Ford’s Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1, which is responsible for building their popular Ecoboost V6, as well as the naturally aspirated 3.7L V6 used in the F-Series and Mustang, is adding a third shift to keep up with demand. But the extra 250 jobs will largely come from the Cleveland Engine Plant No. 2, which is being shuttered this week.
The official sports car of the British underclass (that can afford to move out of the council estate) is the Ford Focus RS, a fluorescent display of 4-wheeled vulgarity. The British motoring press follow the progress of the Focus RS like we follow crappy celebrity gossip (well, they do too), and the latest such report has turned up an interesting tidbit about one of our home-grown working class heroes, the Ford Mustang.
Hang on to your hairplugs. The 2013 Ford Shelby GT500 has the same 650 horsepower supercharged 5.8L V8 making 600 lb-ft of torque. But unlike the 200 mph coupe, the ‘vert will only top out at 155 mph. The vert does get 6-piston Brembo brakes, a carbon fiber driveshaft, an upgraded clutch, electronically adjustable Bilstein shocks and a Motley Crue Greatest Hits CD in the Shaker audio system.
The Index of Effluency, LeMons racing’s top prize, gets handed to the team that accomplishes a lap total far beyond what any sane person would have imagined possible for such a terrible, terrible car. Sometimes that means getting 10th overall in a Toyota Tercel EZ, and other times it means taking 36th out of 57 entries in a 1977 Ford Mustang II. Macaroni Racing, in their Cologne V6-powered “big Pinto,” managed the latter achievement at the Heaps In The Heart of Texas 24 Hours of LeMons today. (Read More…)
After judging at the Arse Freeze-a-Palooza 24 Hours of LeMons near Bakersfield, I headed north to visit my family in the San Francisco Bay Area before heading back to Denver. Naturally, I had to stop by at least one junkyard, and— small world!— I ran into a car that looked very familiar. (Read More…)
It just does my heart good to see a suburban Denver neighborhood in which there’s no meddlesome HOA to tell a man he can’t have a vintage customized Econoline on the street and a Mustang drag racer in the driveway. (Read More…)
While I prefer daily-driven survivors for this series, it’s impossible to resist photographing a flawless 1960s machine making a rare street appearance in my neighborhood. This 289/4-speed ’67 fastback spends most of its life garaged, but the weather in Denver this week has been so nice that the car’s owner must have felt compelled to give it some fresh air. (Read More…)
After being away from the quick-turnover self-service junkyards of Northern California (where Guangzhou-bound container ships full of crushed vehicles leave the Port of Oakland every day) for a few months, I decided to check out one of the biggest when visiting from Denver last week. I found a ’62 Comet, a ’65 Fairlane, and a ’72 Mustang huddled together in The Crusher’s waiting room. (Read More…)
If you read my Mustang GT introduction and Performance Pack on-track test articles, you know that I am an unabashed fan of the 2011 Mustang GT. On a road course, it is very probably the fastest normally-aspirated ponycar in history; it’s certainly the best-conceived, best-assembled, and most satisfying ponycar I’ve ever had the pleasure of driving.
The 2011 Shelby GT500 hasn’t received quite the amount of media attention devoted to its five-liter little brother, but it is packing two significant upgrades. There’s an SVT Performance Pack, which includes larger forged-aluminum wheels, revised suspension settings, a 3.73 axle ratio, and a unique Goodyear F1 Supercar tire. Ford has also taken advantage of a unique “Plasma Transferred Wire Arc” process to create an aluminum 5.4-liter V8 that makes 550 horsepower, ten more than last year’s iron-block monster. The payoff is a 120-pound weight savings.
Lighter, stronger, better-handling. Let’s go to the track.
Powered By Ford. There’s something special about those words, something iconic, something that evokes nightmares of an uniquely American scope, from our first family cross-country trips in a 1954 Ford that perpetually overheated and stalled from vapor lock (when it actually started) to the last one, Mother’s craptastic 1981 Escort (replaced by a Civic) that could barely do seventy wheezing unsteadily along the rain-soaked I-70 straight. Powered by Ford. It’s the peeling logo hastily slapped onto the valve covers of this five-liter Mustang II, but you won’t need to raise the hood to understand what it means. The first time this pathetic lump of an engine tries to suck air through its tiny two-barrel carburetor and wheezes its feeble exhaust through soda-straw sized tailpipes, it will be more than crystal clear. (Read More…)
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