Naturally-Aspirated Shootout - Natural Causes

Eric Fischer
Freehold, NJ
'92 Coupe

If Eric Fischer's '92 coupe looks familiar, it's because his Stang has graced MM&FF's pages before. Both his car and his brother Bill's '88 coupe (which also participated in our shoot-out) were feature cars in the Sept. '04 issue. Heck, they even made the cover!

When it came time for our naturally aspirated shootout, Eric was all for it, and came to the track loaded for bear. Packing a 418 Windsor backed by a 4R70W automatic, Eric was the only participant able to dip down into the 10-second zone (he drove brother Bill's car as well). Not only did he get there, but he also did it consistently, and that was after driving the car to the track.

"One of our goals that we have held true to is that we always drive the car to and from the track," Eric says. "That means it must be civilized and reliable enough to make it back and forth, and maybe even stop at Burger King on the way home."

While the ultimate goal is to run 10.0 and cruise back to the homestead, on this day, Eric's 10.36 was more than enough to distance himself from the rest of the competitors. "I really didn't think we would be the quickest in the shootout," he says. "I honestly thought we would be at the bottom of the field, and that we were more like a couple of field fillers. There are so many fast Mustangs now, I didn't think we had that good of a chance.

"One of the biggest changes we made to the car was to run it on Mickey Thompson drag radials. I originally bought them so that I would have a tire that was more rugged on the street than the bias-ply ET Streets." Lo and behold, the switch to the radials yielded a 60-foot time of 1.401 seconds. From that point on, there was no stopping the hard-charging pushrod engine. It sounded good and ran like a champ all day long.

"With the way the converter works, it was better for me to leave at an idle than to footbrake the car," Eric says. "For some reason, the car 60-foots better when I leave off of an idle as opposed to giving it any rpm. Plus, with the car using the '95 computer, I set the shift points within the computer, so I just put the car in Drive, left the starting line, and let it do its thing."