Time for an update. I bought a Mustang!!! It's a 2008 Mustang GT with 5 speed manual and the 4.6L 3V engine. I bought it for $8800. After tax, registration and smog, it totaled about $9500. It's 100% stock, for now. I am the 2nd owner. The first owner, a lady, bought it off the showroom floor here in Utah and drove it about 131,000 miles. The last 4 years or so its gone less than 2,000 miles total and has sat parked in the KSL downtown Salt Lake City parking garage. Before that it spent its whole life in the garage. The paint is nice and shiny. I did test drive 2 other Mustangs, both blue, but they were rough around the edges and were going to be more work than I had planned. This was the first one I drove and I actually drove it here at my house and around my neighborhood. The owners were on their way through my town and they stopped by so I could test drive it. At that time, they were asking $10,000 and I was annoyed by the dent in the front passenger fender.
Here's some pics the day I brought it home, September 25, 2023.
Here it is parked next to my 2002 Subaru WRX. I ended up selling the WRX for $11,000 to the 16 year old across the street. It's his first car. And he's learning to drive stick on it! Very cool! It is pretty weird to hear the car and see it parked in their driveway.
The black leather interior is pristine! I've already put some conditioner/protectant on it to keep it nice! All the plastics, vinyl's and leathers were wiped down with the E303 protectant.
After the interior detail, a few days later I spent a couple hours cleaning up the engine bay. Here is a before and after view. So much better!
I also changed the oil! While it hadn't gone even 3,000 miles since the last oil change, it had been like 4 years. Yikes! Some fresh 5w-30 Valvoline Synthetic "High Mileage" oil and "Ford Motorsport" oem oil filter.
At some point in this first month, a few weeks ago, I removed the rear stock GT spoiler. It has 4 bolts, which are easy. The hard part is removing the thick adhesive tape that goes in between the trunk surface and the bottom mounting surface of the spoiler. It took like an hour of soaking and wiping the adhesive in some gold ol' Goo-B-Gone. Gave the trunk a coat of wax for good measure. I still haven't actually washed the car yet. Maybe today.
I've definitely been drafting up my modification plans. I've spent time researching what I want to do. Clearly my brother's red 2005 Mustang GT "Red Baron" has been the biggest inspiration to what I'm doing here by selling the WRX and getting a similar S197 generation Mustang GT. These 3v S197 Mustangs are such a performance bargain and are the best tribute to the 67-70 Mustang Fastbacks that raced in Trans Am road racing. They look the most like those classic Mustangs and have a great combination of modern and classic. They have all the things a modern car has, good brakes, safety, efficency and technology but it still has a manual transmission, a V8 with 300hp and the tried and true solid rear axle. The interior is one of my favorite parts of the S197 Mustang so far. Its a really nice place to be and looks cool with that double brow dashboard design. With a few modifications, these cars are very capable sports cars and coupled with the torquey and great sounding SOHC 3 valve per cylinder V8, they look and sound like a modern Trans Am car. So, that's the plan. Enhance what's there. Improve the suspension, add bigger brakes, wider wheels and tires and some very basic engine/power mods to better hear the V8 sounds and improve the throttle-by-wire throttle response with a tune.
Following in Red Baron's foot steps are some Rockauto.com 14" 4 piston Brembos. These are the bigger brakes used on the 2007-09 GT500s, as well as the 2011-14 Performance Pack GTs with Brembos or the 2012-13 Boss 302s brakes. These are a bolt on affair and cost me $289 shipped, for both the 2 front calipers in a nice gloss black paint and blank 14" rotors. The rotors were some kind of last in stock $12/rotor price. I ordered them and then asked for forgiveness. I still need to order up SS lines, fluid and pads, but I'll save about $900 or so by going this route. These are "remanufactured" calipers, but as you can see from the pics, they are like new.
Ok, so the Ford Racing Intake Manifold was an impulse purchase from the local KSL classifieds. It was $350 picked up about 15 minutes from my house. I thought, it looks great and will allow future modability down the road. The bummer is, rookie mistake, the guy didn't have the hardware and I assumed it would use stock manifold stuff. Wrong! I'm hoping I can get the hardware from Ford Performance? We'll see.
In following Brent and his Reno racer P51 Red Baron name for his Mustang, I too had to go with a P-51 themed name. I looked over various Reno racer P51's in silver, but for those who know, the best choice would have been the "Galloping Ghost", but yikes, if you know that story, we're not going there. That would be some bad karma right there! My car won't likely be to the racecar level that the Red Baron is, at least, not in the near term. So, I was looking at names that were classic WWII P51 names. I kept coming back to "OLD CROW". It started to stick and now that's its official name.
One idea is to have my wife do a vinyl masking of the words "OLD CROW" so I can paint the logo on the black brake calipers. That'd be pretty cool eh?!
So, that's it for this intro I think. Stage 1 of the parts will be getting ordered over the next little bit and will start to install those parts during the winter here in Utah.
No comments:
Post a Comment