We were looking for a vehicle to run some races in NASA, the SCCA or possibly ChampCar and someone told me the Mustang was available. Since most of what we wanted to do was long-run endurance events, I knew that many original-style engines get really suspect when you’re beating on them at high RPM for long periods of time, plus fuel mileage it important so you can keep running longer, so we thought 4-cylinder power. We had a respectable engine builder involved in the NASCAR world here local to us and he built a killer 2.3L Ford 4-cylinder, but when I noticed a new EcoBoost 2.3 from Ford, which had undergone the torture testing of production and therefore proven itself, made a tad more power than our “race” engine, that became the engine of choice for the race car.

We bought it as a former NASA and SCCA rolling shell with a full cage and safety setup, a full Maximum Motorsports suspension, and dropped in a new Ecoboost and  a T-5 transmission, and that trans has proven to be the car’s weak link—they’re fine on the street but not capable of handling the stress of endurance racing and we’ve broken a few of them. We race it quite a bit in both 24 Hours of Lemons, ChampCar and Lucky Dog events and it’s dead-nuts reliable (except for the trans) and we’ve had luck with it.