Late last week UPR picked up a new show car that will be displayed at the NMRA and other race events we attend in 2010. Since it's first and foremost a show car to display our Billet parts we changed things up and went with a convertible with black interior and an automatic. The exterior is Kona Blue with a black convertible top. This will allow us to drop the top at events for a great view of the interior and the black interior will make the billet pieces jump out more.

Even though it's more show car than anything that doesn't mean we won't be playing with it to see what kind power we can get out of it. The dyno pulls were done on Mustang Dyno all between 180-200*. I'll have to update this with the exact numbers as I'm going off of memory but in stock form we made right around 256RWHP at peak in purely stock form. We then added an in house custom SCT tune with some timing and a few fuel adjustments to get the car right and picked up 15RWHP pretty much across the board with a final number of 271RWHP at peak.

After that was done we decided to see what we could do for a cold air kit over the stock cold air box that it comes with. We've seen claims of 26RWHP with a tune and JLT kit and one other non name brand making 18RWHP. We took an 2005 JLT kit that won't fit under the hood but still fit on the throttle body and made some tuning changes and the car only picked up 1RWHP after several pulls. The JLT set up wasn't making any power so we started to play around with some other set ups that were showing promise but were running out of time so we put the stock airbox back on. We found it interesting that most of the power was in the tune and cold air kit wasn't picking up any power. So far other dyno tests we've found show combined power gains with the tune and CAI.

Next with a total of 40 miles on the car we took it to the track. The cool thing with the Mustang dyno is you can do a simulated 1/4 run that resulted in a 13.40 @ 101 w/ 1.92 60 foot. I was rather doubtful the car would run that fast just because I've yet to see a stock auto cut that kind of 60 foot without gears or more power.

We made a total of 6 passes on the car, tried various launch techniques and the one that seemed to work the best was to hold the RPMs at 1200 and stab the gas. Hot lapping the car I was getting 14.20 @ 99MPH with 2.20-2.21 60 foots. Jeremy Martorella made a pass and went 14.08 @ 100.23 w/ 2.20 60 foot, which was the best pass of the night. At the time the DA was 1829' which corrected out to a 13.79 @ 102.26. We let the car cool for an hour and it got down to 188* coolant temp (it was very hot and humid out). I made another pass and went 14.10 @ 99.72 w/2.186 60 foot which was my best in the car. The DA at the time was 1742' which corrected to a 13.83 @ 101.64.

Pretty far off of the 13.40 the dyno showed but it is a heavy ass convertible automatic. Not too bad when you consider the old 2v convertibles were lucky to run sub 15 second passes in stock form.

Next up will be some exhaust work and testing some other air filters and MAF set ups to see if there is any room for improvement.

-Bill Putnam

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