Top 5 Ford Crate Engines for both Street & Strip
Why buy from someone else when the best street/strip Ford crate engines come straight from the Blue Oval itself?
These days, those that want to stuff a brand new, hi-po engine in their Ford Mustang have a plethora of options to choose from. Many of those options come straight from Ford, so why bother looking elsewhere? Honestly, there’s just a comforting feeling that comes from buying Ford crate engines, mainly because we know that they’re put together by the manufacturer, which obviously knows a thing or two about them.
Thus, we thought it would be a good idea to put together a list of the top five Ford crate engines on sale today for both street and strip use. This might seem like an easy task on the surface, but truthfully, it wasn’t. Ford offers many intriguing crate engine options right now, and any one of them would be a great basis for a dual-purpose build. Regardless, here are our five favorites of the bunch.
1. Ford 7.3-Liter Godzilla V8
The Godzilla is a proper throwback for a newer engine, bringing back simple Blue Oval pushrod power to the masses. For that reason, it’s become an incredibly popular option in the new Super Duty pickups, but also among drag racers. Right out of the box, it’s fairly formidable with 430 horsepower and 475 pound-feet of torque at a lower RPM, and the block is made from beefy cast iron.
It’s still early, but more than one person has already swapped one of these bad boys into a Mustang, and we’ve seen them extracting serious power from the gas 7.3 with ease. If we had to put money on it, we’d wager that the Godzilla will soon be the most popular of all Ford crate engines, in fact.
2. Ford 5.2-liter Aluminator V8/5.0-Liter Coyote V8
The Aluminator and Coyote come from the same family tree, and you can’t go wrong in either case. We all know just how capable the latter is, as plenty of second- and third-gen Mustangs are cranking out 800-plus rear-wheel horsepower with ease with little more than a supercharger on top. In stock crate form, the 5.0 produces 460 horsepower and 420 pound-feet of torque.
The Coyote platform provides one of the easiest routes to high power, but if you want something more capable right out of the box, the Aluminator is just the ticket. Save for displacement, it’s similar to the Coyote in that it uses an aluminum block, but produces a more potent 580 horsepower and 445 pound-feet of torque straight from Ford.
