The guys over at Team Z Motorsports in Detroit are keeping the classic art of hot-rodding alive with a modem twist. The team plans to take one of Ford’s smallest cars, the Foxbody Mustang, and implant it with Ford’s largest modern V8 the all-new 7.3-liter Godzilla V8. Although cramming a large engine into a small car is a familiar recipe, the new ingredients make this an interesting project as the 7.3-liter Godzilla V8 is proving to have a lot of performance potential.
Brian Wolfe is a lifelong Mustang racer and former Ford engineer who was at one point the head of Ford Racing Technology among other impressive titles. His intimate knowledge of Ford engineering and passion for building race cars lead him to take on this latest project with the help of Dave Zimmerman, owner of Team Z Motorsports. Cramming a Godzilla V8 into a Foxbody racecar is a great way to test the limits of what’s possible with Ford’s new robust engine right from their F-250.
The Ford Godzilla V8 is a 7.3-liter pushrod V8 engine designed to be durable for an extended period of intense use in a work truck application. This robust design is the perfect platform to build a performance engine since the Godzilla V8 arrives over-engineered from the factory. In the F-250 the Godzilla V8 produces 430 horsepower and 475 lb-ft of torque.
On the bench dyno with light mods, from Team Z Motorsports, the 7.3 produced around 600 horsepower. In its latest iteration with a full build for an eventual boosted application, the Godzilla V8 made an impressive 790 horsepower. We’re excited to see how much power this engine makes once they run it with the 3.0-liter Whipple supercharger that it was built for. Estimates stand around 1600 horsepower which is almost quadruple it’s the factory power rating.
