen will be able to carve his "niche" out of the new Mustang, especially his ultra-high-end ultra-high-price models. As Ford continually raises the performance bar and the wow-factor bar on their more affordable stock factory Mustangs, it squeezes out that comfort zone that Saleen used to occupy and sell a decent amount of cars in. Back in the mid 90's when the SN-95 came out Saleen made a huge comeback because Ford's stock GT's and Cobras were both tepid performers and not that exciting from a styling standpoint. They sat high, on relatively skinny tires, with p*** poor seats, and handled fairly sloppy. There was a ton of opportunity for improvement there, you could park a new Saleen next to a new Cobra or GT on the showroom floor and the Saleen addressed all of the shortcomings of the factory cars, and then some. Even if you didn't have the extra dough, you could add up the cost of all the parts Saleen added, tack on the exclusivity and collectibility that you can't bolt on yourself, and justify the car in your head. That was the S281 and S281 Supercharged. The ultra-high-end supercharged S351 was just over 500 h.p. and retailed in the high 50's for what was a totally trick hand-built car. NOTHING in that car's driveline or chassis was stock, from the radiator to the exhaust tips. The parts list to build your own to an identical spec (I did this list a long time ago before I ordered my '97 S351) was staggering, and the 50-some thousand pricetag was not a bad deal when you broke it down to cost of components to build your own S351. Furthermore, back when they were building them 1994-1999, there was nothing else on the street that could come close to competing except maybe the Viper GTS, which cost even more. So for $50+, which was and still is a painful amount of money to spend on a Mustang, you got what was truly the king of the hill on the street that came with a warranty. Today, you can drive off the dealer's lot with a new Cobra that looks aggressive, sits low, has fat tires, good seats, and handles fantastically, for just north of $30 grand (they're really dealing on Cobras right now) and go to the track and run high 12's on the gas that came in the car. The $60,000 S281E has become irrelevent, because there's no justification for it, the Cobra is fixed in all the areas that Saleen used to exploit opportunity. And anybody who would drop 60 large on a gussied-up Fairmont derivative chassis rather than jump the fence and buy a real-deal sports car in the Z06 is just a little too blue-oval crazy to claim sanity. Now the '05's are coming, styled incredibly, sitting low, nice wheels that push out to the wheel lips, good seats, good stock power, supposed to be a better handler than we've ever seen. And the Cobra will be a close to 500 h.p. BMW killer?? Ford has taken Saleen's market and invaded it like we invaded Iraq. I don't know what he can do to this new car that will sway people to blow the extra cash. I don't sell him short, but it sure will take a brilliant plan. He sold cars by fixing all of the Mustang's shortcomings. This new Mustang has damn few shortcomings.