I've been looking at specs and stuff on the web, and on edmunds, it says the 0-60 time for a 98 mustang is 9.9 seconds. Is that wrong, or is my car really that slow? It is a stock 3.8L, but that seems really slow. When I drove it it felt much faster than 9.9 seconds. Not blazing fast, but certainly better than a 10 second time.

 

No, that's about right, 9.4s is about as good as you'll get with a manual, 10s is generally what autos run. Sorry, but that 150 hp off the flywheel you have isn't gonna do much more than that.

 

Theres always room for some upgrades. It hopefully will keep me out of too much trouble anyways.

 

Well you should really start looking into a split port intake swap, easy and quick way to pick up 40 rwhp, and that's if you do no porting, cam swap, or head rebuild, you could easily gain 60-70 rwhp if you do everything.

 

Thats pretty good gains for just a single mod, but more cash than I have. I'm probably gonna get my suspension set up real good, with shocks, struts, springs, sway bars, etc. Then do the flywheel, driveshaft, gears, differential, etc, and then go for power once everything else is done. My parents aren't gonna let me do any power mods, at least not for a while, but they don't have a problem with suspension and stuff, I'll just tell them how it makes the car "safer".

 

with those 40 more horses you're gonna be at 7.4, what a 99 and 2000 get.

 

I would just keep it stock, and buy another car later, but I'm probably going to be keeping this through college, so its gonna have to last me a while, I might as well make it a bit more entertaining to drive.

 

Well don't worry about the flywheel and driveshaft, kind of worthless mods for a street car. But you can get the all the parts you need for the split port conversion for under $1000 and add in $200 for the cam, and if you're good at mechanics you can do the swap yourself, and maybe have a local machine shop port the heads and intake for you. So for under $2000 you can put up some pretty nice times. And $2000 is about as much as all the other stuff you talked about put togther, and your gains with those will be minimal.