We don't have emissions in NH either, but you do have to have cats installed as part of the sticker inspection check. They just look under to see if they're there. Now if you could get off road pipes that have fake cats on it, that would be sweet.

 

Not quite sure what you find "odd" about it, though it is somewhat different than the current setup, which isn't necessarily bad.

Indeed, just from eyeballing it, it looks to be quite a good design right out of the box: single cats up close to the motor for faster lightoff and more efficiency (motor can be better tuned for power rather than towards placating EPA), pretty straight runs for the piping and hopefully, nice, efficient and good sounding mufflers out back. The headers look to be very nice to just by eyeballing them.

My guess is that the '05 exhaust setup is going to be a lot better out of the box than the current one. The down side, if you can really call it that, is that aftermarket exhausts might not realize the same HP gains as the setup is so good to begin with. But that's more of a downside for the aftermarket manufacturers than for the Stang owners.

As for sound quality, Ford indicates its spending a lot of attention to this, as Pontiac did with the GTO, and if initial reports are any indication, it does sound very good on the prototypes now circulating the car show circuit.

 

We don't have emissions in NH either, but you do have to have cats installed as part of the sticker inspection check. They just look under to see if they're there. Now if you could get off road pipes that have fake cats on it, that would be sweet. [/b][/quote]
This is WAY OT, but the previous post reminded me of something that happened to a friend of mine. He was coming home from his girlfriend's house about 3am on a Sunday morning. He makes a turn on to one of the main roads in town by the hospital and nails it - he's running a Bassani O/R X-pipe and Bassani cat-back with no baffles so his stuff is insanely loud at WOT. So as he's making the turn, he nails it as he's going past the hospital. He gets about a mile down the road and sees a cop's lights in his rear view. He pulls over and shuts the car off. Cop goes, "You know, I was gonna over look the speeding, but I thought the world was coming to an end when you passed the hospital. Start it up." So he fires it up, and the cop goes around to the back and looks underneath it. Cop goes to him, "Hmmm...looks pretty stock to me. I guess that's the way they come from "SVT" (he said it like he had no idea what SVT was), huh?" My friend said, "Yes sir, they do." He got a warning B) . So any way, back to the topic

 

I was one of the people that heard the Ford rep say during the tech session that the mufflers were designed so that it will be easy to swap them out without having to buy a whole catback. They easily disconnect at those band clamps. He also said that the entire system IS 2.5" mandrel bent, instead of the older 2.25" crappy bent pipe. They're giving us our mods WITH the car for once!

 

It has an H-pipe stock. I cant see getting more then 5hp by changing cats, a lot of it is more of an illusion. High flow mufflers may give a few, but I probably wont bother this time around, after 5 stangs with exhaust work, It doesnt look like it needs much. It already has an exact copy of the FRPP hi-flow manifolds too.

 

We don't have emissions in NH either, but you do have to have cats installed as part of the sticker inspection check. They just look under to see if they're there. Now if you could get off road pipes that have fake cats on it, that would be sweet. [/b][/quote]
You will LOOSE power with an off-road pipe unless you run 15+ psi of boost on a modular.

 

Sounds like all I need to get is a Flowmaster cat-back then!

We'll see what comes availiable a year from now. I didn't realize that it comes stock with 2.5" mandrel bent!

 

Would you mind elaborating? What was the "tech session"?