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I knew I shoulda kept my 82!

Fatguy

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Did you not read? I was there when they came out. I had multiple friends who had them. Fear? Yeah - driving them in the rain would inspire fear. They were fast for the time they came out and what they were - but they weren't unbeatable or as fast as you remember.

"Other performance cars found a reason to get off the street when you showed up."

I literally LOL'd at that. I guess we had different upbringings. Anything close to stock and off the lot was never feared. I had a 10 second '67 Chevelle that I built pay check by pay check in high school - and that was when a 10 second car you could drive on the street was actually kinda rare. Hell now you can buy a new Vette, and listen to tunes while running 10's with the dealer tags still on it.

True like the an RX7 and on and on... But whatever. I did know two guys who had Grand Nationals. One guy replaced his tranny with an Art Carr transmission and but took it or the strip. The other guy babied it but his wife drove it like a maniac and was always breaking the rear axle...


BTW: Location means something. Even the way we named stuff seems to vary but we never knew as that was pre-internet and everyone was on their own...



Oh yah - I totaled my first 5.0 in the rain. I blame the Goodyear Gatorbacks. Second 5.0 had them immediately removed and replaced with Pirelli snow tires till I got my mojo back and I drove that baby for 18 years.
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HoosierDaddy

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Kicking myself for selling my '89. I think it qualifies as a Saleen on Craigs List. Saleen ordered more from Ford than he could get orders for. Maybe it was always that way, but back then he ordered finished cars and converted them. Anyway, he had to cancel some after the Window stickers were in the system. Those cars were diverted to other dealers. So my '89 had Saleen as the ordering "dealer" on the Window sticker.
 
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WildHorse

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Remember guys that the 1987/1988/1989 cars were some of the fastest cars on the road
And today my 17 GT rapes my buddies 89 5.oh with trickflow heads, trickflow intake, 10:1 cr, 1/7/8 full length headers, BIG comp cam, etc., on those
mean Mexican streets. Nevermind the road courses.. he's just a spec in my rearview.
 

Acehole

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And today my 17 GT rapes my buddies 89 5.oh with trickflow heads, trickflow intake, 10:1 cr, 1/7/8 full length headers, BIG comp cam, etc., on those
mean Mexican streets. Nevermind the road courses.. he's just a spec in my rearview.
And we all know a buddy with a friend with a cousin who has a fox that can beat your new car at both and dont have close to 30k into them. There is always a bigger fish in the pond. The 550 is a great car and great platform and lightyears better then oem fox, but the aftermarket support for a fox makes it a good car to learn with and make fast and competitive. If i wanted to buy fast I would have bought a vette wearing my members only jacket.
 
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WildHorse

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And we all know a buddy with a friend with a cousin who has a fox that can beat your new car at both and dont have close to 30k into them. There is always a bigger fish in the pond. The 550 is a great car and great platform and lightyears better then oem fox, but the aftermarket support for a fox makes it a good car to learn with and make fast and competitive. If i wanted to buy fast I would have bought a vette wearing my members only jacket.
Point being it'll take ALOT more then what I listed for any fox body to be competitive with a S550. $30k would be a average start.
 

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Hack

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I owned a lot of different Fox Mustangs. I remember one I bought for $400. Yes it was crappy/rusty, but it had a V8 and a stick. I think I drove that thing for more than a year before I decided that the rot had progressed too far and it was dangerous. I dropped the 302 from that car into my '70 convertible after I scrapped it. I also owned an '83 GT rust free original California car I bought for $750 because the PO routed the clutch cable wrong and he/his mechanic couldn't figure out how to fix it. That car ended up with a '93 Cobra-ish 302 and a Tremec 3550 + Maximum Motorsports rear suspension.

I swore off them, though. I liked them when they were cheap and common, but now they are starting to be "collectible". Who wants a 200 HP collectible Mustang? Not me. IMO they were decent once most of the original parts were swapped out, but the suspension and brakes were enough of a weakness that they aren't the safest if driven on the road with modern cars. They always felt fast because the brakes and suspension were so crappy.
 

ctandc72

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Picked up this little troublemaker early 2018, as a walk down memory lane. What a nightmare. I shoulda waited for a 2.3 or 5.0 to come available, as the paperweight 3.3 in this car was just that...a paperweight. I lost my ass getting rid of this thing, after dumping thousands into it getting it running right, replacing the A/C, wheels, tires, brakes....etc. Never again will I walk down the old American Iron road.


1982.JPG
Well to be fair, that model wasn't a high performance model of the Fox Body run. Everything was faster in our memories. I'm old enough to remember a lot of muscle cars from the 60's and 70's and they weren't as fast as most people think they were - stock that is. I miss the styling on a lot of the older stuff, but the list of stuff I DO NOT miss is much longer.

Things almost always seem better with age. I see people refer to Muncie Rockcrushers all the time. No thanks. I broke so many Muncie's in my Chevelle that replacing blocker rings and synchros was something I could do in the parking lot.

4.11 gears in a street tire GM A-Body with a 4 speed wasn't practical at all. Even with premium leaded at less than a buck a gallon that thing sucked it down like an addict.

Cork gaskets? Tolerances all over the place? Bias ply tires that hooked about as well as black ice, solid lifters that needed adjusting every time you revved it hard, drum brakes - even worse non power drum brakes. Adjusting points.

No thanks.

Modern suspension, drivetrain and accessories in a classic body? Yes please.
 

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I've loved the Fox since I was 10, because my sister bought one exactly like the one above, except with the 2.3, in 1980. This purchase was literally a walk down memory lane....or my mid-life crisis, I don't know which. I flew to Nashville and drove it home, if you can think of anything crazier than that. This was before anything on it was fixed, including the ventilation, which was stuck on defog, without a functioning A/C compressor. Little did I know that the carburetor was disintegrating from the inside out as I drove, and the front main seal was the source of the oil streaming down the outside of the pan. (I thought it burned 2 quarts of oil during the trip.....nope.) I was damn lucky to make it home.

A love of cars will make you do insane things. But they can also teach you important lessons, #1 being that you need a savings account much larger than mine to bring one of these dinosaurs back to life. It was a 1982 with 65,000 original miles, and despite looking fantastic and only having surface rust on the underside running gear, it needed almost EVERYTHING you can imagine. Never again. I sold it to someone who planned to transplant a Coyote into it, which is exactly what that car needed. A big budget.

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Acehole

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Point being it'll take ALOT more then what I listed for any fox body to be competitive with a S550. $30k would be a average start.
Not necessarly. The maximum motorsports maximum grip box ( What a majority of winning guys in the NASA American Iron class run) is around 5300 bucks last I remember then wheels tires brakes youll have maybe another 4k into a car that will certainly outhandle a stock s550 any day of the week. Go wild on the bullet toss 5k into that for AFR heads nice 11:1 rotating assembly machine work etc will make 430 wheel pretty safely NA. and 4k for a trans and gears. You would be under 20k for a Street machine!

Or toss a chineese turbo kit on it till you spit rods out for 5k and out run a s550.

But In the end when you hit a wall in the fox you have a 93 percent chance of being spit out of the car like a bottle rocket and loose 20k! Cant get that out of a s550!:cwl:

(Im agreeing the s550 is a better safer more reliable car)
 

1Bad_ShelbyR

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Here’s one for ya......

1993 LX 5.0 Mustang

Never winter driven

Black / Black interior

40,000 original miles

5 speed

Vortech “S” Trim

3.73 rear gears
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