Fox Body Mustang - The Science Explained

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The Evolution of the Mustang: A Story of Change and Adaptation

As we take a look at two iconic models, it's hard not to wonder what changed over the years. The 1969 Mustang and the 1974 Mustang may seem like two similar cars, but beneath their sleek surfaces lies a story of adaptation and transformation.

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The emissions standards of the 1970s brought about significant changes in the automotive industry. New regulations were put in place, requiring car makers to drastically reduce ozone-depleting exhausts by 90%. This sudden shift in priorities had a profound impact on the design and functionality of cars.

What happened next was nothing short of remarkable. The once-buff pony of the Mustang gave way to a more subdued yet efficient machine. The modifications made to meet these new standards were not just cosmetic, but also structural and technological.

The 1974 Mustang is a testament to this transformation. Gone are the days of excessive emissions, replaced by a more streamlined approach to power and performance. This change was not just about compliance with regulations; it was about creating a better driving experience for car enthusiasts everywhere.

In conclusion, the story of the Mustang's evolution is one of adaptation and resilience in the face of changing circumstances. From its humble beginnings as a rebellious icon to its current status as a symbol of automotive innovation, the Mustang continues to captivate audiences with its unique blend of style and substance.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- This is a 1969 Mustangand this is a 1974 Mustang.What the heck happened?Well emissions standards happened.New emissions regulationsput in place during the 70smeant that car makers had to cut downon their ozone depleting exhausts by 90%.And when that happensyou go from buff pony to "My Little Pony".But the Fox-body,it got the Mustang back on track.It showed the worldthat you can make anall-American V8 sports carwhile still keeping the EPA happy.So how did Ford do it?How did they bring back the 5.0 badge,revive the Mustang,and keep the EPA off their back?Well today we're gonna look at three waysFord re-engineered their Stang,starting with itssurprisingly aerodynamic body,and then how they used70s computer technologyin the fabled 5.0,and lastly the misunderstoodand underappreciated catalytic converters.Don't cut those things off.They're actually pretty good.Let's go.(hip hop beat)Let me address the bigold elephant in the room.When you think about Fox-bodies,chance are you're notthinking about aerodynamics.You think of in-traffic burnies,"Menace To Society", and Florida.But in the late 70s Fordwas starting to experimentwith aerodynamics intheir production cars.And the reason was, well, they had to.When you're forced to cut emissionsthere's only a few ways thatyou can tackle that problemand one of the more obvious ones is,well, you make your car more aerodynamic.Fox-body was based on theplatform of the Ford Fairmontbut with a wheelbase thatwas five inches smallerto make the car more nimbleand more importantly lighter.Less weight means youburn less fuel to move itwhich means less emissions.And not only did theymake the car lighter,they slanted the front end backwardsand raised the cowl point of the hoodto give it more of a wedge front end.And that shape allowed the carto cut through the air better.And the purpose of all thatwas to have a drag coefficientthat was as low as possible.Now drag coefficient is a measurementof how much an object orshape is effected by a fluid.And like all great dimensionless numberswe can actually calculateit using the drag equation.I know school's out forsummer but stay with me, okay.Now the area is the surfacearea of the front of the car,the velocity is the speedat which you're moving at,and the fluid density in thiscase is the density of air,that's the fluid we're moving through.We're moving through air.You might know that.We're on a bunch of air right now.So if we were in a controlled environment,like, say, a wind tunnel,we could control the airdensity and the air speedand we can measure the drag force.That's the force pushingon the car due to air.And once we have all those numberswe can plug it into our equationand determine the car's drag coefficient.Now what does all any ofthat science math stuffhave to do with fuel economy?Well, the more drag there isthe harder the engine has to work.Pretty obvious, right?And as you acceleratethe air velocity hittingthat car increasesand the force pushing on the cargets exponentially stronger.Look at our drag equation.The V in our equation is squared.That means exponential.So even a little changein the shape of a carcan have a significant effect on drag.Now we've all stuckour hand out the windowto feel the air pushingour hand back, right.You feel more force on yourhand when it's shaped like thisrather like this.So you have a more aerodynamic car,the engine has to do less work,and that means it uses less fuel.Now in the case of the Fox-body,it's new shape withits bucketed headlightsinside that slanted grill,quarter window louvers,and that wedge-style hoodgot its drag coefficient down to 0.44.Which doesn't sound allthat great but at the timethat was the lowest dragof any American Ford car ever built.Now the Fox-body actuallyhad the same drag coefficientas Ford's Le Mans winning GT40.That's pretty cool becauseif you were to compare these two cars,nine out of 10 people would thinkthe GT40 would have alower coefficient of drag.But now maybe you'rethe one out of 10 personwho knows that they're the same.So that's the first way Ford tackledsome of these emissions problems,making the Stang slide through the airwith some curves on it.The next was some fancy techcalled electronic fuel injection.(jazzy hip hop beat)The 1986 Ford Mustang GTwas the first ever fuel injected Mustang.It used a computer that controlledthe amount of fuel beingsprayed into the injectors.That's what electronic fuel injection is.There's not a car out there todaybeing manufactured in2020 that's I know ofthat doesn't use EFI.If you know what throw itdown in the comments below.But before we can really explainhow Ford engineered EFI into the Fox-body,we have to look at whatthey were doing before.They were using carburetors.(gasps) No!Up until 1885 Ford had been using carbsfor getting fuel and airinto the Mustang's cylinders.And they had this engine,you may have heard of it,I don't know if you have, I have.It's called the 5.0.And it was the enginethat was going to bringback the horsepowerinto their pony car.Problem was theirexisting carburetor setupwasn't cutting it.Ford tuned the engine normally,it would be so bad on gas mileagethat you'd get hit withthis gas guzzler taxthat would be way too expensive to sell.And then if they detunedthe engine too muchthe car made no power.So what going on with thiscarb and why is it so finicky?Now a carburetor isreally just a fancy tube,and I'm greatly oversimplifying itbut it makes understandinghow they work pretty easy.Now there's a plate inside that tube,it's called a throttle plate,and that controls the amountof airflow through the tube.Now the shape of the tubedoesn't have a constantdiameter across its length.It actually narrows towards the centerand then opens back up.It's called the venturi.And the reason there's a venturiis because when air flows through itit creates a differencein pressure, a vacuum.And you might have heardof the Bernoulli principleand the Venturi effect.This is what's allowing a carb to work.Air flows down thetube, creating a vacuum,and it's this vacuum that draws in fuelthrough various holes, alsocalled jets, inside the car.And adjustments can bemade on the carburetorto fine tune how much fuel gets mixed inwith that incoming air.It's really an ingenious process.But here's the problem.While a manufacturer or aauto shop mechanic or your dadcan adjust a carburetor very precisely,they can't adjust it while you're driving.And things like the engineRPM, the throttle position,the conditions of the piston rings,and yes, even the typeof exhaust you're runningeffect the carb jetting.And not only that.Carbs can take into accountchanges in air or fuel temperatureor atmospheric pressure.So anything outside of perfect conditions,a carb will be delivering aless than perfect mixture.So the Ford engineershad reached their limiton how much power they can makeand how much emissions they can controlwith the carburettedsystem in the 5.0 engine.So what did they do?Well the engineers decidedto use this technologycalled electronic fuel injection.Boom, boom, boom.(jazzy hip hop beat)Now with EFI,it's just a nozzle spraying fuelwhen a freakin' computerrobot tells it to.And it has the ability tochange fuel volume on the fly.So in 1986 Ford developedtheir first fuel injectionsystem for the Fox-body,the SEFI system,which is sequential electronicmulti-port fuel injection.They missed a couple letters in there,but engineers aren't good at naming stuff.And they're really not goodat engineering stuffa lot of the time too.As an engineer you can say that.We can make fun of ourselves.And the brains of thisSEFI used in the Fox-bodywas a very sophisticatedcomputer at the timecalled the ECC-IV,electronic engine control IV,it was their fourth version.This thing was built by Intelusing a 16 bit processorwith only one kilobyte of RAM.Okay, say your computer hasan eight gigabyte RAM stick.That's eight million timesmore RAM in that little stickthan this whole entire computer setup had.It's just, you know.So that computercontrolled eight injectors,one per cylinder,and the distributor thatfed ignition to the 5.0.So how does that work?Well stored on that massiveamount of memory is a fuel map,and a fuel map is justa reprogrammed tablethat engineers write basedon various sensor data.And it looks something like this.Now you have your engine RPMand your have your engine load.And for each point youhave the amount of fuelthat the injector is squirting in.So this fancy dancy computer uses that mapto tell it how much fueland for how long theinjector needs to quirt.And with sequential feel injectionit fires each injector separatelyjust as the intake valve is opening.And this helps EFI give your engineonly the fuel it needs when it needs it.That means no fuel is wastedand that means the car canbe more fuel efficient.You get better emissions,and in fact you get better performance.And fun fact,that efficiency actuallydoesn't have to meanbetter miles per gallon.And in fact the Mustang was so efficientthat Ford sacrificed alittle bit of that efficiencyto dump more fuel into theengine along with more air.And as we all know by now,more air plus more fuel equals--- You're god dang right, more power!- But like any new tech,the initial reaction to EFI was not good.Car guys, there were like"Dude, electronics, I don't know."Am I gonna be able to modify my engine?"Obviously they were wrong.The Fox-body's EFI showedthat making power usingfuel maps and computerswould be the way of the future.Freakin' Fox-body, man.So the Fox-body brought thepony car into the modern erawith aero and electronic fuel injection.But those two things downcut down on 90% of emissions.To do that you need not only engineering,you need chemistry.(funky jazz music)Luckily there was thishack, this magic box,that scrubbed emissionscalled a catalytic converter.All cars made after 1975were required to have them.Inside a catalytic converteris a honeycomb of materialcoated in rate metal thatneutralized those exhaust gases.And when heated these elementsinside become a catalystand they speed up chemical reactionsof the oxidizing exhaust gases,converting that gas tosomething less harmful.Hence the name catalytic converter.So how's it do this?Well it's a two step process.So those rare metals inside the catare platinum, palladium, and rhodium.Now first platinum and rhodiumpull oxygen off nitrogen oxide,that's the bad emissions,so that nitrogen can be shot out as N2.That's a harmless gas thatmakes up 78% of our air.Now the second step, palladium, is usedto take that free oxygenpulled off from the first stepand help bind it with carbon monoxide,again, carbon monoxide,another bad emission,to form CO2.And not only that,it also helps oxidizeany unburnt hydrocarbonsby throwing a bunch of oxygen on them.That's what oxidize means.Now the Fox-body fans knowif you want more power out of your Stangyou should cut those cats off.The cat is a bottleneckon the exhaust flow.The more the emissions needs to be reducedthe tighter that honeycomb needs to beand the more back pressure gets built upbetween your cat and your engine.Your engine needs cleanair in the cylindersand if exhaust gases are backing it up,it means the exhaust gasescan't escape quickly enoughto make more room for more clean air.Just, everything gets bound up in there.But here's the thing.Don't go cutting offyour catalytic converters'cause this was in the 70s.So nowendays cats are super efficientand actually they canhelp give you more power.And really we don't wantall those harmful gasesgetting spewed out into the air.Think about your kids.You don't want them breathingthat stuff in, it's nasty.The 1986 Fox-body made havemade less power on paperthan a standard GT of 1969,but it had the same zero to 60,it had a higher theoretical top speed,and it got 18 miles per gallon.It hit that sweet spot ofpower, cost, and fuel efficiencythat Ford actually stilltargets in their GT today.Now the Fox-body Stang,it wasn't the first car with catsor that used aerodynamics orelectronic fuel injection,but because Ford changedthe muscle car formulaand added these innovationsto their halo pony car,it's probably the reason theMustang is still around today.Heck, they have a huge cult following.There is a reason for that.I want to be a part of that Fox-body cult.I know James wants to be.He wants a Calypto green Fox-body.I also want a Calypto green Fox-body.So if you know where there'stwo Calypto green Fox-bodiesbe in the comments,tell me where I can find it.I'll actually be in thecomments for the first hour.So come hang out with me.Hit me up on Instagram @JeremiahBurton.Hit us up on Donut @donutmedia.Bye for now.