Vortech Equipped and Customized 2001 Mustang GT - Street Sweet

Horse Sense: Aside from applying his savvy tuning skills to Jack's Gt, PHP's Paul Svinicki has also coached Jack on the necessity of radically lowering the rear tire pressure at the strip from the 22-or-so pounds he was running. We expect the GT's 1.78-second 60-foot times to drop accordingly.

Jack Perry is a tool and die maker by trade-a mold maker, to be specific. It's a precise occupation that, by necessity, tends to attract fastidious, exacting personality types. Though certainly not a hard and fast rule, people who must work to fine tolerances in their jobs tend to be equally fussy in other aspects of their lives. Having glanced at our photos of his pristine '01 GT coupe, we guess you know where we're going with this line of thought: Jack is a detail freak.

We can't help but wonder if he's applied this affliction to all of the 70 or so cars he has owned in his 55 years. Six of these have been Mustangs, but of that nonstop procession of no-doubt interesting automobiles, this New Edge GT seems to be his favorite. Why? Possibly because it's such a well-rounded beast: "With my air conditioning on, and the automatic transmission and stock suspension," Jack says, "I could easily drive it from Michigan to California on pump gas, take a turn off the highway, and go to the dragstrip to run 11s in the quarter with my Nitto 555R street tires. It's a dream come true."

For Jack, the trip into dreamland began about three years ago when he stumbled across the GT on a car lot with 13,000 miles showing on its clock. It was the Performance Red hue that clinched the deal.

The modifications started immediately-but oh-so gently-with the hood stripes. "Then, as I don't leave anything alone," Jack says, "I started dressing it up with engine bolt-ons and dressing up the interior with a few billet parts." Does any of this sound familiar? We all start off with such humble intentions only to succumb to the lure of more power, and when that buzz wears off, more power still.

So on went a Vortech V2-SQ centrifugal blower, crossbred with one of ProCharger's air-to-air intercoolers. Jack then had Rick's Transmissions, near his hometown of Ida, Michigan, toughen up the GT's 4R70 tranny. "After it was finished, I took the car to get dyno-tuned locally, but I wasn't happy with the results." It's an all-too-familiar story, we suppose. Yet Jack was undeterred and decided to change pulleys for about 15 pounds of boost, a swap which prompted him to worry about the stock bottom end's ability to handle the results.

Livernois Motorsports got the call to build a worthy rotating and reciprocating assembly, encompassed within an SVT aluminum block and with a Kellogg forged crank as a backbone. This is linked to Diamond 9.0:1 forged pistons by Manley rods. The stock Two-Valve PI heads were retained, but Jack mildly ported these himself, as he did with the new Bullitt aluminum intake. To handle the anticipated demand, he switched to an SCT 90mm mass air and a dual-pump Cobra fuel tank to feed CPR's fuel rails and the set of 55-lb/hr injectors. What goes in must come out, so BBK ceramic-coated short-tube headers came onboard, as did a Bassani cross-pipe and quiet MagnaFlow mufflers (no sense raising unwanted attention when forced to do burnouts for demanding magazine types). Jack credits Randy at Conway's Car Care in Rockwood, Michigan, for invaluable help in pulling the project together.

There was still the matter of getting the tune just right, a problem solved by a visit to the Dynojet at Paul's High Performance, an hour or so down the road in Jackson, Michigan. It was that tune that made the car, in Jack's words, "street sweet."

Since the street is Jack's playground, surprisingly little has been swapped out on the chassis. Even the stock springs remain, though AFS Cobra R-style chrome rims (17x9 front, 17x10.5 rear) add a dash of flash. Nitto 555s are mounted at the front end, size 275/45R17, while pudgy and sticky 315/35R17 Nitto 555Rs go for grip out back. Jack is currently working on his third rearend, this one an 8.8 packing FRPP 31-spline axles and 4.10 gears, along with an Eaton Posi.