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This Candy Apple Red 1970 Boss 302 exists because Ford needed 6,500 street-legal siblings built before it could race against the Camaro Z/28 in SCCA Trans-Am — Ford built 8,641. A 290-horsepower small-block, F60-15 tires, and upgraded suspension turned a homologation requirement into one of the most capable street Mustangs Ford ever built. Read on to find out what Ford actually won because of it.
Ford needed something to embarrass Chevrolet’s Camaro on a road course, and what it built carried a name that started as an inside joke between two engineers. The Boss 302 was rated at 290 hp on paper and closer to 380 in reality. Read on to find out the story behind the name, and why a $3,720 car now sells for over half a million.
Rick Campbell spent fifteen years restoring this 1970 Boss 429, chasing exact factory accuracy rather than showroom shine — down to preserving its original California emissions equipment. That patience earned it one of only two Authenticity Awards ever given for the model, shared with a 1969 Boss Mustang rather than a fellow 1970. Built originally to homologate Ford’s 429 big block for NASCAR, this Grabber Blue example is as much a research project as a restoration. Watch the full walkaround.
The 2012 Camaro ZL1 brings 580 supercharged horsepower to the line. The Boss 302 counters with 444 naturally aspirated ones. On paper it should be over before it starts, and yet quarter-mile results from the era put these two within a couple of tenths of each other. Weight, gearing, and two completely different engineering briefs explain why, and why the argument still comes up two decades on.
This freshly restored 1969 Boss 429, brought to Jay Leno’s Garage by Anghel Restorations, exists because Ford needed exactly 500 street-legal examples to homologate its NASCAR engine for competition. Fitting the oversized 429 required an outside contractor to rebuild the Mustang’s own engine bay. The result remains one of the rarest, most sought-after Mustangs Ford ever built. Watch to hear the full story behind the engineering headache.
Ford built the 1969 Boss 429 for one reason: to make a NASCAR engine legal. The cylinder heads were so wide that half-built Mustangs had to leave the factory and go to an outside shop where the shock towers were physically cut and moved. Only 859 were built that year, and the car wore almost no badging to announce any of it. Read on for what Ford was really up to.
Ford did not build the Boss 429 because customers were asking for it. NASCAR’s rulebook demanded that a race engine be sold to the public before it could compete, so Ford dropped a semi-hemi big block into the one car nobody expected — and then discovered the regular assembly line could not physically build it. Only 859 left the shop in 1969. Read on for what that homologation gamble actually cost, and whether it paid off.
A naturally aspirated Mustang built to embarrass cars twice its price versus a supercharged Camaro with 136 more horsepower, settled by a professional driver on a real road course in Arizona. The lap times came back 2.45 seconds apart, and the reason had less to do with the horsepower gap than with what was inside each car’s shock absorbers. The result exposed how much modern damper technology actually buys you.
Forty-two years after the original Boss 302 was built to win a Trans-Am race, Ford brought the name back with one very specific goal: beat a BMW M3 around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Around the same time, Chevrolet revived the ZL1 badge — a name that started with one Illinois dealer’s odd request for fifty aluminum-block Camaros — on a supercharged, 550-plus horsepower Camaro built using suspension technology borrowed from the Corvette ZR1. Read on to find out how two of Detroit’s oldest names ended up chasing the same import.