1989 Ford Mustang LX

Are you ready to get a bit "old school?" OK, here we go. It was 1991, and Jeff Lee's brother-in-law was trying to sell his car. Not knowing a darned thing about Mustangs, Jeff offered him $7,000. Unfortunately, it took the brother-in-law 12 months to realize that would be the best offer he was going to get. In May 1992, Jeff became a first-time Mustang owner. He had no idea what was about to happen to him.

At first, Jeff just flat-out dug the car. He had never owned an American V-8 musclecar, and this little bone-stock 5.0 was filled with torque and overflowing with fun. For more than a year, and several thousand miles, Jeff enjoyed the car before he began to wonder what a few upgrades would do for the performance of his hyper Ford.

A free-flowing exhaust system and a set of 3.55 gears came first. Those simple changes transformed the car. (Remember how cool it was when you did this?) By 1994, the blue hatch was sporting a set of the then-new Trick Flow Twisted Wedge heads and a GT-40 intake that Jeff purchased from Ford Performance Solutions, a California-based company that had been started by James Lawrence (who would go on to work for 5.0&SF magazine and later found the NMRA). With those two additions, and still on street tires, the car was good for 12.90s at more than 111 mph. Jeff continued to enjoy the car, taking advantage of the dual-purpose flexibility of a well-built street machine.

By 1996, the blower wars were heating up. The established king, the Paxton was on its way back to the design table to await the coming Novi. Meanwhile, Vortech and the upstart ATI-ProCharger companies were battling it out on dragstrips across the country in an attempt to lay claim to the lucrative street-kit market. That feud lives on to this day, but in 1996 a new player entered the game.

The blower was called the Powerdyne, and it looked similar to all the others. But the manufacturer went after the affordable-and-easy install market with a unique Kevlar-belt design promised to stay intact for thousands of miles, while adding good power without all the noise of a gear-driven system. It didn't have any external oil lines, which eased installation, and it was value-priced at around $1,000 less than the competition. Initial magazine testing of the new Powerdyne was good, and even Ford Racing Performance Parts began offering the blower with its own labeling. It is still sold through FRPP to this day.

Well, Jeff had to have one of the blowers. He actually bought two-one for his car and one for his brother-in-law-who, surprise, had bought another 5.0 Mustang. For $2,100 Jeff got a 6-psi base kit with polished BD-11 head unit. He installed the kit himself with an optional bypass valve and a Boost Master inlet pipe, which is no longer manufactured. As promised, the Powerdyne blower picked up the power level big time, with Jeff gaining an honest 100 rear-wheel horsepower.

Since that initial install, Jeff has spent 30,000 miles pounding the crap out of this thing. We're happy to report the Powerdyne is still ticking away. It has survived a pair of blown head gaskets and regular doses of street racing. The Powerdyne has even survived one of Jeff's more abusive experiments, when adding nitrous on top of a centrifugal supercharger was all the rage. Just to make this clear, Jeff had all this rock-and-roll going on under the hood without adding an Extender or a custom chip. He has never taken advantage of those modern-day tuning aids, and he's quite content to stick with the stock A9L computer, a timing light, and a boost timing retard.

So here we are in 2004, and Jeff's old-school combination is still kicking butt and taking names. He added his own custom paint and made the car much more unique, but if you look real close, it's 1996 all over again. If you've read the spec box on this baby, and you're thinking about how close this LX is to a Real Street combination, you're reading our minds.