Sister has a 85 Fox body with a 302/5.0 FI, cam, headers, dry system ect. She saw how much fun I was having with my car and wanted to get in on the racing.She bought this car off C/L 2+ years ago.She took it to one of her Mustang buddys shop to have a auto trans with a brake installed in place of the manual gearbox.Ran 12's rowing the gears. While it was there he "test drove" it and had a NOS backfire that blew the manifold through the hood. He did replace all the damaged parts but its never run right since. We went over to his shop and brought it back to my place after sitting in his back lot for more than a year untouched. My advise is to get rid of the FI totally and go with a single plane intake and around a 700 Holley carb. We'll need to modify the fuel system ect. maybe totally get rid of the computer.IM not realy Ford savvy but think I can get this done.
Aside from making the asshat shop make it right, I'd leave the FI. I'm running a mild 9:1 FI 302 in my Futura. On motor, it runs mid 12s. 150 shot nitrous put it at 11 flat. Motor pass: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10151265719229643
Neither she nor her husband are mechanically inclined. They have no way to tune the car and I dont need another project to screw with. Simple carb and MSD with no computers will fit the bill.
I'll probably leave the system intact for now and add a plate later if she wants to go faster. She owns a 03 Cobra as well. That supercharged pony is a beast on the street.
I've had quite a few 5.0s, and am GENERALLY a Ford guy. That was the first year of fuel injection (only on CA cars IIRC). The system is super simple and usually bulletproof, but unless it was converted to Mass Air (would have a Mass Air meter after the air box, which is a super common modification to the 85-88 FI 5.0s), it was originally a Speed Density system and has limited capacity to accept mods. Usually a header and camshaft swap would go over it's self tuning abilities, especially at idle. Once you yank the fuel injection and distributor with module off, you'll be able to totally remove the computer from the system (there's no computer inputs on the transmission, and all other sensors for temp and oil pressure are just like an old carb engine). Good thing about doing that is luckily the heads and everything else have the same bolt pattern/port placement between carb and injected small block "Windsor" Fords, so any small block intake will bolt right on to the most likely E7 casting heads. Make sure the nitrous system is a wet system before buying a carb plate, because most for those cars were dry systems without any added fuel and just depended on the computer and fuel injection to make up the difference in oxygen going into the engine. So if it is a dry system, about the only thing you'll be able to reuse would be the bottle and line. They're about the easiest cars in the world to make go fast, as I'm sure you know, and there's a lot of potential there. Plus they're as simple as a single cylinder lawn mower to work on.
One more cool thing is that the FI cars were roller cam engines from the factory, so hopefully some moron didn't remove that set-up and go back to flat tappets. Cams are super cheap for them and the factory roller set-up is actually quite nice.
And, don't forget to tell your sister to drop the timing back 2 degrees for every 50hp of nitrous, when activated.
It does have a Mass Air under the front right fender and a dry system nozzle stuck into the plastic breather tube running to the throttle body. It would blow the nozzle out when she hit the spray button. all thats going away. We'll hook up a proper wet system if she want to spray it in the future. I do not think the shop went that deep into the engine as to pull the cam and rollers out.