Despite being much more detailed...
Despite being much more detailed than the average race car, Mark Motsinger's '87 LX certainly looks the part with its purposeful HO Fibertrends cowl hood, wheelie bars, and lay-down wing from Skinny Kid Race Cars.
Horse Sense: Ford Racing Performance Parts' M-6010-W351 wet-sump cast-iron block, as used by Mark, has a 9.5-inch deck height, siamese bores, and can be bored/stroked to 454 ci. The V351 variant is of similar construction, but has a 9.2-inch deck and is limi-ted to 427 ci.
Though you'll occasionally see Mark Motsinger's nitrous-tickled '87 LX in Fun Ford or NMRA competition, the Jackson, Michigan, resident recently seems to have found a home in the eighth-mile Outlaw Street Car Association. In only a partial freshman season last year, Mark had one runner-up finish in OSCA's Pro Street class and two semifinal appearances in Modified Street. Despite inevitable annual rules changes, he hopes to mount a serious assault on OSCA for 2002.
Mark's original plans for the car weren't nearly so serious. He bought it as a used, bone-stock, LX hatchback, white with red interior. It didn't stay that way for long. "By the second day of ownership," Mark recalls, "I had pulled the engine and trans and began stripping the car down to bare metal for a fresh coat of paint. My original intention was to have a fast, nice-looking street car." To that end, he originally installed a stock short-block with World Castings heads, a GT-40 intake, and a five-speed. This was back in 1993, when the Mustang aftermarket was just beginning to ramp up, so Mark-who now makes his living as a crash-impact mechanic for one of Detroit's Big Three-began fabricating needed parts at home.
Mark was quite satisfied with weekly visits to the dragstrip on test-and-tune nights for the first year, but then he heard that Norwalk was having a Mustang shootout, so off he went with his purple 5.0 and ended up as runner-up in a Real Street class. "I was hooked!" he says. Gee, how many times have we heard that?
Mark's 427-inch small-block...
Mark's 427-inch small-block is augmented by an NOS fogger kit, as well as a so-far-unused Big Shot plate built into the intake. On the fogger alone, the 14:1 Windsor has propelled the 3,200-pound hatchback to a 5.40-second at 134-mph eighth-mile. It resides in an ultra-sanitary, filled and smoothed, body-color engine bay. As with many other pieces on the car, Mark built his own caster/camber plates.
The following year, Mark went back to Norwalk for the True Street Shootout, where his ride took Editor's Choice, but it was apparently no longer fast enough to keep the old adrenaline flowing. So, during the Michigan cold months, out went the 302 and in went a 408 stroker with Trick Flow heads and a C4, finished just the day before the '96 True Street Shootout. The then-required 50-mile drive preceding three back-to-back passes served as the stroked Windsor's break-in. Mark finished in Fourth Place, with an average of 10.50.
After fiddling with the combo for another year, Mark finally broke into the single digits with a 9.85 pass at the St. Louis Gateway Rumble. Trouble was, the winners were running low 9s. So, yup, you guessed it, during the course of that winter and the following summer, Mark built yet another motor and "the car was smoothed out a little more." By the spring of 1999, the rearend had gained mini-tubs and a ladder-bar suspension, and all original thoughts of that "fast, nice-looking street car" were forever abandoned.
In that final year of the old millennium, the giggle-gassed combo would run consistent 8.90s at 150-plus mph, which was good enough to bag Mark the Wild Outlaw win at J&P's Canadian Shootout. The bad news was the Street Outlaw cars were by then running 8.70s, so Mark correctly concluded that more was necessary.
For the 2000 season, the car's current combination of 427-inch displacement and Ford Racing Performance Parts' Yates C3 heads came together to the tune of 8.40s at more than 160 mph. Since then, Mark has left the healthy Windsor well enough alone. But a Michigan winter lasts at least six months, and he had to do something...