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A wise man once said... "Your car, your dollar, do whatever you damn well please" Forget his name.... Merlin I think, or something like that.... If you can make it happen and it puts a smile on your dial, then I see no better reason to go ahead and do it. The rest are just sheep....

I've been talking to a few friends about this who think that a crossflow is a stupid idea, their logic is if i'm going to the trouble of importing a car I might as well go the whole hog and fit a barra/orion or a ls1, and I get that but when I look at the idea, the simple fact that a crossy is almost a bolt in fit compared to the changes required to fit the later engines makes the crossflow conversion appealing...the simple ease of the whole thing and then just bolt in some US aftermarket goodies for the suspension etc and wham...a different kind of street car for our local roads...

I've been reading a lot of yank mustang forums lately and it's got me interested in the little fox mustangs from 1980-1982, the interesting part I have found is that these cars were available with a 3.3 litre inline six that is very close to our old pre crossflow sixes found in Falcons and Cortina's upto 1976. Surely one of these cars would be an awesome and different candidate for a crossflow conversion, given that the yanks do similar conversions on older mustangs. My understanding is the cars in question had a 3.3 litre with 66kw's and a C3 3 speed auto in them so a tranny change would be required as the aussie sixes had a different bolt pattern and starter location, but the rest should be fairly easy to achieve and given the low prices of the mustangs ($3K-$5k US) could be done on a reasonable budget. My thoughts are given that the V8's made a piss poor 120-140hp, that even a stock alloy head crossflow would match this so a worked crossy would be pretty wicked and considerably lighter than the US running gear. Any thoughts?

Absolutely! I think this would make a very interesting car and would stand out from the usual 347 windsor crowd. I would imagine the performance to be similar to a Cortina as far as power-to-weight goes, but would be light-years ahead in handling and braking, (McPherson strut/multilink) also with a massive range of options to upgrade them. Have a look at footage of Dick Johnson's green one and watch how well he got that handling. It seems to have just the right amount of rear-end slide dialled into it whenever it's pointed around corners. Apart from it being a bit of a turd for power (Group A rules) it was an excellent race car. Bit of history: they started fitting the inline into the Fox Mustang in the early 80s as the German Cologne V6 was reaching production capacity and was probably getting pretty expensive to import. As the larger Fairmont was also a Fox chassis, and was already being offered with the inline, it was a no-brainer to shove that in the base Mustang. Your options wouldn't need to stop at a stout crossy. It would be just as easy and cheap to fit an E-series or AU motor with the bonus of them being more plentiful these days. Barra too, but might be a tad tight. 4-eyed Foxes rule! Sent from my CPH1607 using Tapatalk