Bolt-On Upgrades

If you want to make your 5.0 Mustang the baddest in your neighborhood, all it takes is some patience and the right combination of parts. When you get right down to performance, the answers lie in simple physics—the use of real-world, bolt-on parts any of us can buy from the local speed shop or mail order warehouse.

Mustangs are all about bolt-on performance. Sure, you can run nines with a big stroker motor, high-dollar heads, and a monster supercharger—and back it with a pro-style chassis—but for honest street power, it’s hard to beat the simplicity, cost, and effectiveness of a few bolt-ons. In “Bolt-On Dyno Thrash” (Sept. ’98), we showed how various bolt-on parts affected rear-wheel horsepower. But just as important as the rear-wheel horsepower number is how it translates into a quicker car, via dragstrip performance, so this time we’re going to show what similar bolt-ons can do to your Mustang’s quarter-mile times.

We’re going to do essentially the same modifications as in the previous story, but without the expense and effort of swapping the cylinder heads. We want to see what kind of improvement we can get without actually “breaking the seal” on the engine.

Our donor car is a ’90 LX coupe that served the first 100,000 miles of its life with “The Man” behind the wheel—it’s a former California Highway Patrol car. Before any modifications we took it to the track for some baseline numbers. The car cracked the quarter-mile in 14.47 seconds at 93.6 mph. Not bad for a well-worn 5.0 Mustang on street tires, but it leaves lots of room for improvement.

We’re going to show you how to shave well over a second off your quarter-mile times with performance bolt-ons whose prices range from affordable to several-paychecks expensive.

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