Dyno Testing a Ford Coyote Engine with Borla Stack Injection

Mike Finnegan trades his own garage for a seat at Kaase Racing Engines, where a 5.0L Coyote wearing a Borla individual throttle body stack gets strapped to the dyno with Holley’s Robin Lawrence on tuning duty. The pull produces serious torque and a number that has commenters guessing all over the place. Watch to see what the Coyote made, and what it cost to get there.

There is a certain kind of dyno pull that makes even seasoned engine builders lean in close, and this one belongs squarely in that category. Mike Finnegan usually does his wrenching in his own garage, camera rolling, tools within arm’s reach, narrating every step for an audience that has followed him for years. This time he set that aside to go watch someone else work, a decision that turns out to say a lot about what was about to happen. What waited on the dyno at Kaase Racing Engines wasn’t a stock intake or a bolt-on kit. It was something stranger, louder, and, according to the numbers that came back, considerably more interesting than a typical Friday afternoon pull.

A Coyote Wearing Someone Else’s Intake

This time Finnegan ventured out of his own garage to watch the pros at Kaase Racing Engines dyno-test a 5.0L Coyote wearing something most Mustang owners will never bolt onto their own engine: a Borla individual throttle body stack. Robin Lawrence from Holley handled the tuning chores, working the dyno room the way a pit crew works a race car, adjusting fuel and timing pull after pull while Finnegan watched the data scroll past. By the end, the combination produced serious torque and, in Finnegan’s own words, nearly 500 horsepower out of a stock-displacement Coyote short block, a number that surprised even him given how little else had been changed under the valve covers.

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The Sound of Eight Independent Throats

What makes an ITB stack different from a normal intake is that every cylinder gets its own dedicated throttle body instead of sharing a single plenum, and commenters who watched the video couldn’t stop talking about what that does to throttle response. One viewer called the sound of it running “the Ford Cosworth DFV” of Coyote engines, a comparison to Formula 1’s most famous naturally aspirated V8. Another simply wrote that “the throttle response with this intake must be phenomenal,” which, going by the reaction in the room during the pull, appears to be exactly right. A third called it flat-out beautiful before the engine had even fired.

Why Kaase Racing Was the Right Room for This

Kaase Racing Engines has built its reputation on big-block horsepower for decades, developing everything from all-out race motors to street-driven crate engines, but the shop’s dyno room is just as useful for smaller, modern combinations like this Coyote. Finnegan had originally hoped to show viewers how to read spark plugs after the pull, a diagnostic step tuners use to judge how an engine is actually running cylinder by cylinder based on the color and texture of the electrode, but ran out of time during the session. It’s a small, honest admission that reflects how much ground a single dyno day actually covers once a real tuning conversation gets started.

The Modular Coyote’s Second Life as a Hot Rod Engine

The 5.0L Coyote has been Ford’s workhorse V8 since it debuted in the 2011 Mustang GT, and more than a decade later it has become one of the most swap-friendly modern engines in the hobby, showing up in everything from trucks to hot rods. ITB stacks like this one are part of a growing aftermarket push to treat the Coyote less like a factory appliance and more like a race engine platform, chasing the kind of individual-runner breathing that used to be reserved for purpose-built race motors costing many times as much.

What This Setup Actually Costs to Chase

None of that comes cheap. Commenters guessing at the price of the Borla stack setup landed around $6,500, a number that sparked its own side debate in the replies about whether the performance gain justified the cost. One viewer pointed out that a Cobra Jet intake manifold paired with the stock ECU could get a Coyote to roughly 490 crank horsepower for closer to $1,500, a fraction of the price. The gap between the two approaches is really a gap between chasing a dyno number and chasing a specific sound, feel, and throttle response that only individual throttle bodies deliver.

Reading a Crowd That Knows Its Engines

The comment section on this one reads like a reunion of people who already know Finnegan’s work well. One viewer described meeting him in Memphis, getting a cupholder signed, and taking photos with his kids at a car show, calling it a highlight of his weekend. Others floated ideas for what should come next: the same ITB setup on a Shelby GT350’s flat-plane Voodoo engine, or a 5.2L flat-plane Coyote variant running on E85 for even more top-end breathing. It’s the kind of audience that shows up for the tuning conversation as much as the horsepower number itself.

A Test That’s Really About the Details

That may be the real takeaway from this one. The final dyno number matters, but the video spends most of its time on the process that got there, watching Lawrence and Finnegan talk through fuel curves, intake behavior, and part throttle response in real time rather than just cutting straight to a pull. For an engine platform as common as the Coyote has become, that kind of hands-on tuning session, done properly on someone else’s dyno for once instead of in Finnegan’s own garage, is still worth stopping to watch from start to finish.

The Question Every Coyote Builder Eventually Asks

For anyone weighing whether a setup like this makes sense on their own Coyote, the honest answer from this video is: it depends on what you’re actually chasing. If the goal is the single highest horsepower number per dollar spent, the aftermarket has cheaper paths that get remarkably close, as several commenters were quick to point out. But if the goal is the way an engine responds the instant a foot moves on the pedal, and the specific, mechanical sound eight independent throttle bodies make under load, there is no substitute for what Kaase and Holley put on that dyno. That distinction, more than the final number, is what stuck with viewers after the video ended.

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