Yes, it’s true that the new 5.0 Liter engine in the new Mustang GT is the worst kept secret of all time. I went to the press event a couple weeks ago, where in a very serious tone, Mark Fields, Ford’s best public speaker, told a room of 150 journalists that they couldn’t say peep about the new 2011 Mustang GT’s powerplant until today, December 28th. That embargo lasted exactly 1 hour, and was broken by basically everyone.
This site isn’t yet big enough to play the racing game with the major sites yet, so we try to focus on other things that people might be interested in. Like the story of the headers on the new 2011 Mustang GT.
For years, you couldn’t even call a factory exhaust manifold a “header,” and for good reason. They were heavy, restrictive, and ugly, and most certainly in the top five most upgraded parts of all time. In high school, I had a Mustang, and the exhaust manifolds were the first thing to go; i replaced them with some BBK jet-coated headers.
Ford needed to make big power out of the new 5.0′s engine, and in a very short amount of time. Plus, it seemed obvious to the engineering team that, if it was going to be done in the aftermarket, it may as well be done in-house and with a warranty. (For the record, Thanks. -MF) The engineers came up with a design, and when the first prototypes arrived from their [unnamed] supplier, they looked terrible. Instead of waiting for a new design to be prototyped, created in CAD, then plastic, then metal, one of the engineers simply went home over the weekend with a welder and some mandrel-bent pipe, and made the header in his garage. Come Monday morning, the dyno numbers didn’t lie, and the factory Mustang header was born. Hell hath frozen over, now maybe my mom will approve of my tattoos.
Improve your track times with Mustang headers from American Muscle.
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That’s great! I love stories where an innovative engineer beats out time wasting computer generation…
Good write up!
From an engineering standpoint that header is TERRIBLE. The flow mesh would cause back flow, the primaries are of unequal length and are likely not at the optimal volume.
have you ever seen the exhaust manifolds on an ’05-09 4.6L engine? by comparison, these things look like something off the space shuttle.