After untold years and uncountable dollars dumped into cars that rarely need to turn...
and being subjected to seemingly endless abuse by the drag racing sanctions who gladly accept your hard earned cash but really wish you would go away, I got a hankering to satisfy my auto racing addiction in a different way. To that end I picked up a totally original 85.5 Mustang SVO with 76K on the clock thinking that 1) it would surely appreciate over the years since it is fairly rare, and B) it might be fun to try out other car competitions that involve more than my right foot. Mind you this was back in 2005 and, after attempting thought B) with an autocross or two on rock-hard tires and a ridiculous turbo lag compounded by a right foot which was well trained to be either on or off, I thought maybe I should stick with thought #1 after all. So the SVO gets parked in a quiet space in the shop where it slowly gathers dust and the tires continue to harden. An occasional drive keeps the thing from deteriorating excessively and maintains the hope of a reward for thought #1 over time.
Advance forward a number of years.... another uncountable bucket of cash and totally tired of the E36 M3 delivered in copious amounts by the soul-less straight-line sanctions I decide to stop feeding the beast and dust off the SVO. In its place goes the big yellow beast and its 429 cubic inches of true Detroit Iron where it can slowly harden its tires and collect the requisite dust. My wallet emits a deafening sigh of relief.
So, I think, surely someone who has spent the better part of his life messing with all things which involve internal combustion and wheels could learn to modulate his right foot enough to get a touchy car around an autocross course without it being a series of donuts and subjecting the course workers to excessive aerobic exercise and un-needed practice in resetting cones. Well, maybe. The obvious first thing to do is dispose of the vintage tires and get some whose hardness doesn't need the Rockwell scale to measure. Might as well get some new wheels while I'm at it since the OEMs, while made of aluminum, weigh like they are steel. So the first improvement is a set of Enkei RPF-1s with Hankook R-S3 in the OEM 225R50-16 size.
Major improvement! The driver still really sucks and seems unable to convert the digital right foot to analog, but at least the car doesn't exhibit drift-worthy oversteer anymore. But, of course, now that the rear is sticking better the front end pretty much ignores requests to turn with any amount of urgency and many, many cones continue to be subjected to levels of torture that would make Dick Cheney wince. Along the way the leaking master cylinder gets fixed along with fresh high temp brake fluid and some new pads and flex lines. If I learned anything from drag racing it is that the stopping part is at least as important as the starting part.
So on it goes and the driver keeps autocrossing and seems to improve at a glacial pace, but enough to get cocky. What the heck, surely I can do better than second gear romps around a parking lot! After all I am used to 120+ MPH runs down the dragstrip. I feel a need for speed. What better way than a PDX session at an easy road course, sort of like a spirited romp through the backroads on a Sunday morning. Mind you now, that other than the wheels, tires and brakes, this thing is totally bone stock, right down to the 30 year old hoses and paper air cleaner. Other than oil changes, it doesn't look like the drivetrain has ever been touched.
Undeterred, off I go on the 2 1/2 hour trip to, wait for it ... Hello Road Atlanta! HOLY CRAP! Now, you would think that someone who has been racing cars since the early '70s and broken enough stuff to fill a junkyard would have better sense than to partake in such an excursion. But no, he drives the car to the track having no backup plan for getting home if the engine scatters its guts or an unplanned encounter with the wide array of available walls occurs. Fortunately, for whatever reason, advantageous planetary alignment perhaps, the trip goes off without a hitch. Well, other than needing a clean set of drawers after the repeated launching into space on the way under the bridge and into turn 12, and a few signs of overheating near the end of the session, this intrepid traveler and trusty steed made it there and back intact. How unfortunate, since there is nothing worse than a successful, adrenaline stoking first outing in a new endeavor to lead one into a mine field.
What I know about making a car go around a corner can be easily summed up with one word, nothing. I know how to make a 3600 lb. car with 600 ft-lb of torque hook on 9" slicks well enough to pull 3 foot wheelstands, but getting said car to turn onto the return road at a crawl doesn't take a lot of skill. Research ensues. There are serious advantages to messing with a 30 year old car since the road is littered with carcasses of previous souls who had made similar attempts. The survivors of such attempts have either learned their lesson and moved on to more modern and capable platforms, or have started companies that supply an astonishing array of paraphernalia to people who cannot or will not abandon the attempt to make a fundamentally flawed design perform in a manner that is the least bit comparable to more modern designs. The owners of such businesses are called "entrepreneurs" while their customers are called "delusional". Count me among the latter. The former can thank me later.
So the first order of business is to revisit item #1 from way back at the beginning. Do I want to start messing around with a valuable classic collector car and subject myself to the scorn of the concours restoration crowd who will lop $10K off a car's value because the crossmember bolts are cadmium plated instead of black oxide and the shade of the red paint slash on the rear axle housing isn't quite right? Do I risk missing out on the joy of seeing my desirable classic get the high dollar hammer as it crosses the Barrett-Jackson stage because I stupidly welded a set of subframe connectors onto otherwise pristine OEM stampings? Further research is in order. Research complete. Yeah, it is a uniquely equipped and limited production vehicle with only 9844 examples built over its three year run. My particular version, a half-year introduction in 1985 is the rarest of the group with only 439 built. But all said and done, it is a FOX BODY MUSTANG and there is virtually no one on the planet that gives an E36 M3 about it other than a small group of aficionados, some of whom are vociferously militant when it comes to preservation of these cars. As a group these guys seem to create an endless demand for the special parts that came only on the SVO leading to the unfortunate situation where it is more profitable for the average joe who stumbles upon a SVO to part it out than to sell it complete. Indeed, over the course of a year or so of watching the market I see several examples of unmolested, minimally rusted, drivable and truly restorable cars, some in better shape than mine, being dismantled and the choice pieces sold to the highest bidder. Prices for complete cars are about what you would expect to pay for any Mustang of the same era, mileage and condition, which isn’t much. Also, it seems unreasonable to think that a Fox Mustang of any ilk would someday rank among the collectable classics that demand a high price… I’m thinking Boss 302/429 or early Shelby stuff here. Time to fire up the welder!
First thing is to install said subframe connectors as the Fox unibody is notoriously flexible. You’re welcome, Steeda.
Somewhere along the line I read that the FoMoCo limited slip diff is limited in other ways too, and the state of the art is a Torsen differential. Unfortunately the SVO came with the 7.5” rear with a 3.73 ratio. The Torsen is only available for the 8.8” rear. Happily the rear housing from later model Mustang GTs that came with the 8.8 will fit right in and the special axles used to accommodate the rear disk brakes on the SVO work too. The other good thing is that these rears are ridiculously common and can be had for next to nothing. So a nice unit from a ’89 GT is found and a new set of Ford Racing 3.73 gears are fitted to a Torsen diff, buttoned up with a pretty cover and out comes the 7.5 which I will trip over repeatedly to this very day.
Well, going through all the effort to replace the rear end opens a nearly bottomless can of worms, of course. Since the control arms come out it makes no sense to put them back in without new poly bushings. I began this operation with the intention of keeping the car compliant with SCCA ESP autocross rules for no apparent reason since I don't really compete in autocross, I just go to have fun. However, it is nice to have a basic set of rules to go by. At the time, ESP rules required keeping the OEM lower control arms. Naturally, since I went to all the trouble of putting poly bushings in the lower arms the rule has changed to allow aftermarket LCAs, and gave an uncomfortable reminder that race sanctioning bodies are pretty much the same whether you go straight or turn. The OEMs remain for now.
The Fox rear suspension has been call many things, most of which cannot be repeated in mixed company, but it is pretty much the best suspension system that a bunch of accountants could design, naturally resulting in an engineering E36 M3 pile. The intentional binding of the unequal length and weird angle four link has to be fixed. Implementing a better way of controlling lateral axle location is the first order of business. A panhard rod or watts link are legal for ESP but a torque arm is not. A panhard rod is cheaper and easier to install, but the Fox can't have a really long arm without interference with all sorts of items. The Fays2 watts link is a tidy package that is easy to install and provides the ability to adjust the rear roll center by moving the propeller axle. It also changes the role of the upper arms from lateral location duty to mainly setting the pinion angle. That means that the bind-o-matic UCA bushings can be replaced with spherical bearings.
Naturally something had to be done about the springage too so a set of H&R Race springs were tossed into the mix.
Enough for now... some front end work is next.
