The life and times of my 71 maverick

Is there a science to the shape?

 

ya im not a big fan of the look of the new one. i wasnt a big fan of the look of the old one either.
the d shape is to give leg clearance. not necessarily needed but a little helpful to me. when i race i move my seat up about 3" (im 6'2"). this lets me get better leverage on the steering wheel and on the pedals but it is a bit cramped for getting in and out of a race seat with the wheel that close. i really wanted suede for a good grip. i find my hands get a bit sweaty racing and am afraid of slipping on the leather grip of the old wheel.
my first impression of driving with the d shape wheel is that it gives a a lot more grip and the corners of the d shape give a stronger point to grab and turn.
ideally i would like the wheel round with suede all the way around with the same spoke lay out as the d shaped wheel but grant didnt offer a wheel like that. its just 5 litte bolts to change out the wheel so its not like a major thing to change.

 

Hi everybody. Its been a while!
I have done a lot of racing with this Maverick but very little changes till recently.
I just got rid of the love it or hate it front spoiler. It lost a plowing effort with a parking lot drainage ditch that was in a shut down area at an autocross practice course a few weeks ago. It was damaged beyond any repair effort I wanted to do. So I cobbled up a splitter with stuff I found in the shop and at home. Im sure its going to be a love it or hate thing also. All I know is that it makes WAY more downforce than the air dam ever did! Here's the pics of the spliter






Also, I had already put a rear spoiler on the car. It really balanced the car with the air dam. Once I added the splitter, I lost the balance. So now I need to increase the rear down force. I am doing 2 things to do this. I am installing vortex generators by air tab on the roof. (Mary Pozi uses them so they a have to be effective!) Then Im making a new rear spoiler that will be height adjustable to hopefully be able get the car balanced again.

 

Glad to see you are enjoying the car and learning how to make it get the most out of it. Do you still have the Comrick

 

I do still have it. I have done almost nothing to it. I have been have a great time with the maverick and leaning what all I want to do to the comrick. I keep wanting to major suspension stuff to the Maverick but then remind myself, I need to do them to the Comrick. I think I'm close to having the full package I want to build into the Comrick figured out.

 

It been a minute since I have updated this!!! I have done a lot with the car since 2018!!! Lets see.....

I now have 18x10.5 wheels all the way around with 295/30-18 tires. To do this, I had to adapt gm drop spindles to get the wheel to go over the the upper ball joint. I did roll the fender lips and pushed them out with a port a power. In the rear I had to massage the inner fenders a bit to stop some rubbing.

End of last year I put Holley Terminator X fuel injection on. I took an Explorer intake and ported it. I cut the plenum open and knocked 2" out of the runner length to raise its rpm power band. The motor dynoed to the tire 372 hp and 410 tq.

I have taken the carbon fiber hood off and made a heat extractor hood. I don't have any pics on line that I can link to. I'll have to do that later.

I had one of the spindles break on me during an autocross last may. The snout snapped off the up right. The scary thing was I was doing a track day the previous weekend and hitting speeds over 110 and braking as hard as possible into turns. It could have been bad if it broke there. When it broke at the autocross, the brake caliper kept the wheel in the wheel well but the tie rod ground on the wheel. The company that made the spindel refunded me the spindle cost but no other damage compensation. I changed to a hub bearing type spindle and put C7 corvette hubs in that I machined for ford pattern. I also switched from my cobra R Brembos to Wilwood brakes that work with the vett style spindle.

My TCP control arms were not holding up well to all the racing. I built all new arms. I extended them 1" to get better scrub radius. I also lowered the upper arms inner pivot point to 2" below stock to get a good camber gain.

I built an offset 3 link coilover for the rear suspension. That really made the car a lot more precise in its handling.

This summer I had a two month break between races. I have been sitting on new pistons for years to bump the 331 from 8.7 to 1 compression to 10.7 to 1. I plan on running both 91 octane and e85 fuel. I added a flex fuel sensor to the terminator x and it will be able to self adjust the tune to the fuel. When on the road course during a 90+ day, it would keep building heat in the motor and got to 225. So the plan for the compression bump is, MORE POWER!!!! and running E85 will run cooler than gas. So the first engine shop I had coordinated with to do the machining, wasn't ready when I had pulled the motor. I waited 3 weeks for them and nothing. All they had to do was bore the block and balance the rotating assembly. So I went to another machine shop. Well long story shortened a little bit, I finally got my motor parts back last friday (9/17/2021). I missed two races with my car. I put the motor together and back in the car last weekend. I have been driving and tuning the motor to and from work all week. It feels stronger. It pulls in the low rpms where before it would stumble. The tune is using about 10% less fuel than the low compression motor used. So the cost increase of 91 is offset by the efficiency increase.

Here is a video from Sunday of the motor idling after I got it started.

This is from my youtube channel and you can see more videos mostly of the car autocrossing and some road course.

 

It sounds great, are those still the magnaflow mufflers?

 

Yes. 2 1/2 with x pipe from the headers to the end of the tail pipes.

 

Has a nice mellow idle and a beautiful growl under load!

 

Very cool car, sounds like you're having a blast driving it. I'd be interested in knowing more about a couple of aspects of your car.

First is the modified Exploder intake. I've looked at all different versions of the 5.0 EFI intakes and am disappointed with the variety and price. All the aftermarket intakes cost a ton, and the stock runners are sooo long! The stock manifolds for GT40 and GT40p heads seem to have decent airflow until you spin it really hard, but the runners are a mismatch for a 6,000-6,500rpm engine.

The other is the spindles you've adapted, and what all is involved in that. What did you use, and how did they have to be modified to work on your car? Do they use shorter steering arms? That would be nice to help quicken the steering of any Falcon-chassis Ford, but you can't do that on a stock spindle. Plus the advantages of better bearing technology.

 

My intake runs out of rpm around 5700 rpm, but it made 20 more horsepower over the carbed performer rpm set up it replaced. It also gave me the low end power I was lacking with the carb for pulling out of turns when autocrossing. I plan doing another upper intake with shorter runners. Probably fabricate or buy an old school bread box type upper for the lower. I would like to not lose the low end but get another 1000 rpm of top end. I know thats not how it works but one can dream. I plan on using this upper for autocross and the short runner dream intake for road course. Its really easy to swap upper intakes so its worth the effort. For comparison, a friend has a 347 with same heads, a little less cam, and the Holley system max intake. My motor pulls way harder on a autocross than his does. He aways comments on it when he rides with me. Ive driven his and prefer my power band.

The current spindles I used are CPP's AFX spindles. They have a drop version that was supposed to be out this month, but I am not sure if they are. I will probably switch to the drop ones. I had to ream the upper ball joint hole to the ford ball joint taper and ream it as deep as possible to get the top of the ball joint under the rim lip. this is where the drop spindle version would be great. On the bottom I use a 1" tall ball joint to get more camber gain. My control arms are made with chrysler style screw in ball joints. That gives me lots of options for stud tapers and lengths. Using the GM afx style spindles requires the upper control arms to be longer than Fords because the SAE or KAI angle is less.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

 

First off. That engine sounds terrific and the car is just awesome!!!
Secondly: The Explorer intake is actually a really good move and porting it helps even more as does shortening the runners. What cam are you running in that bad boy?

Just as a comparison this manifold flows just a tad better than the GT-40 manifold does and seems to be on par with the Cobra intake.

 

Thank you!
Its a TFS cam. I call it stage 3, but TFS does not refer to them that way anymore. The real magic of the motor is the AFR heads. These heads make power and efficiency like no other ford head Ive had experience with. I do plan on doing a shorter runner upper intake and will do dyno testing. Ill try to share the results here whenever I get around to it.

 

Dang brutha. Sound like you've got one heckuva engine going on there. Your cam looks like has a 3200-6800 rpm range, your heads are a great choice and it will definitely help to have your compression ratio up there at 10.7:1. Honestly it may sound like your intake is indeed holding the show up some. If I can offer a friendly suggestion, it looks like this intake kit will take you to where you want to be in your cams operating range up to 6500 rpm.

https://www.summitracing.com/parts/TFS-515B0002

 

Just so I know this is the cam you're using and that we're on the same page

Is this the one? https://treperformance.com/i-654-tf... Cam Track Max Trick Flow Trickflow | $264.95