Mustang GT V8 Replaced with Supra Engine — Strategy or Sacrilege?
Owner could’ve gone several ways when it was time to replace his car’s engine. So why did he go with a 2JZ straight-six?
Having to replace the engine in your car is never a good thing. It’s a hassle. Sometimes it’s just better to junk the entire car and find another one. But if you’re going to take the time and spend the money to put a new engine under the hood, you have a sort of clean slate. You can put whatever you want to between the front wheels, as long as you can afford it and are able to make it fit and run. That’s the situation a man by the name of Stephen found himself in with his 1994 Ford Mustang GT in the above video from The Smoking Tire. Its original 5.0 went kaput, he chose to replace it with something completely different: the 2JZ straight-six immortalized in the Toyota Supra.
It started when Stephen was in college. He worked in a tuner shop that specializes in Supras. After that, his love for the bulletproof I6 never died. When it was time to give his SN95 a heart transplant, the choice of which engine to go with was easy to make.
As you can probably imagine, swapping a Supra engine into a Mustang took a lot of work. He had to make custom brackets for certain parts. Then he had to make his creation pass emissions testing in the state of California, which basically required converting the JDM engine into a USDM power plant. He tells The Smoking Tire‘s Zack Klapman, “I had to actually drill the head for EGR ports and add an EGR cooler to the back of the head. And then I swapped the turbos and the intake manifold and the injectors and added all the EGR plumbing.” To upgrade its performance, Stephen added a chip and other enhancements that increased output to 350 horsepower.
He didn’t stop with the engine swap, though. Stephen paired the I6 with a six-speed manual gearbox (also from a Supra) and threw out the Mustang GT’s stock rear end. No, he didn’t install a Supra suspension in its place; he bolted in the IRS from a 2003 Cobra.
Klapman loves the end result, even though it messes with his head. As he puts it, “My brain is very confused.” He’s sitting in a mostly stock Mustang GT interior, but feeling the rush and hearing the whoosh of a Japanese performance engine with a completely different cylinder count and layout than should be under the Mustang’s hood. Although there are some interior ergonomics issues, the car’s on-road dynamics are satisfying. Klapman finds the Mustang fast, smooth, and progressive. He tells Stephen, “You’ve really done it correctly.”
Stephen’s Mustang may not have a Ford heart, but it does have heart in it. Mustang owners have a passion for their cars and express it through their modifications. Stephen could’ve scrapped his entire SN95 and started over. Instead, he kept it and customized it in a remarkably unusual way.
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