We're usually the ones who pen feature car stories because, well, that's how we earn those big, fat magazine paychecks. But the following first-person narrative that accompanied Rick Linden's tech sheet tells the tale about his sanitary, yet insanely powerful, '93 notchback concisely and painlessly. Being a dentist, we guess he knows the drill
Growing up in Detroit, it seemed as if everyone had a hot rod in their garage; everyone except me, that is. I had made up my mind at a young age to pursue an education, so I could never afford to build what I really wanted. But I made myself a promise to build my ultimate street car as soon as it was possible.
There never was any question as to what make or model car to build. Every GM product I ever owned ended up with a blown motor. my first car was a Dodge Dart-enough said there-and I had owned a few Ford pickups that I just couldn't kill. To me, the 5.0 Fox-body Mustang just looked and sounded cooler than anything on the street.
My first Mustang was an '89 hatchback stick car that I bought in bone-stock condition with 32,000 miles on it. It was beautiful but slow. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but it didn't take long for me to replace nearly every part on the car. It had a Mexican block, good pistons and rods, a Vortech S-Trim blower, short-tube headers, a Performance Automatic C-4 Supercomp tranny, and some drag suspension components, among other things. It was a killer, super-fun street car that spun the dyno to 498 rwhp and ran 10.1 all day long. Anyone could get in that car and strip off a low-10-second pass; it was that predictable and easy to drive. It would hook on the street and I never lost a street race.
But before long that just wasn't fast enough. So I had the car rebuilt from the ground up. I was going to try to build the fastest stock suspension car in the country. I started with an A-4 block bored 0.100 over, added an 88mm turbo, rollcage, gutted all the creature comforts, and ended up with a car that went 5.5's in the eighth and 8.35 in the quarter. I wrecked the car at our local track in spectacular fashion, so I needed another Mustang.
I built yet another race car and raced it successfully for a year or two, but I soon began to tire of trailers, tow vehicles, expensive repairs, and down time while the race car was broken. I began to miss the fun I had with my first Mustang street car. So I gave up racing with the intention of building my ultimate street car.
I wanted a Fox coupe and I wanted one that hadn't been beaten to death. I wanted a silver coupe with black interior that was in good shape-good luck. I searched the Internet for months and went on several wild goose chases until I found my '93 coupe, complete with black interior and five-speed, unmolested and in fantastic shape. I bought it from Jay Meagher, who worked at Lamotta Performance near Orlando. Jay worked on Mustangs all day long and he was basically "over it" when it came to modifying Mustangs, so he kept his street car stock. I paid him a fair sum for my blank canvas and promised him he would like the result when I was done.