Blew heads on race motor, now what...?

[24hrlemons]

Our endurance racing 3.8 '98 mustang T5 blew up last weekend. Got hot, blew a heater hose apart. I fixed it, did not see obvious signs of malfunction, oil and water were OK. Went back out. Less than 2 hours later a driver reported it went "bang" and stopped. We found a blow freeze plug on the R head, and the spark plug was blown out taking threads with it of the center cyl on L. After disassembly, we found the combustion chambers were badly erroded, most likely from racing with a failing fuel pump creating a lean burn condition. We surmise that the head become erroded badly enough that cooling water was able to leak through the pouros casting exposed on the combustion chamber and nearly hydraoulic locked the cylinder with the blown spark plug. The combustion was also able to pressurize the cooling system with steam and blew out the freeze plug.

We're looking to get the car back on the track, but would like more power. Looking at parts or engine replacement. I understand that the truck 4.2 is the same block just bored and stroked. Is this correct? Can we just bolt that in? Would that be a good engine to put in the race car, perhaps with the windstar intake that I read about? We were also going to try to get a mid level performance cam and do some mild porting on new heads, get some new bearings, seals, water pump, etc while its apart.

Due to restrictive rules, I cannot do things like adding supercharger that would make sense otherwise.

TIA!

 

[atlanticblue98]

a 4.2 will drop in, with slight modifications to the fuel rail and swapping 99-00 3.8 mustang intake manifolds on. it would also need a custom tune as well because of the different injectors used in the 4.2

the Windstar intake can be used if you are swapping to the 99-04 3.8 style heads, and can be used on the 4.2 engine as well.

your 1998 comes with, under most circumstances, inferior head and intake designs when compared to 99-04 3.8 heads and intake as well as all 4.2 engines.

it is fairly common to swap the later style heads and intakes onto a 94-98 V6, and it is called the "Splitport swap"

there is a little info that can be found on this site about it, but there is tons more information on 3.8mustang.com (which is now called 3.7mustang.com, but the site is still the same) and on V6power.net

searching for "Splitport swap" should yield tons of information