1992 Ford Mustang LX Methanol Injection Kit - Cool Your Jets!

Horse Sense: While methanol injection can replace an intercooler, its benefits are further enhanced when you use it in addition to an intake-cooling device, such as Vortech's popular line of aftercooler units.

Keeping the air that enters your engine--or intake charge--as cool as possible is a longtime tradition with hot-rodders looking to maximize their horsepower efforts. For decades, racers have been packing their intake manifolds with ice and running their fuel lines through cool cans. With a fuel-injected performance car such as the 5.0 Mustang, the same concept applies-- plop a bag of ice on that upper intake plenum, and you will be rewarded with a healthy increase in horsepower due to the denser intake charge. But once superchargers came to the forefront, we were faced with a new dilemma.

Forced induction does pack the air into the combustion chamber, but by the laws of physics, it also greatly increases the intake-charge temperature. This can lead to engine-destroying detonation or preignition. As a result, intercooling (and massive intercooler sizes on the racing circuit) has developed rapidly to combat this increase in heat. Recently, creative companies have been investigating the use of injecting chemicals into the intake tract as cooling agents. They have tested not only nitrous oxide, but also other cooling sources such as water and methanol have been looked at as alternatives to the sometimes bulky intercoolers and the requisite support equipment.

Leading the way with its line of methanol-injection kits is Matt Snow's Snow Performance in Wood Park, Color-ado. Matt has spent several years in the industrial engineering field working with various chemical-intercooling agents. Once he supercharged his personal '93 Cobra, it was only a matter of time before he added a home-built methanol injection kit. Then, people began asking Matt where he got that trick little methanol-injection kit. Suddenly, Snow Performance was formed, and its success has been tremendous.

Before we get to Snow's product, let's address the question "Why methanol?" as taken directly from the Snow Performance Web site.

"Methanol is a high-octane fuel that is extremely resistant to detonation with an excellent cost/ benefit ratio. Its high latent heat of vaporization also makes it an excellent air-charge cooler, which means a denser mixture and more horsepower. Because of these facts, it is a better antidetonant than ethanol or isopropanol although they will work in a pinch. It has, however, only about 60 percent of the energy content of gasoline by volume, so about twice as much is used to make similar power if used as a straight fuel. It is extremely toxic and should be handled with rubber gloves in well-ventilated areas only. Care should be taken to avoid skin contact."

With that as a primer, we took the kit out of the box! Snow Performance's Boost Cooler kit is based around a high-flow, viton-diaphragm pump that is modified to Matt's specifications to produce 60 psi and flow 2,500 milliliters per minute at the nozzle. Matt built the rest of the kit with an eye toward keeping the cost down while maximizing the end-user's bang-for-the-buck. It represents one of the hottest trends in the 5.0 Mustang hobby--liquid intercooling.

Our test car for this experiment is owned and assembled by Tim Stockwell from the Akron, Ohio, area. Tim is a certified mechanic and a longtime fan of the 5.0 Mustang. He has also assembled several of these cars and works on them in his spare time, so he knows his way around the popular 5.0 combinations. The car he had waiting for us when we arrived at his 60x24-foot attached garage (with lift!) was his own personal '92 LX notchback. It was an all-original 5.0 car with only 39,000 miles on the clock when he bought it just a few months before our shoot.

Despite the short time of ownership, Tim had already significantly increased the performance of the LX (look for a full, in-depth feature on this awesome car in an upcoming issue). As an introduction, the car had the complete 5.0 engine still in place--the stock throttle body, intake, heads, valve covers, and so on had never been off the car. Tim added a Vortech S-Trim kit with a 10-rib, 2.95-inch blower pulley, which was force-feeding the little stocker 14 psi.

A good fuel system featuring 42-lb/hr injectors, a 4,000-stall converter, short-tube headers, and a drag suspension were the only other serious additions.

With the engine accessories cleared out of the engine compartment, making for clear photography, it was the perfect car to do our installation. The other reason this was a perfect 5.0 deserving of a methanol kit was that Tim had maxed out this AOD combination to the tune of 11.60s at more than 116 mph, with the stock AOD, the stock H-pipe, and the stock 3.27 gears--a low-buck 11-second rocket!

With low cost in mind, Snow Performance specified its Stage I kit, which retails for only $299. Tim opted for the reverse-flow check valve to keep the boost out of the methanol system of his high-boost application. Once the parts showed up and Tim purchased a 5-gallon jug of methanol (about $25), all we needed to do was install the kit and get to the dyno for the torture--uh, testing--session.