The 1993 Cobra was a better shot, as was the first-gen Lightning pickup and the Cobra R series, but if you want to see when SVT really took off, start looking about 1995 or so. They started in the early Eighties with the SVO Mustang, which while unique was on-par with the 5.0L cars. Shame the big-block F-body that they highlighted didn’t.įord tended to do the same thing. Case in point: during a 1998 episode of Motor Trend Television, a black Monte Carlo with a supercharged 3.8L V6 showed up, ripping the skins off of it’s front wheels. More often than not they were showoffs or market thermometers, display cars that didn’t always make it to market but one or two that would.

There were the cars themselves: the black-and-silver ZL-1 Camaro, the big bad Boss Mustang, and a myriad of other vehicles that were teaser prototypes. SVO, SVE, and SVT versus Chevrolet Specialty Vehicles and the mystical Toy Box collection of cars. But if you looked at the inner workings of both GM and Ford at the time, you saw a couple of names that stuck out: John Coletti and Jon Moss. Camaro/Firebird deal that was heating up, but those cars were still hanging under 300 horsepower for the most part. In the mid-1990s, a horsepower war was firing off that consumers couldn’t quite access.

92 thunderbird 5.0