Muscle Car Of The Week Video #32: 1970 Ford Mustang BOSS 429

on this week's muscle car of the week is one of the baddest Mustangs you could ever buy 70 boss 429 in 1970 you could have gotten any number of high-performance Mustangs I mean there was base model cars there was Mach ones there was GTS there were Boss 302s of course you can get any of the shelby cars and then you could get what many consider to be the king of the hill the boss 429 and this car you know they only made 500 of them or so 499 originally in 1970 because of a nascar tie and that we'll get into in a second but a lot of people look at this car and see the giant engine and a very basic car and think you know this must have been a drag race version of a Mustang but in reality this thing has its roots solely planted on the super speedways of NASCAR the big boss 429 v8 came about as Ford was going to compete with Chrysler against the Hemi headed 426 'as the Ford version had a semi hemispherical cylinder head which gave way to these giant valve covers and a super wide engine and in NASCAR you had to have 500 street versions of a particular engine to be sold legally on the street to be able to introduce that engine for competition in NASCAR racing and the interesting part of how the boss 429 Mustang came to be is if you look at it Ford never raced a Mustang and NASCAR you know the cars that were racing a NASCAR were Torinos and mercury cyclones at that point you never saw a Mustang on the track so you'd think you'd be able to go to your Ford dealer and buy a boss 429 Torino well that never happened they decided to put the boss 429 NASCAR engine in a Mustang and as I mentioned earlier there was a variety of Mustangs you could buy so to get this 429 under the hood of a Mustang the front of the car required extensive modifications I mean if you look and see how wide this thing is it just took a lot of work to get there and Ford realize that they had all kinds of different Mustang programs going on so they enlisted a subcontractor called car craft which was spelled with K's and had em do the work to get the 429 motor in the nose of the 69 and 70 boss 429 Mustangs now car Kraft was already building the boss 302 cars for Ford so they knew the Mustang platform in and out it wasn't that big of a deal for those guys you'll see the shock towers have been widened they changed the front suspension mounts and the engine mounts to bring everything down but looking at this thing it's kind of amazing to see that they used every available square inch to fit something even a smog pump this car has a factory installed smog pump with the air tubes that go into the exhaust so I mean it's amazing that they fit that on a car it's even more amazing that it's still on this car because these things were ripped off and thrown away many years ago by most people there was some other modifications to they change the front spindles the front spring rates different sway bars different and once you've put all these things together to get that thing under the hood you could see why they had to relocate the battery to the trunk because there just wasn't any room left the boss 429 s have their own unique look and part of it is that it's actually kind of boring looking but if you pay attention you'll notice they've got an aggressive stance and again that's because of the special suspension they put in these things they sit a little bit lower than most of the other Mustangs they've got a scoop on the hood that's blacked out they don't have any other stripes or a rear wing or rear louvers or anything fancy to make them stand out which makes them you know essentially kind of a sleeper that 429 might be a beast under the hood but the car is pretty comfortable if you look at it it's fairly basic it's got a pair of high-back bucket seats it's got a fold down rear seat for instrumentation you've got 120 mile an hour speedometer and 8,000 rpm tach a fuel gauge and a temp gauge it didn't even have an oil pressure gauge which is pretty surprising thinking you know of how powerful these engines were and how people would beat on these cars you know you want to know what's going on but this thing didn't really tell you you also have an AM radio down there a basic heater with a blower a Hurst t-handle shifter on the top loader four-speed transmission disc brakes in a center console and the passenger like most 69 and 70 Mustangs gets a clock to stare at but of course the coolest part of a boss 429 is the boss engine and this thing starts as a 4 bolt main block 429 cubic inch is ten and a half to one compression ratio it's got a forged steel crankshaft the cylinder heads are aluminum and they're so big because to get the valvetrain to work with the semicircular hemispherical head design they had to offset the valve train geometry and that's what takes up so much room up there one thing that's interesting about the boss 429 heads is that they are an o-ring design you don't have a traditional head gasket that you drop on and then bolt the heads down you've got a whole assortment of a rings that have to go around every coolant passage every oil hole you know every possible leak point so putting one of these engines together is definitely challenging you got to know what you're doing Ford claimed that these things made 375 horsepower at 5200 rpm and 450 foot-pounds of torque at 3400 rpm but this engine is the stuff of legends you know people have been talking about it for years that really they make over 500 and some people say they make over 600 horsepower they've got a Holley 785 CFM carburetor and an aluminum intake and you know those kind of numbers with the 429 cubic inch displacement are definitely possible there have been dyno tests done over the years that said you know they made everything from mid 400s to just over 500 in stock form again depending on who tunes them and then depending on what other speed parts you add you know nobody really knows but the cool thing is that this is one of those you know mythical cars that even Ford apparently lied about the power numbers because at that time the insurance companies were really starting to get wise to these cars and if you had a high power number they drove the insurance rate up and Ford thought that would scare people away now I've also heard that story about the insurance companies for years and years and years I've never seen any proof and documentation that says that maybe someday we'll investigate if that's really true we do know that sales weren't very good on these cars because it's a you know high compression race motor that didn't like to start in cold weather didn't idle very well it was made to spin at high rpm all day long so driving around on daily streets really wasn't any fun you know this isn't a car going to get a cold day and turn the key and expect to get to work on time you know the dragstrip these things were capable of 14 second quarter miles that you know 104 miles an hour and then of course road racing they were great but around town they were kind of miserable but nevertheless it's still one of the baddest Mustangs ever made other parts the driveline include a beefed up 4-speed transmission and a 391 rear axle with a traction lock differential this car debuted in 69 but in 1970 they added a bunch of different colors to him grabber green grabber orange grabber blue Calypso coral and a pastel blue so the colors got brighter for 1970 I don't know if that was an effort to attract more attention and sell more but that's one of the big differences between 69 and 70 is the colors everything else is basically the same on those cars so to have the boss 429 engine be legal and NASCAR Ford had to sell 500 versions on the street story is there was 499 Mustangs and a couple of Cougars done in 1970 so they reach that goal but did they reach the goal of dominating NASCAR with the boss 429 doesn't look like it I think Chrysler had more wins with the Hemi than Ford did with the boss but nevertheless this is definitely a car in the brothers collection that I would love to take out and any day of the week and twice on Sunday with tons of power awesome performance and great looks to match it's no wonder that this car is one of the bosses of the brothers collection you can see more on our website at muscle car of the week calm also check out our Facebook page and if you like what you see share it with your friends we're also going to post a teaser pic of next week's car so you can try and guess what it is and if you subscribe to our youtube channel you'll never miss an episode of muscle car of the week you

Channel: V8TV

Views: 340,277

Keywords: 1970 ford mustang boss 429, 1970 boss 429 mustang, ford mustang boss 429 review, mustang boss 429 review, 1970 ford mustang boss 429 value, Boss 429, boss 429 mustang 1969, boss 429 startup, Boss 429 (Automobile Model), boss 429 engine, boss 429 sound, Ford Mustang (Automobile Model), V8TV, 1970, grabber blue mustang, grabber blue boss 429, grabber blue boss mustang, Muscle Car (Film Subject), Muscle Car Of The Week

Id: Fi2A4ePk3NM

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2014