Late-Model Builder's Guide for Performance Vehicles- Car Craft Magazine

It's generally accepted that the second coming of the musclecar occurred during the early '80s, and has continued since. The advent of electronic fuel injection (EFI) and its use on American performance cars seems to have been the catalyst that allowed power outputs to flourish. At the same time, EFI brought a new level of complexity to the genre that initially seemed to threaten the average enthusiast's ability to tweak and tune for improved performance. Fortunately, finding additional performance was simply a matter of gaining an education in electronic engine management, which is exactly what motorheads nationwide did, primarily through word-of-mouth, magazine stories, and lots of trial and error. Now, these '80s-era musclecars are becoming the bread-and-butter of entry-level street machining. These are the cars that are old enough to be cheap, but not old enough to be considered valuable. Most of us who are looking for a daily driver, a weekend beater, or even a first car aren't going to be scoring a '55 Chevy or a '69 Road Runner--it's going to be an IROC, a 5.0 Mustang, or maybe an LT1 Trans Am.

This marks the first in a series of guides we'll be doing on "late-model" performance vehicles. Of course, the term late model is used fairly loosely, since we'll be covering cars that are nearly 20 years old, but you get the picture. We opted to go chronologically and begin with GM's Tuned Port Injection (TPI) F-cars. We've limited our scope to the TPI models rather than the entire third generation, because when it comes to engine tweaking, a four-barrel-equipped 305 will respond to upgrades in pretty much the same way a four-barrel-equipped '72 Nova does, while Cross-Fire Injected engines have fairly limited ability. Besides, there are so many variations of engine combinations throughout the third generation that we'd have to use the entire issue to cover them all.