2007 Ford Mustang Roush Racing Drag Pak - Drag Pak Track Attack

10 Minutes With Jack Roush
Evan J. Smith: Jack, thanks for sitting down with us. I have a few questions about the Drag Pak Mustang and the direction of Roush Performance.

Jack Roush: The Drag Pak Mustang for 2007 is on the floor. The 50 cars that we plan to build have been sold to Brandon Ford [Tampa, Florida]. I have a short list of the things I want to tweak on for additional potential before the package release of the car. We'll see how they're accepted and if they show up on the racetracks. We'll see the results people get and what they think. If there is a demand, we'll do another run which will have some additional equipment.

The new Mustang is so exciting and so reminiscent to what happened in the mid-to-late-'60s with Ford Motor Company and musclecars. I said, "Wow! This is such an exciting car, it should be on a dragstrip." The public would really enjoy having something that would be a reasonable starting point for a Drag Pak car. I thought of the '68 Drag Pack cars that Ford did, and they were all white at that time, battery in the back, 31-spline axles, a Detroit Locker, a 4.10 or 4.30 gear, a scattershield, a heavy clutch, and away you went.

So, this past summer [2006] we made over 200 passes on our development car. We wanted to improve the suspension, the safety equipment, the clutch, and the transmission, and we got everything pretty much OK. We made little changes in the transmission with some of the shift forks, made a shifter with the Reverse and Fifth-gear lock-out feature, and rolled that in the package, and it's less than $60,000 for a brand-new Ford, if you want a place to start.

The other thing that's really exciting is that there's so much room left in the car. It still has its power windows, power seats, air conditioning, heater EVAC system, stock K-member front suspension-all those things that make up unnecessary weight for something you're going to take to the dragstrip. It's all there for the person who gets the car to decontent it, and when you do that, it will go at least another half second faster than the high 11-second category that we've got it released at.

Roush's Drag Pak is enhanced... 

   

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Roush's Drag Pak is enhanced by a RoushCharger pushing 6 psi of intercooled boost. The package is rated at 430 hp; we saw 396.60 rwhp on a Dynojet chassis dynamometer with 364 lb-ft of torque.

EJS: You have a lot of the excitement towards the new Mustang platform. What do you think the advantage is over the '99-'04 SN-95 Mustangs?

JR: I think it's the styling thing. The first thing I'll say is that I never saw a Mustang I didn't like.

EJS: Even a Mustang II?

JR: A Mustang II. I drove a Pro Stock Mustang II that's a favorite car in our museum. We don't have it totally restored, but I've got the car that I drove in 1974. I know that was not a popular car for a lot of people. Some people thought when they made the wheelbase longer in 1971 that was a mistake, but those are Mustangs that at a point in time were exactly what I think the public needed and what Ford thought they wanted to be morphed into. Going back to the '67-'68 Mustangs for the styling cues, and this new car that we sold in 2005 first-and it's carried into 2006 and beyond-it certainly tugs at my heart strings. For the folks that were there and saw, and enjoy seeing, the cars from that era, it provides the continuity and momentum to the Mustang brand.

EJS: You got your start in drag racing, and it seems that after years of road racing and being in NASCAR, you're now getting back into drag racing. You are an icon in NASCAR and everybody knows that. And now your involvement in NMRA is obviously increasing, or so it seems. Where do you see the future of Roush in drag racing?

JR: First of all,let me say that I think that a race car in any series-be it on a round track, at Pike's Peak, Bonneville, drag racing, or stock car racing-should have doors. So the idea of us changing our emphasis from, say, a doorslammer series to whatever it might be, like to a formula car series, that's not going to happen.

Mustang was there for me, and I went to work for Ford right out of college. I was in the Dearborn assembly plant by June 1964 and they started production in April, so Mustangs have been a part of my racing career as well as my business life for the last 45 years-in Trans Am, GTO, and all the road-racing things, as well as Pike's Peak. Mustang is a staple for me, and we're going to continue creating products that will be exciting for the consumer.

They will not be nitro-powered, and I don't have an interest in operating Funny Cars. I don't have an immediate interest in Pro Stock, although there are discussions with some of the people we do business with who would like us to support a Pro Stock effort. But for now it's about us going back to the grassroots and being involved with our dealers. We've got over 300 dealers selling Roush Performance products, and we want to be involved with the generation of folks now that have their first performance car and would like to change the rear axle, would like to put bigger tires on it, would like to make it measurably faster in the quarter-mile or something. I've got great empathy for that. I live vicariously through the success and realization and satisfaction of people one generation or two generations younger than me. I realized that my family and my engineers wanted to go drag racing last year, and I said OK-here are the tools and I'll help you with what I can, and let's get after it.

EJS: That's excellent. If the Drag Pak program goes the way you'd like it to, do you foresee building another level or another version with maybe a stroker engine, or maybe a more advanced car altogether?

JR: Yes to both of those questions. If you look at our SEMA booth here with the Roush display, we have Don Bowles' car, and it's fitted with a Ford GT engine with an open exhaust, aggressive calibration, and it's got 600-650 hp. And that's a variant we're interested in. We've got a whole family of new modular crate engines that we'll be releasing over a period of time. We've got a couple of engines in our program now, and there will be more displacement increases, up to at least 5.4 liters and that's off the 4.6 platform. Potentially we can go out as far as 6.0 liters. With Two-Valve and Four-Valve configurations and the various blower capacity we would put on the top of it, I see our modular crate engines going to at least 600 hp, and that's going to give us great latitude. We've got a 400hp engine in an '03 car that my daughter is driving. We did just one test run in it at Reading, Pennsylvania, last year and the car went 10.40s with 400 hp. If I put another 200-300 hp on that, it will be way down in the nines.

EJS: How do you feel about the engineering of the modular engines compared to the pushrod engines?

The battery has been relocated... 

   

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The battery has been relocated to the trunk and a nifty "On/Off" lever is affixed to the back of the car. The Drag Pak also has a rear-seat block-off plate that is required by NHRA and IHRA rules when the battery is moved to the back.

JR: Well, if I had been in charge, if I had a responsibility and authority as it related to Ford, I would have done more of what General Motors did in terms of advancing the [pushrod] Two-Valve engine closer to its limit of capability, rather than have to jump off as early as they did to the Four-Valve engine at the kind of limited rpm that one could expect from a street car. So, I wouldn't have made that decision, but the technology certainly isn't bad. It's in the direction of the future, and it's more interesting than pushrod technology. But right now we are well into it, and we're committed to Two-Valves, Three-Valves, and Four-Valve engines, with the overhead cam configuration. That's what the Ford family engines are, and we can make a very exciting offering to the general public as well as to spectators who would watch us race.

EJS: Will we be seeing more Roush modular crate engines in the near future?

JR: Yes, you will definitely be seeing more Roush modular crate engine options. We have a whole variance that will appear throughout 2007, and we hope to be caught up to where we want to be by 2008. We're getting there.