Performance Red 35th Anniversary Mustang

Here at 5.0 Mustang & Super Fords, we receive phone calls all the time telling us about hot Mustangs. Usually we tell the person to send us pictures of said hot Mustang and we go from there. When we received one such call from Steeda Autosports [(954) 960-0774] in Pompano Beach, Florida, describing a ’99 35th Anniversary GT that made more than 400 hp at the wheels, we were mildly interested.

Then the words “It’s an automatic” came through the other side of the phone. That’s when we really got excited.

It turns out a customer of Steeda’s had once owned a ’97 GT that was treated to a wealth of performance components—including a blower—but one toasted piston after another made the gentleman dump the Mustang in favor of a ’99 Lightning.

However, one trip to Bill Currie Ford led to the purchase of the Performance Red 35th Anniversary Mustang seen here. Not wanting to repeat his past mistakes, the gentleman summoned Steeda to outfit the Two-Valve accordingly in order to maintain reliability while still making a ton of power. Oh, yeah—remember we said it was an automatic? That proved to be a monumental exercise in tuning expertise. The folks at Steeda hammered it out, however, and now they have one happy customer.

Horse Sense: According to the Third Generation News & Beyond National Mustang Registry (thrdgenreg@aol.com), 4,642 35th Anniversary Mustangs were built in 1999. Ford built 1,555 in Performance Red—like our feature car—of which 859 were five-speeds and 696 were automatics.