Photography by Chris Tropea
As we soon found out, while effective at moving the exhaust away from the car, the exhaust system we fabricated for our Mustang is very loud and certainly not street legal. Ear plugs will be a must.
This fact is a bit sad since our Mustang’s engine sounds so glorious. With little or no carb and ignition adjustment, the engine started right up and ran perfectly.
Before we ran the car at high speed on a dyno, we decided we would run it at low speed at the Florida International Rally & Motorsport Park, our test track.
Before heading to the track, though, we put the car back on the lift and checked all the fasteners on the chassis to make sure everything was tight.
Once at the FIRM, our official test track, we went through our normal tack day routine. We checked fluids yet again and set tire pressures to about 28 psi. This would provide a safe starting point, we figured.
We torqued the wheels one more time and headed out. Our goal was not to get final lap times that day but to bed in the brakes, make sure our gauges were telling us what we wanted to hear, and break in the transmission and rear end. Finally, how did the car handle?
The car is truly fun, even before we ran at the limit. After bleeding the brakes once again, they started to warm up, bed in and become effective.
The car ran surprisingly well and pulled like a freight train. While some more tire and suspension tuning will be needed, the initial handling was quite good. The car is stable, although like all Mustangs, will oversteer if you get carried away with the throttle.
We built a fun, safe, cool-looking icon. With some sorting–more on that to come–it should be very competitive and a blast at HSR and other events.
I thought you might find that exhaust to be a bit much. When I saw the pics I thought "that's going to be awesome for about ten minutes!"
I had custom SpinTech mufflers on the side exit exhaust on my Camaro. The receipts went with the car when I sold it so I don't have exact pricing but I remember thinking that the pricing was quite reasonable.
I don't have any pics of the system but you can see the driver's side oval tip sticking out just in front of the rear wheel in this pic.
I'm wondering if you will be able to run the car at some tracks if it's that loud since more and more tracks are subject to noise limit regs......
Just a thaught regarding the exhaust.
I remember an article in GRM talking about Cats and how little real impact on the performance they have while cleaning up the exhaust and possibly quieting things down a bit. I could be wrong but I think the article ended up with Magnaflow Cats being the best of the bunch tested.
300zxfreak said:I'm wondering if you will be able to run the car at some tracks if it's that loud since more and more tracks are subject to noise limit regs......
It's definitely going to be a problem at Laguna :)
I haven't checked the signup list but is it going to be at the Mitty?
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