Friday, 3 November 2017

Four-Eyed Fever: Goodguys Commissions a Beefy ’79 Fox Mustang

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November 3, 2017 at 12:00 pm by Davey G. Johnson | Photography by Davey G. Johnson

Back in the ’90s, the hot-rod set often called the Fox-body Ford Mustang, produced from 1979 to 1993, the modern ’55 Chevy. Given the plethora of machines built on the Fox platform and the abundance of speed parts available for its venerable Windsor V-8, playing mix and match with FoMoCo parts was as easy as building a Lego car. By the late ’80s, the notchback Mustang GTs and LXs had evolved into a pretty potent package for the era. Like the ’55 Chev decades earlier, they were cheap to pick up and easy to modify, and parts were plentiful. So we’ve seen plenty of worked-over later Fox Mustangs, but the earlier cars have often been denied the limelight. The Goodguys Rod & Custom Association figured it was time to change that.

For years, Goodguys had capped the model year of vehicles allowed entry into its shows at 1972. Muscle-car purists tend to decry anything built after that year as down on performance and less than classically styled. But 1972 was 45 years ago, classic muscle cars are often spendier to get into than later iron, and with shows like the ’80s-and-’90s themed Radwood popping up, snaring a new generation of enthusiasts demands newer machines. So Goodguys adjusted, raising its model-year cutoff to 1987. To celebrate the move, Goodguys dug up a clean, first-year Fox Mustang, relieved it of its turbocharged 2.3-liter four-cylinder, and stuffed in a 5.0-liter Ford Performance Aluminator crate engine.

Bathed in custom-mixed PPG Goodguys Gold paint, with a livery based on the style of the ’79 Indy Pace Car package, the Goolsby Customs-built Mustang sits low over a set of Forgeline wheels wearing 265/35R-18 Michelin Pilot Super Sports up front, with 345/30 R-19s out back. Torque is routed through a trusty and tried Ford nine-inch rear axle, while Baer brakes haul the thing down from terminal velocity.

It’s hard to make a Fox Mustang stand out after nearly four decades awash in the machines, but Goodguys managed the task with a bit of visual wit and an unorthodox choice of car—if one can in good conscience call any Fox-body Mustang an unorthodox choice. In any event, it caught our eye, and in a miasma of sensory overload like the SEMA show, that’s no mean feat.