The Alchemy of the Iron Chef Premise
Over the weekend was the drawing for a sweepstakes I had entered online (and of course, did not win)...it was from Ford Racing and the prize was a 7-liter V8 race car engine of the latest version.
I had no ready use for such a thing, but it was fun to brainstorm possibilities. What WOULD I do with such an engine? Did I have a tasty recipie for the Secret Ingredient?
Upgrading an existing vehicle is the most basic idea, of course. Mustang, T-Bird, Taurus, Crown Vic, Pickup, Lincoln Mark #, Cougar, whatevs. Sure. Plenty of project cars to be had. Heck, that Mach 1 across the street is still theoretically available.
Early Thirties "rat rod"? I know a local shop that can build one in their sleep.
Replica Cobra roadster or Shelby Mustang? That's practically a cliché for current kit cars. Repro bodies-in-white for Sixties Mustangs are almost a phone call away.
Spec racer? Late model? Road-legal NASCAR stocker? I know where to look for those too.
So where did I wind up going on my train of thought? GTs. Ford had two from my lifetime that I was interested in: the GT70 and the Mustang GTP. The former was a possible follow-on to the GT40 that Ford developed at the end of the Sixties but never put on the track. The latter was run in IMSA in the early 1980s...but never built with a V8 engine, although Roush Racing wanted to build such a machine. A replica of something that never was? A rewrite of motorsports history? Could I have gotten away with it?
I had no ready use for such a thing, but it was fun to brainstorm possibilities. What WOULD I do with such an engine? Did I have a tasty recipie for the Secret Ingredient?
Upgrading an existing vehicle is the most basic idea, of course. Mustang, T-Bird, Taurus, Crown Vic, Pickup, Lincoln Mark #, Cougar, whatevs. Sure. Plenty of project cars to be had. Heck, that Mach 1 across the street is still theoretically available.
Early Thirties "rat rod"? I know a local shop that can build one in their sleep.
Replica Cobra roadster or Shelby Mustang? That's practically a cliché for current kit cars. Repro bodies-in-white for Sixties Mustangs are almost a phone call away.
Spec racer? Late model? Road-legal NASCAR stocker? I know where to look for those too.
So where did I wind up going on my train of thought? GTs. Ford had two from my lifetime that I was interested in: the GT70 and the Mustang GTP. The former was a possible follow-on to the GT40 that Ford developed at the end of the Sixties but never put on the track. The latter was run in IMSA in the early 1980s...but never built with a V8 engine, although Roush Racing wanted to build such a machine. A replica of something that never was? A rewrite of motorsports history? Could I have gotten away with it?