This car has a damn springy clutch. Which is an unlucky break for me, what with the premise of this article requiring 87,000 shifts and 50 miles' worth of krutzing along behind taxis and buses and nervous ex-hippies in Volvo SUVs.

And speaking of nervous ex-hippies, if seeing this car makes you fear that you're having a flashback, don't worry. This package — Ford's second Mustang Bullitt and the first on the highly McQueenable current body — compliments the regular cars' retrodesign styling with retropaint, retrowheels, retrohotrodparts, a retroadvertisingcampaign, and a great retroexhaustnote. Add tear gas and gonorrhea, and it's just like the Summer of Love. The dark-green metallic finish was common on late-'60s Pontiacs. The wheels are a riff on the Torq-Thrusts we all had in high school. The hop-up equipment — numerically higher rear axle, cold-air box, front strut brace, "performance" pads, remapped ECU, stiffer shocks and struts — is straight out of the hot-rodder handbook, or in this case the Ford Racing catalog. And as for the sound, the Bullitt's new model-specific pipes make the best '60s rock in the business.

The question is, is this 40-year-old iconography really so smart in 2008? The car industry's come a long way in four decades: Do we need to hark back to the era of peace, love, and Level 4 smog alerts? When faced with this weighty issue, any car writer worth his shrimp fork will think of the following paths to an answer:

One: Find a Highland Green '68 Mustang as seen in the movie "Bullitt" and test the cars side-by-side.

A fine notion, except that it won't really tell you much. You already know that the new car is aping the old one — that's why it's called the Mustang Bullitt. The question is, should it be aping the old one?

Two: Wait until spring, then stage a Ford-vs.-Dodge rematch. Chrysler's reborn '09 Challenger — the closest thing we'll get to modern iteration of the '68 Charger R/T that made up the other half of "Bullitt"'s seminal chase scene — makes this idea practically irresistible. Alas, every other hack writer in town has already had the same thought.

Three: Test the new Bullitt against other mid-$30K enthusiast coupes. Yes, you could do this, but why? Anybody who cross-shops a Bullitt, a BMW 1-series, and an Infiniti G37 doesn't need to be reading a car review. He needs to be reading a new scrip for lithium.

So maybe it's time for another approach — maybe like taking Ford precisely at its word. Why not drive the 2008 Mustang Bullitt exactly like McQueen drove his '68 Mustang in "Bullitt." And by that I mean re-run the route of the 9.4-minute sequence of squealing tires and bad continuity and blown shocks that defines the whole film. Take that out of the movie, and all you've got left is another damn hippie-noir cop flick. Besides, the Mustang and the chase scene have so much in common. They're both happy to make lots of smoke, noise, and mayhem while accomplishing nothing of substance. The chase scene kills off the bad guys before they can talk, which a falling safe could've done in about half a second. As for the Mustang, its 4.6-liter, three-valve V8 can turn rubber to vapor at will, but vapors don't move a car down the road.

Not that the ability to move down the road will be much use in this test. In "Bullitt," every vista showed a traffic-free hairpin or long lonely straight, as if San Francisco was like Spa with a few extra bagel shops. In reality, this city is a muscle-car driver's Sodom: A rat's-nest of one-way alleys and narrow streets clogged with tour buses, blind hills, double-parked taxis, kamikaze meter maids, and the stoniest, most confounded, hill-stallin'-est, Beetle-shod locals this side of Missoula.

Worse yet, the movie's chase route is hardly contiguous — it covers a half-dozen neighborhoods and hundreds of backgrounds, some of which aren't even there anymore. The old car wash near Army Street where the whole sequence started? That's a McDonald's now. And technically Army's gone, too. Now the name's Cesar Chavez Street, though it's still the same gritty, torn-up, six-lane artery loaded with cop-car cholesterol. In some muscle cars, the potholes and seams on Cesar Chavez make you pull over to look for your kidneys. In the Mustang Bullitt, the suspension is firm but civilized, so all organs stay present and accounted for.

From Army, McQueen bangs a huey to York, then executes a sneaky reverse to reappear behind the bad guys moments later. In reality, he reappears a dozen blocks north and east, near the corner of Kansas and 20th on Potrero Hill. This detour adds a third of a mile and six minutes to my own journey, which has already taken longer than the entire chase in the movie. After two blocks in Potrero Hill the film jumps locations again, this time to Filbert in North Beach. It's no sweat for McQueen, but for me and my '08 Mustang, that means a slog across town behind some of the city's finest cabbies. (Never mind that when Frank Bullitt wanted information, he managed to come up with a genuine New York hack driver outside the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The real SF-cabbie population is 23 percent transsexual, 69 percent unintelligible, 92 percent hostile, and 100 percent dicking along 16th Street directly in front of me.)

The Potrero-to-North Beach debacle adds five miles and 25 minutes, but in the process I learn the Bullitt 'Stang's interior is not such a bad place to be. Sure, the materials are pretty awful — the Bullitt's real-leather seat inserts and genuine turned-alloy dash applique just make the pop-bottle door panels look that much sillier — but the cabin is well isolated, the Shaker 500 audio system lives up to its name, and the flat-looking front seats prove incredibly comfy. (They might look like the glute-numbing mid-'60s buckets in McQueen's car, but their support is pure 21st-century.) The rear seats, of course, are best suited to small infants, hobbits, and enemies.

More minutes slip by chasing the route around Filbert, but I make up some time with a speedy transit across to Columbus. Skipping the bad guys' tire-smoking illegal left onto Chestnut, I make the block and then head over to Leavenworth before re-checking my notes. According to one of the websites I'm using, the next segment jumps back to Potrero Hill, and all just to drive one lousy block of the route. It's 4.8 miles there, 4.8 miles back, and 31 minutes total: By the time I get back to North Beach I'm ready to off a few henchmen myself. Another 44 minutes of hinky driving on and around Larkin and Chestnut and Lombard adds just 2.2 miles to the odometer, and by this point my clutch leg is starting to quiver. Plus, who put that extra notchiness into the Tremec? And let's say, just hypothetically, that you wanted to hop out for a quick pee at a Chinese restaurant. Have you ever tried opening a Mustang door while the car is pointing uphill? You need a hydraulic jack.

Taylor is the street you remember from the movie — the one where everyone rips out their floorpans and passes the same green VW four different times. Alas, there'll be no jumps for me today: I've got a church bus directly ahead of me, and avoiding a trip up his corn-chute means dropping the box into second and riding the "uprated brakes" down the hill. In this case, "uprated brakes" is Ford-ese for "harder front pads"; the Bullitt gets 18-inch wheels, versus 17s on the GT, but the calipers and rotors haven't grown into that space. Ford says the new pads fight fade and improve feel; all I notice is that the cold effort is higher than stock. Of course, they also made it all the way down the hill without bursting into flames, so maybe there's something to it.

After Taylor a dozen more off-camera blocks get me to Larkin, rejoining the route at the concrete-wall curve where the Charger loses its 69th hubcap. (An excision healed, Lourdes-like, in subsequent scenes.) A few more unfilmed blocks bring me to Laguna, and finally Marina Drive.

I was looking forward to this part. In the film Steve is double-clutching his pants off around here, hitting 80 with no cops or strollers in sight. In 2008, unfortunately, Marina Avenue has sprouted stop signs at every block and a Soylent Green crowd on the sidewalk. As I blaze past at 12 mph, a statuesque woman in low-rider jeans yells out "Cool car!" This has less to do with the Bullitt's horsey-and-badges delete than the prospect of a half-hour date, but at least someone noticed. Since last count, I've racked up 13 more minutes and 1.5 miles.

On film, getting from the Marina to McLaren Park is the work of one corner. In my world it's a 10.3-mile schlep that burns 32 minutes and crests a couple of hills that you wouldn't normally attempt without sherpas. On the other hand, McLaren Park is where the chase route at last opens up, and as soon as I get there I push down the throttle accordingly. Make no mistake: The Bullitt is quick. Yet the factory quotes a 5.0-second 0-60 time, and it sure doesn't feel like it's that quick. The rear end hooks up well, especially considering that the stock BFGs appear to be carved out of granite; with only a little feathering, the chatter and sideslip stop and the car simply moves off sans drama. It's just that there isn't a huge rush of oomph once you get there, with or without traction control active. We're talking about a remapped ECU, freer intake and exhaust, and a taller 3.73 (versus 3.31) rear axle plus 315 hp, 325 lb-ft of torque, and a 6500-rpm redline. (Those numbers are 300, 320, and 6250 in the normal GT). This thing ought to be ridiculously gutsy. It just isn't.

One answer might be cheap gas. I got our test car right after a fellow journalist — a species for whom the disparity between a 60-dollar tank of premium and a 55-dollar tank of regular may mean the difference between a Subway BMT and going to bed hungry. And, since for '08 the Mustang at last gets adaptive ignition (i.e., the spark retards automatically in the presence of low-octane fuel), a tank of cheap gas will mean substandard power. In any case, even without big acceleration I love the delivery: smooth, good midrange, no flat spots, and all with that stellar exhaust note. The marginally lower and tauter suspension is good news as well. Backed by a Bullitt-specific strut brace and predictable steering it's firm but not jittery, which helps the driver ignore the car's weight and focus on its ability to turn. This is simply the best Mustang suspension to date, striking a good compromise between the regular GT's wooliness and the pounding you take in the heavy GT500. Pretty soon I'm blasting through McLaren Park, hitting 80 and trying the corners, when I shoot past one of Frank Bullitt's brethren (and a mean-looking example at that, right down to the leather cop jacket and black-and-white Harley). Hey, what do you know? The front pads work better warm, but they also work better when stomped in sheer panic.

Chastened, I make the last non-film transit — a 4.5-mile hop down to Daly City — with one eye on the mirror. Not that it matters, since at this rate it'd be faster to walk. Getting from McLaren Park to Guadalupe Canyon Parkway, site of the film's final wide-open blasts, burns up another 12 minutes.

In the movie, the Mustang and Charger run a few different segments of Guadalupe Canyon before ending up in that plot-stifling fireball. The gas station is gone now — I guess I know why — so I drive the entire road twice and consider it done. Finally, at the east end of Guadalupe Canyon, I pull over and do some quick math. Total distance: 31.4 miles. Divided by Frank Bullitt's 9.4-minute chase time, that works out to an impressive 200.45-mph average. No wonder the chase looked exciting on film.

My own re-creation took three hours and 45 minutes, for a rather more leisurely 8.4-mph average — not as remarkable as McQueen's time, but what can I say? I was bound by the laws of physics, geography, and traffic, and I wasted additional time checking maps and showing policemen my license. The important thing is, I found out that 40-year-old thinking doesn't necessarily ruin a modern performance car. My average speed might've been lower than McQueen's, but I'll bet that my ass isn't nearly as numb.

Haven't seen the Bullitt chase scene yet? Need a refresher? Head over to You Tube to check it out!