Ford Repair: 82 Ford Mustang Gt, double pumper, dual flowmasters

Question
Steve,
Assuming my car is all stock except for an aftermarket intake and carb, where would you start to upgrade the performance of my car since it runs rich because the carb is a 750cfm on a 302ho block? I have a single exhaust with a Flowmaster installed, which I plan to remove the sigle y-pipe and manifolds and put headers and an h-pipe in with dual Flowmasters in it's place. Is the cam the best place to start or something else? Thanks.

Answer
Mike-

  Even if you had a few more modifications I'd say a 750cfm carb is too big.  So on a stock engine it's way too big.  Assuming you've got more mods coming, I'd say switch to a 650cfm double pumper or even a 600cfm double pumper...depending on your power level.  A good cam and exhaust are a good place to start, but a good cam is only as good as the heads it's opening.  Depending on what you want from the car, there's a few ways to go.  I'd get a cam with a lift in the area of .500" and a duration of no more than 220 degrees @ .050".  That will keep it completely streetable and still maintain good vacuum for things like brakes.  For the heads I'd go with something like a set of AFR 165s or even Ford's GT40X aluminum heads.  There's a ton of heads out there and just about anything to suit any need.  My recommendations are more for a mostly-street setup and, if chosen properly with a good carb and intake you'd probably be looking at somewhere between 250hp-300hp.  A big drawback of the '82 motors (and all 5.0s of that era) are their compression ratio.  If you ever decide to rebuild the motor, I'd up the compression ratio to around 9:1 or 10:1.  Hope this helps.

Steve