My daily driver is this Mustang 5.0. I bought it in September, 1993 after my '85 Capri RS bit the dust in an accident (RIP). The car was bone stock except for 3.55 gears when I got it. It now has 182,000 miles and I have added the following:
With those additions the car's best 1/4 mile ET is 13.086 @ 104.40mph at a weight of about 3150 lbs (with me in it), on General XP2000 DOT approved road race tires (225/60/15).
Here's a shot of the local drag strip in Ennis, Tx. where I go drag racing fairly often. The car on the left belongs to a friend of mine, Wes Tarbox.
The car was recently put on a chassis dyno at Team Dynotech and made peak corrected horsepower of 245.7 and 310.1 lb-ft of torque with the stock throttle body and stock fan through the cats. Here is a graph from Team Dynotech showing the HP/Torque curves. The highest curve was with the accessory belt removed, which pushed the hp to 253.8 and torque to 316.6. So you were wondering how much horsepower those accessories were costing you? Now you know - 8 hp peak and over 10 at 5000 rpm, and that's with underdrive pullies and a worn stock fan clutch.
I have also put the car on a weight diet, and in it's current street configuration it weighs in at 2985 lbs. I had hoped to get it down to 2900 lbs over the next couple of years, but a roll cage and other heavy parts are in my future, so I no longer think I can stay much below 3000, even with aluminum heads.
I'm pretty happy with the car's performance for the moment, but in the next year I plan on adding:If I hit the lotto, I'll also be adding:
...but enough dreaming. Some people claim their close-to-stock 5.0 Mustang will go 150, or even 160 mph, just because they changed the rear gears or lowered it an inch. Sure, maybe if they roll it off a cliff. The fact of the matter is that the horsepower required to go a certain speed increases as the cube of the speed, approximately, because of wind resistance. A stock-engined, stock bodied Mustang will top out somewhere in the neighborhood of 135-140 mph. Don't let anyone tell you differently. :)
