How SVT Brought Out the Best in the Mustang
For decades, SVT has been busting out some of the baddest Mustangs to ever hit the highways including the SVT Cobra!
The creative minds at Donut Media have blessed us with an Up To Speed episode on our beloved SVT. Host James Pumphrey details the ins and outs of one of the best automotive divisions to ever come out of Detroit. So naturally, Mustang references were plentiful.
While it’s a shame the SVT name has diminished in recent years, the team has a long history of straight-up banging cars.
SVO Predecessor
As his final request before relinquishing control of Ford Motor Co., Henry Ford II tasked the manufacturer with reviving its racing heritage. Out of this request came SVO or Special Vehicle Operations.
SVO would be headed up by Michael Kranefuss, and the team got right to work on creating a new race car. Lead man Bob Riley designed what became a very unconventional race car for the IMSA GTP series.
What the team concocted was a front-engine turbocharged 1.7 Cosworth BDA-powered racer. Typically IMSA cars had the engines in the back. But SVO thought it might be nifty to have some sweet ground effects and use some science to win. It worked.
Sort of.
Ford finished first overall, in their IMSA debut, but… “Unfortunately, the 1.7- and upgraded 2.1-liter engines were hellishly unreliable…” shares Pumphrey “…and Ford only stayed in GTP racing for two seasons before pulling out the next year 1984. But not everything that came out of the GTP project was a failure.”
SVO went on to drop a 2.4 L turbocharged and intercooled engine into a stock Fox Body Mustang. This drastic change saw the SVO Mustang cut half of its cylinders but retain the same horsepower rating. That meant some serious weight reduction. Oh, and it was faster.
A dropped mid-engine concept car led to SVO’s final highlight. SVO had worked with Yamaha to develop a new high-revving engine for the concept. But after it was axed like French royalty, SVO needed somewhere to put the sweet new engine. The choice was obvious; the Taurus.
Wait… what?
Placing the SHO (Super High Output) engine in the Taurus proved to be a hit. But the tale of that legend is for another time. After a final project developing the SHO Ranger, SHO went through a metamorphosis of sorts, rebranding as SVT.
SVT in the ’90s
“Their first project,” says Pumphrey “would be sending off the Fox Body Mustang with a bang.” By this point, the 3rd-gen Mustang had been around for a long time. We’re talking fourteen years. The Fox Body was a teenager!
“SVT started with a stock Mustang GT, but switched out the cylinder heads for better flowing GT40 heads,” says Pumphrey “To improve shifting, a Borg-Warner T5 transmission was bolted on the back. They revised the suspension with KONI Shocks. Bolted on bigger brakes and threw on some sweet, sweet turbine-style wheels. They called it the SVT Cobra!”
Consequently, the SVT Cobra boasted a 0-60 of 5.9 seconds. Pretty freakin’ fast for a ’90s pony car.
Afterward, SVT renewed Ford’s focus on racing with the Cobra R. “This straight-up track toy was relieved of anything not meant for the track,” states Pumphrey “No radio. No AC. And no warranty.”
Not long after, a little thing called the SVT Lightning came along. “The Gen 2 lightning set the pace for SVTs run in the early 2000s. And SVT hit the new millennium ground running with one of the baddest, and I mean baddest, Mustangs ever concocted.”
The 1999 SVT Cobra came with a 4.6-liter V8, and independent rear suspension, which was a huge leap forward for the nameplate. But, owners soon discovered the Cobra was slower to 60 mph than the previous model. Not good.
Ford had claimed 320 hp, but the Cobra pushed out something like 285 to the wheels in reality. Soon, Ford recalled all 5,300 to fix the issue. The problem turned out to be the intake manifold and overly restrictive mufflers that differed in the production from design. As a result, model year 2000 saw no SVT Cobras, but we did get a little treat known simply as the Cobra R.
SVT in the 2000s
The Cobra R was sick. It sported a racing fuel cell, was stripped of all the creature comforts, and housed an naturally-aspirated 5.4-liter V8 with 385 HP and 385 lbs.-ft of torque. At the time of its release, it was the fastest Mustang ever with a top speed of 170 mph. However, Ford only made 300 of them.
The new heights of performance were all well and good, but by 2003 SVT was in a bind; the Mustang was flopping. So what did they do? They supercharged it and gave it way too many names. Thus, the Ford Mustang SVT Cobra Terminator was born.
The Cobra Terminator continued the ramped up performance and included the sickest paint job ever seen, dubbed MystiChrome.The special paint job celebrated 40 years of Mustang and saw an exclusive release of only 1,000 vehicles in 2004.
The last great act of SVT was to revive the legendary Ford GT. This was to commemorate the company’s 100th anniversary and Ford’s 40th anniversary of beating Ferrari at Le Mans. SVT produced a screaming aluminum block V8 for the GT, do justice to the timeless classic.
End of an Era
In 2006, Ford made a deal with Carroll Shelby and chose to rebrand the Cobra under the Shelby name. Since then, SVT has carried on with other projects such as the SVT Raptor. But, ultimately, even the Raptor line dropped the SVT badge.
The SVT badge has slowly begun to phase out. The query of the automotive prophet Pumphrey reverberates, “Will we ever see an SVT car again?” Unfortunately, it’s looking bleak.