We haven’t posted in the 21st Century Fox’s forum build thread for three months, but we’ve been busy working on this 1988 Mustang – mostly tackling a V8 swap, along with a ton of other upgrades. We’re doing all of this work so we can get a more realistic “baseline track test” in this car before we tackle much needed suspension upgrades, which will include all new creations from Vorshlag. And it ended up being pretty dang light for a full interior street car at 2732 pounds!
In the latest round of work we tackled a whole new cooling system to connect the 6.3L built LS V8 engine to the rest of the chassis, including this massive How radiator shown above. This work includes custom radiator hoses, heater hoses, remote coolant reservoir, steam vents and more. This update also covers the intake manifold, throttle body, fuel rails, injects, and remove ignition coil mounting.
The V8 required a whole new exhaust system and we opted to build a dual 3″ stainless setup with classic Flowmaster series 40 mufflers. This connects to the (temporary) log manifolds and has provisions for twin Wideband O2 sensors, which will be sending data to the Link G4X fuel injection system.
After the exhaust was finished we could then tackle the new fuel line system. This forum update shows the dual 1/2″ aluminum hard lines and Fragola -8 AN flex lines running the length of the chassis and into the engine bay, where the regulator and fuel rails take over. The conversion to fully hydraulic clutch actuation is also covered.
The dash was out for a long period while the entire wiring system was upgrade, going from the NOCO 5 pound Lithium battery underhood to the stock fuse box, alternator, starter, and auxiliary fuse / relay system that came with the Link ECU. In the latest update we show the cleaned and weighed dash going back in as well as some lightweight carpet, shifter, seats and belts.
Last up is the EFI system wiring and base map tuning, which was tackled in-house with some help form Link ECU tech support. We got the engine fired up in late December 2025, verified data on the Link software, and even managed to get the factory dash and gauges to work. We did this with a duplicate set of sensors as well as a heavily modified speedometer cable assembly. You can read about all of this and more on our forum. Next time we post about the car will be after the next track test and we will hopefully, finally be offering some real suspension solutions for the Fox chassis!