2002 Mustang GT: Power on a budget

Thank you very much for all of your guys' help. And thank you admin, that article is also helping me out. I will let you guys know what I'm going to do, and I'm sure I'll have questions along the way.

Best bang for the $$$$$$$ is gears.

Depends on the cost of the install. If you can do it yourself, then yeah it probably is the best bang-for-the-buck.

However, a 100 shot is still hard to match up to.

I do agree that gears are a great performance upgrade, but it's best to know what direction is going to be taken with the car when making gear selection (so you do not have to change them out later). Is it going to be drag race oriented? Naturally aspirated, nitrous'ed, and supercharged mod motors like a lot of gear...especially with an automatic. A turbo car will prefer less gearing.

I also highly recommend using FRPP brand gears, as it has been my experience that they are more quiet.

If you are going w/ gears, it seems that the best choice are 4.10 or 3.90. However, if a lot of highway driving is a fact of life, 3.73.

I totally agree and in reading the FM article on ported head and cam install on a 4.6L SOHC GT,I would say for a shade over $3,500 you could put on a good blower kit and a good cat-back exhaust.

The number seems large, but trust me power does not come cheaply. You can try to find a used kit on Ebay to reduce your cost, but do not cut corners, you'll end up spending more money.

Personally I would run supercharger kit I could get on the cheap. If you look HARD you can find them for around $2700.

Then put on a good cat-back, personally I don't like Flowmaster anything, but if you like it, more power to ya.

Aftercooling is excellent, some years ago at a dyno day in Gardena, there was a '91 GT with a Vortech aftercooled kit, shorties, 2.5" cat-back, stock cam and stock everything else.

He put down over 405hp and well over 400+lbs of torque.

Increasing your power by over 60% is worth the extra cost to do it right the first time.

If you can spare the time to work a part-time job, do it.

Combine that with a set of frame connectors, some sticky tires and maybe a bit of gear and you got a pretty fast car.

Though you still got some work to do to catch my SRT-4 that runs 12.70's currently on the stock turbo and I already have Stage 3R with Toys in a box ready to put on whenever I feel like it....

Forget the power adders. If you want to spend that kind of money, drop in a 5.4. The horsepower may not be worth it but the torque will destroy anything. Plus, you can opt for a $600 one out of a wrecked truck/van, add adaptor plates, PI intake, and mild cam and you're already looking at a strong engine. Add ported heads, hot street cam, headers (custom fabbed), and forged internals and you are making the same power as a mild super charger but with tons of low end torque. Not only that, what every you do to it, you get a better return in power.