Ford Mustang Boss 350 V-10

Who says a V-8 is the only engine choice for an affordable car that runs 0-60 mph in under 4.5 seconds? Well, nearly any American powertrain engineer will, though the folks at Mitsubishi and Subaru have had a lot to say about that lately. But what would you get if you started with one company's tried-and-true 4.6-liter/305-horsepower DOHC V-8 residing in a used-up test car destined for the crusher, then added a vivid imagination, some serious know-how, a deep parts bin, a stray company credit card, a tanker load of midnight oil, and, oh yeah, two extra cylinders?

Answer: one of the quickest Mustangs ever built within the walls of Ford Motor Company.

If you do the math, this all-aluminum, DOHC V-10 based on the current Modular 4.6 comes out to be just a smidgen under 351 cubic inches. That's why this silver rocket-launcher proudly and appropriately wears Boss 351 decals in the best '71 Mustang tradition. On a chassis dynamometer, its clandestine motor is said to deliver 430 horsepower and 405 lb-ft of torque to the rear wheels. Given the instrumented results from a late-evening test session, as well as the pair of long black tire stripes we left behind, we have no reason to doubt those numbers.

This Xstang and its V-10 engine are so secret and politically charged that the advanced-powertrain engineers and the Ford (in this case, not so) public-relations person who slipped us onto the company's remote Romeo, Michigan, proving ground insisted they remain anonymous. That's not to say Ford brass is completely unaware that this car and engine were built.

According to these same sources, Chris Theodore, vice president of North American product development; J Mays, vice president of design; Neil Ressler, retired Ford Motor Co. chief technical officer (now consulting on the GT project); and even William Clay Ford Jr., chairman and CEO, have all experienced a dose of eyeball-flattening V-10 thrust (Bill Ford's enthusiastic comment is too colorful to quote here). And J Mays liked this engine configuration so much he wrapped a whole car around it. Mays demonstrated Ford's future-sedan design vocabulary with the 427 Concept, which appeared at the North American International Automobile Show in Detroit this past January. That sedan's V-10 was a rumbling 7.0-liter DOHC design running high-flow Cobra-R-based cylinder heads.

Why did a handful of rogue engineers at Ford Powertrain build these V-10 engines? Simple: They're car freaks, just like us. "You could call it an unfunded research project," offers one of the covert operators, "which can get expensive when you're on your third T56 manual trans, fifth clutch, second nine-inch rear axle, and third set of rear tires."