ITS Ford Mustang(s) Build - Stripper Stang Part II

[Ron Earp]

Development heavily continues over in camp stang. The new rear end geometry is working out extremely well and along with our properly re-valved shocks, plus a lot of testing, we’ve really improved our cornering and corner exits. We’re learning that the car is more sensitive to ride height than we initially thought. It is more complicated that stated, but it is sort of where 11-12mm in ride height can make the difference between a properly handling car and one with understeer. When it is spot on though the car handles precisely, with a slight tendency to oversteer, and is a great point and squirt machine.

Over the past couple of months we’ve been working with Burns Stainless and a header builder, Calvin Elston. We knew that our exhaust had some shortcomings and Calvin and Vince have conspired to design a system that would be our final exhaust design. So, after one of our race weekends I dropped the car off at the shop and waited about four weeks for the final product, and wow is that a nice exhaust system he put together. Exhaust V3.0 is really well done from flanges to tail pipe. There are a number of aspects about it that are greatly improved over the earlier headers; water jet flanges that precisely match the ports, lots of upper roof port flow, equal length to within 0.5", three newly sized collectors, newly sized primaries and steps, anti-reversion collector for the final section, and all made out of stainless that might also drop some weight.










It's hard to see from the pictures, but they are elegantly done although the equal length requirement means it's really tight in the engine bay now. There's a damn good reason why most header systems for vee motors, or long inline six engines, aren't equal length. The pipes just take up too much underhood real estate and are hard to manage.

It'll be dynoed to determine improvements, but out of the box one thing that is very noticeable is the sound. The motor sounds much smoother, crisper, with a higher pitched exhaust note. Greatly diminished is the rumpty rumble low pitch frequency exhaust noise that very much characterized the engine from the get go. It's not the kick ass sound of an inline six Z or BMW, but it closer to that and much more of a smoother wail at RPM.