On any weekend from March through October, the odds are good that you can go heads-up drag racing with your favorite Mustang. With three Ford-specific sanctioning bodies, at least three street car series, and dozens of local outlaw races, there's hardly enough time to refill the nitrous tanks before you're off to the next race. There are three major magazines (with hundreds of thousands of subscribers) devoted to the 5.0 Mustang, with general automotive journals kicking in monthly features to cater to the hobby. Internet sites number in the thousands, offering up-to-the-minute, blow-by-blow action of your favorite Mustang racers and new products for your ride.
It's an amazing time to be into Ford performance cars and heads-up racing in general. Things are so good, you may wonder how all of this 5.0 Mustang stuff started-especially if you've joined the party in the last couple of years. The history of the 5.0 Mustang and the industry that has developed around it is one of hard work, creativity, and dedication to an American automotive icon that was re-created in the late '80s.
We're going to take you through the introduction of the 5.0 Mustang, its development, the heads-up phenom-enon, and fill you in on where we are today. I've also asked former Super Ford magazine editors Tom Wilson and Donald Farr to contribute to this story (see their sidebars) with firsthand accounts of this revolution while they were on duty.
In The BeginningIt was 1982 and Ford reintroduced the Mustang GT, packed with a torquey 302ci small-block. This 15-second car was heralded as a return to performance, or "The Boss Is Back" as the Ford ads of the day suggested. It's hard to imagine a 157hp car being thought of as a savior of sorts, but time had been bleak from 1973 through 1981. The Pinto-uh, we mean Mustang-had been insulted with Cobra and Mach 1 sticker packages, but the power and performance were dismal. From 1982 through 1985, the Mustang GT just got better. The horsepower rating continued to climb with a carbureted 5.0 package that peaked in 1985 at 210.
The big news in 1986 was fuel injection, a true dual exhaust, and the introduction of the 8.8-inch, heavy-duty Ford rearend. The GT was a quick car-it could now run high-14s with the right driver-but the fuel injection was looked at, oddly enough, as the end of performance for this car. With a magic black box controlling the fuel and spark, hidden somewhere in the car, Mustang owners could no longer tweak the carb to find some extra horsepower. But in the dawn of the fuel-injected 5.0 Mustang, people tried.
In an '86 article, Mustang Monthly magazine changed the rear gear ratio of an '86 GT convertible from 2.73 to 3.55. The car actually slowed down, which they explained as "the computer readjusting the engine profile to limit performance." The actual answer was published in their own article-the 60-foot times had drastically decreased, indi-cating an obvious loss of traction, but the story was a classic example of the fear of the new fuel-injection system.
It was the '87 Mustang that would change everything. With a few engine upgrades (cylinder heads, throttle body, and intake manifold mainly), the car leapt to 225 horses and 300 lb-ft of torque. The GT was an instant player, able to run 14.20s without even tweaking it. However, people quickly learned they could order all the hot 5.0 stuff in the much lighter LX hatchback and notchback models. While the convertible models cruised the streets, the late-night street racers were buying up 5.0 coupes as fast as Ford could make them.