Check Out This Custom ’70 Wide-Body ‘Ruffian’ Mustang With A Chevy Engine
Awesome Mustangs come and go, but there is something special about this home built wide-body Ruffian, with it’s Trans-Am inspired body and accompanying Toyo Proxes R88Rs. If the looks don’t stimulate you, well than what about hearing that it gets 625 horsepower and 560 ft-lb of torque from a 7.0L CHEVY(!) LS3 427?
Builder and driver, Chris Ashton, took what was a regular 1970 Mustang, and mounted his own fender flares, something that reportedly takes hundreds of hours. However, this dedicated man- who also learned to TIG weld for his cars aluminum rear wing- did it in only 40!
Inside the engine bay, we can see that Ashton also routed the air from the initially decorative side-scoops, directly to the carburetor. This is inline with his using the Chevy motor, which he said he chose to preserve the shock-towers while updating the engine to something more modern, not something he could’ve done with newer Ford engines.
He also made some sneaky adjustments to the car’s engine bay. First, cutting the firewall to move the engine back a couple of inches. Followed by cutting a “pie-slice” out of the engine bay to make the front of the car sit about an inch lower, for aerodynamics. Ashton says that the research he did with Mustang racers from the 70s revealed that they would illegally lower the car’s front end in this way, until they took it another inch too far, and were busted.
Personally, I love the work he did on this car. It deserves all the praise it has received from Toyo and the like. It’s relatively practical, but still very mean. It was also a good call to send the car out to be painted, since we could be having a whole different conversation if this car was rattle-canned.
