When the 2018 NHRA Factory Stock Showdown championship went to Leah Pritchett in her Mopar Dodge Challenger Drag Pak, the Ford racers were angry. All season, they fought an intense uphill battle not only with the Drag Paks whose blown 354 GEN III HEMI had more cubes than the Cobra Jet’s 5.0L Coyote engine, but also against fleets of 350 cubic-inch LS supercharged Chevy COPO Camaros that seem to encircle the Blue Oval camp in the staging lanes at both NHRA and NMCA events.
It takes only one car to win a championship, but there is strength in numbers. When it comes to the heads-up racing format of the NHRA Factory Stock Showdown series, it’s sometimes nice to swap and even share run data with the guy who has the similar engine under the hood.
Throughout the 2018 season, the NHRA Tech Department tried in vain to create parity among all three OEM competitors. Even with a spec blower and minimum weight adjustments favoring the Mustang and Camaro and penalizing the Challenger, it still was not enough. The Ford guys back in Dearborn knew this early on and went to work on designing and constructing a leaner, meaner Cobra Jet. It might still be a Mustang, but it will kick like a mule, especially in high-gear with the new 5.2-Liter/311 Cubic-Inch V8 with a bigger blower that’ll pump out more power.
More on that later.
With lessons learned from last season, the Ford Performance engineers’ mission was to add more venom to their already lethal Cobra Jet Mustang. They also looked at the calendar and realized it was 50 years when their ancestral colleagues, dressed in pressed white shirts, skinny black ties, and donning crew cuts, created the 428 Cobra Jet Mustang that cleaned house in Super Stock during the 1968 NHRA Winternationals.
“This needed to be the best because it was the 50th anniversary of the Cobra Jet. It had to be a benchmark vehicle that needs to be the best and win races,” said Mike Delahanty, Ford Performance Product Manager for Driveline & Power and who also runs the Drag Racing & Circle Track Programs. “All during this process, we got input from racers screaming about how they felt they were at a disadvantage in both engine displacement and other issues impacting their ability to win races in the highly competitive NHRA Factory Showdown class and its twin, the NMCA Factory Super Cars.”
Doing their homework, along with “in-the-pits” market research, the Ford team began in earnest to build their new weapon to slay COPOs and Challengers and introduced a prototype 50th Anniversary Cobra Jet Mustang at the Woodward Dream Cruise. The car was also present at the Cobra Jet Reunion held in conjunction with the NMCA All-American Nationals at Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk, Ohio.
With the new Mustang out of the gate, the Ford Performance folks gave us access to see the build process on the 2019 Cobra Jet and watch these 1,300 hp machines come to life. As in the past, Ford Performance has contracted Watson Racing in Brownstown Township, Michigan, as the builder. Watson Racing has a long and fruitful relationship with Ford going back many years. Watson Racing also races what they build and provides Ford Performance valuable feedback on the Cobra Jet. It’s a great partnership to have, especially when your supplier is flogging their race car virtually every weekend at the track.
With only 68 commemorative units scheduled to be built this year, they’ll not only be fast but also collectable.
Like in the previous builds, it’s expected that some will be transformed into cutting edge Factory Showdown thoroughbreds. The Cobra Jets and their new NHRA-approved 327 cubic-inch V8 (relax, it’s just a bigger Ford 5.0 Coyote engine) have already seen action and have claimed victory at NMCA season opener at Bradenton in the Holley EFI Factory Super Cars class along with the NHRA Gatornationals in the SAMTech.edu Factory Stock Showdown.
The new Cobra Jet can also fit in other NHRA Stock and Super Stock classes, which is good. As with other current factory produced drag packages, some will actually be raced, while some will end up in heated “garage mahals” with wealthy collectors. We are hoping that the bulk of these Cobra Jets will pack the staging lanes at dragstrips across the country and do battle against Camaros and Challengers, rather than rolling across the stage at Barrett-Jackson and Mecum.
Regardless of where these seven-second machines end up, they’ll make history. We also wished there were more build pics of the factory super stockers from back in the day but we can’t go back in time. That’s why we are capturing in-depth content on the factory built drag racing door slammers now.
As in the past, the Cobra Jet Mustang build process begins with a body shell arriving from the Flat Rock Assembly Plant, which is literally across the highway from Watson Racing. The Cobra Jet is unique among the three factory-built racers in that it starts with a special lightweight body shell. Once at their shop, Watson Racing employees assign build numbers to each Mustang body and a build folder is attached throughout the process. This is basically a check-off list for the technicians as the cars move from station to station.
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