It happens to most of us, once you buy a performance car; you just want to get more power and even more performance out of your new ride. Well take a look at what happened to Marc Sorger after he bought his brand new Mustang GT in 2008 as his everyday street car. Like many enthusiasts he quickly started modifying his Mustang and before long it was supercharged with a blown 4.6-liter V-8 engine pushing out 724 horsepower at the wheels. It didn't take long for him to want to take his new baby to NASA HPDE track days but he quickly learned after about five laps or so that the engine would start to overheat loose power and start to get dangerously close to leaning out. It wasn't getting enough cool air to breathe properly with all that power producing so much heat.
So what do you do when you want to go all out racing with NASA American Iron? Forget fixing your engine and supercharger cooling issue, you just dump the engine and drop in an ex Mark Martin 358 cubic inch V-8 NASCAR Cup Car engine under the hood.
But you can't just drop a NASCAR race car engine in a Mustang and bolt up the stock powertrain. So Marc installed a TEX Racing T101A four-speed clutch less transmission and drive shaft from Martin's race car. The intake, cam, and carburetor have all been switched to make the car more road course friendly.
Whiteline Flatout provided their full suspension package, including the watts link and anti-dive kit while Marc switched out the rear axles and gears with a much needed racing differential, rear axles, and high ratio ring and pinion gears.
As it currently sits the car has about 817 horsepower at the flywheel when redlining of 8,500 rpm, but that's before final tuning and calibrations. In the end Marc and his team are expecting to have 850 horsepower at the crank.
The end goal is to have a car that is competitive in the NASA American Iron Extreme Class, which from what we know doesn't seem like it'll be an issue. But what's even more interesting is that the car is still “street legal”, licensed, and insured although we really don’t think it would pass a SMOG test in California. We bet if he drives this race car to the grocery store, he will pick up more than the occasional glance from passing pedestrians, not to mention the envy of other drivers. He will probably grab the attention of a cruising police patrol car who maybe interested in challenging the street legality of this Extreme Performance Mustang. Fact is we are all just jealous we don’t have one in our garage to play with this memorial day weekend!
