rvisme

Hello to all. 45 yr old 1st Mustang "newbie" here looking for some advise from some "oldies". Bought my Stang earlier this year and have put about 2k on her over the summer. Total of 40k now. Let me start with her background. It is a bone stock, (and I mean never touched my anyone other than the dealer, down to the brakes and tires factory stock) 07 GT Convertible. Stored over the winters never seen a snow flake kind of ride. She is not a daily driver for me and spends most of her time in my garage. I fell for her at first glance
While my paycheck tells me I have to be gentile I would like to know from you what performance mods I should start with first. I will be honest I am starting to wonder if I should have went for the 5.0 as my thirst for more get more intense.
My absolute first is brakes. They are due. Thinking of Power slot rotors??
Tire's will be over the winter as I want to "test & tune" any mods on what left of the originals.
Next ??? Thats where you folks come in. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Rocket Ray

A lot depends on what you do with the car. Will you take it to the track? I drive mine to work and back in nice weather, store it in winter. My first mod was 18" wide tires with chrome bullet rims, really makes the car "pop". The absolute next is a cold air intake with a tune. Everyone here seems to be happy with Bama from American Muscle or Brenspeed (which I have). You literally will not believe the difference it makes! Its like going from an ordinary sedan to a muscle car with real muscle. If you are going to do the brakes, look into getting new rotors calipers and pads that Roush takes off of 2012-2013 mustangs when they put aftermarket brakes on, they are available on ebay, they have less than 3 miles on them and are larger in diameter than our and are a direct bolt on switch. After that you may want to upgrade your suspension, so just check out the handling section on this forum.

ski

+1 on the CAI/tune suggested by Rocket Ray. It's the best bang-for-the-buck performance mod on these cars.

808muscle

X2 on a Brenspeed tune and CAI especially if you have an auto, it's a massive difference from stock.
Brakes. I thought the stock brakes sucked horribly. I went with EBC slotted and dimpled rotors with EBC red pads. Improvement was ok but then I added stainless steel lines with some super blue fluid. Now that was a huge improvement and only cost $119. The pedal is now firm vs the stock mushy pedal. You need a special caliper tool to remove the rear pads. You have to push and turn to get the pads out. Tool is around $40 from amazon and worth every penny.

Lots of great info on this site and always research before you buy anything. You won't waste your cash that way. Congrats on the car and welcome.

Nuke

58 y/o (as of Monday) here with an '07 GT which isn't my DD...

CAI & tune is your biggest bang-for-the-buck short of supercharging; good for roughly 15-25 RWHP depending on who writes the tune and what octane it's written for. It'll also improve overall driveability.

Other than performance, there are some sweet visual mods: sequential tail lights, quarter window and rear window louvers, rear black out panel... Too many to list.

Art161

Nuke

TY, Art. I should have included THIS COMING Monday...

rvisme

Great info, CAI it is (after the brake job). I forgot to mention that it is an auto. As far as programmers go I have never used one but curious to know if there is one that can program my Superduty as well as my Mustang? Been meaning to get one for the truck, be nice if I could buy one that does both.

Nuke

The tuner is actually more of a storage device. The company that writes the tune has the license rights to those parameters that affect the bulk of the performance. You, the end user, have a few minor parameters that you can change but as far as the performance, you need to only upload the tunes to your PCM via the handheld tuner that you buy with the tunes pre-loaded and that you store your stock tune in.

But you have to buy the CAI & tune combo for any noticeable gain. Stand alone CAI's only gain about 3-5 RWHP and may also throw a lean code. The tune provides the bulk of the gain and the CAI & tune compliment one another.

mustangspotential

CAI + Tune and some basic suspension upgrades (Lowering Springs, Upgraded Struts/Shocks) I'd say are really the only necessary things performance-wise.

When you get into exterior mods, the list becomes endless. Short of SC'ing etc, those are the only real things that are going to make a tremendous noticeable improvement in your Mustang.