GRUNT HUNT

> MATTHEW PANKAU OF RRS SHOWS YOU HOW TO FIT A 5.0L COYOTE MILL INTO AN XY FALCON, USING THE COMPANY’S TRICK COYOTE SWAP KIT

WHILE the six-cylinder Barra was Ford’s new-millennium highperformance engine of choice, the arrival of the Coyote quadcam five-litre V8 in the Mustang a couple of years ago gave Blue Oval bent-eight fans a tough engine to take on the LS hordes. Ever thought about chucking one of these bad boys into your street machine? Well, Sydney’s RRS has developed a new Coyote swap kit to help you do it. We chatted to RRS’S Matthew Pankau to find out what’s involved in installing a Coyote into an XY Falcon.

FITTING ROOM

THE Coyote runs four cams and four valves per cylinder, so it’s a huge mill. Anyone who’s peered into a Falcon or Mustang engine bay knows there isn’t much real estate in there, so the stock shock towers will have to be notched to allow clearance for the exhaust and heads before the late-model five-oh can be installed.

RRS sells replacement pre-notched towers to go with the company’s strut front end used in this XY, and makes its own bolt-on engine mounts to suit both the Boss and Coyote blocks. For the oil pan, RRS uses an off-theshelf Canton front-sump unit.

“The biggest challenge was making it all fit,” Matthew Pankau says. “The physical size of different components, like the back half of the transmission, was a huge hurdle. You need the right matched componentry all the way through, from intake system to tailshaft and wiring. You can’t use your traditional hot rodding with modern drivetrains; it is far more like science.

“You can make life much easier for yourself by buying a brand new 2017 Mustang floorpan for $1400, which means you can then use latemodel seats and a centre-mount handbrake,

“These Coyote motors make huge power because they’re so much more efficient than an old pushrod motor,” Matthew explains. “You can’t get the same reliability, emissions or fuel economy out of an old motor compared to one of these modern V8s. The engineering in this motor is way better than what you could dream of in a street car engine. You can get more out of these just in tuning compared to an LS”