Hello! I have recently aquired a 72 Maverick 2 door rolling body in fair condition.It was assembled in Canada and came with a 302/c4 combination. It has half been turned into a drag race project with narrowed 9 inch and some fairly serious rubber out back. Mavericks are pretty thin on the ground here - I'd never actually seen one here before I came across this one and I instantly fell in love with the shape. The dilemma is whether to turn in into an all out racer or keep it mild enough to drive it on the street.I don't really want to butcher it any further,but I take it the Windsor is all that will really fit in without some fairly major surgery in the engine bay.I haven't had a good look around this website yet but I'm keen to find out what other owners have done to fit bigger engines. Im real happy with the Maverick as I am a Ford guy,but in New Zealand we never really had a good mid size car from Ford - Their either big Australian Falcons or little English Escorts,Cortinas etc. I couldn't afford a Mustang,and besides being expensive,there is lots of them being imported now.Maverick for me! Maybe someone would be good enough to tell me if a 351 Windsor will drop straight in,and the weight difference between a 302 and 351,and will the extra weight up front destroy the handling? Cheers!
Howdy and About the only thing you need to do to drop in the windsor is shave the shock towers, and that is only to make the plugs accessible. It will fit without it. For handling purposes, you need to keep the front as light as possible. Aluminum heads, manifolds, pulleys and stuff will help. For overall performance and handling, my opinion is you cant go wrong with a 302. Just get one of those stroker kits and you can make gobs of power and torque.
Welcome to the board . No surgery required to put the W in our cars. However, you will need to find some headers that work with the W and doing spark plug changes will be kind of challenging. But it can be done without major modifaction. Jamie
Welcome to the board I love New Zealand beautiful country, I got a chance to fix one of our jets in Christ Church. We ended up witha couple extra days off and got to drive around the country side. Right hand drive and crossing the street were the only things I didn't like.....walked in front of traffic a couple of times
Thanks for the advice guys,stroking the Windsor does seem like the most logical solution,looking at some of the posts here it seems that hooker 6901's are quite popular headers although someone said that Hedman fitted in real nice too.
