Ford USA to offer warrantied Whipple 'chargers
Supercharging the Coyote V8 has become big business; now Ford is going to offer it as an optional extra...
Barely a month seems to pass without someone else strapping a supercharger onto Ford’s 5.0-litre V8 and proudly sharing the results. Whether it’s Shelby or Hennessey or Clive Sutton, it’s a hugely popular upgrade, offering up hundreds more horsepower for relatively little effort (or expense). There’s no more affordable way to a box-fresh 800hp, put it that way.
Now Ford itself is going to make it even simpler to get a supercharged Coyote, for US customers at least, with the introduction of a 3.0-litre Whipple supercharger as a ‘pre-installed, pre-delivery option’ for new F-150s and Mustangs. Tell the dealer you want it, pay your money, and a car upgraded with the required Ford Racing Parts goodies will arrive. Simple as that. It’s no less potent than the other installations you may have heard of, with 700hp for F-150s and 800hp for Mustang GTs and Dark Horses, and comes with a three-year/36,000-mile warranty. In fact, Ford reckons the Supercharger Kit is engineered to its ‘rigorous 100,000-mile durability standards’, meaning there’s ‘massive capability without sacrificing reliability’. Perhaps the only slight drawback is that the top speed will be limited to the same amount as the unsupercharged cars.
When ordered from the Ford Racing Parts catalogue, the supercharger and all the required ancillaries (throttle body, colder spark plugs, uprated injectors) costs $10,500, or a bit less than £8,000. Given a factory order will need that kit installed rather than just delivered, it’s going to cost more than that on a new Mustang or F-150; but even allowing for a couple of thousand extra dollars, that’s a huge amount of warrantied power for not much outlay. As Ford puts it, the new Supercharger Kit provides ‘a seamless way to deliver massive power with factory backing’, and who wouldn’t want that?
Given the Mustang is a rather different prospect in the UK to the US, a similar scheme looks unlikely here. So let’s hope for one or two of the new supercharged Dark Horses, at least. And there are always old supercharged Mustangs to consider - this GT500 is said to be as powerful as a new Aston Martin Vantage…
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