It’s easy to say the next generation of an engine was better than its predecessor. The jump from a Gen 1 (2011-’14) to Gen 2 (2015-’17) Coyote wasn’t a monumental leap in technology, but when it came to the Gen 3, that’s a completely different story. The quad-cam Coyote was already an extremely efficient air pump, but the Ford engineers took things even further on the dual-fueled 2018-up engines.
The jump to direct injection was a bit of a learning curve for most auto manufacturers. Due to the inhomogeneous blending of air and fuel at low engine speeds, controlling engine emissions has become harder. Think of a mist sprayer (port injection) versus a pressure washer (direct injection). Even when using the intake manifold’s charge motion control valves to increase port velocity at lower engine speeds, the fuel was effectively spraying through the air and causing inconsistent air/fuel ratios.
The 2018 Coyote engine’s biggest differences (from a performance perspective) are the addition of direct injection with supplemental port injection and increasing the compression ratio from 11:1 to 12:1. Some car manufacturers that use supplemental port injection will spray the DI and port injectors together at low rpm, whereas the Gen 3 Coyote relies solely on the port injection at low loads, then adds in the direct injection as engine speed increases.
While this all sounds overly complicated, the system is rather contained, and the direct injection pump receives fuel from the port injection fuel rail. What this means for gearheads is that we no longer have to deal with direct injection injectors and pump lobes, allowing for a simple upgrade of the port injectors when additional fueling is required. (The factory port injectors on a 2018-up 5.0L is only 19 lbs per hour!) Sounds like a howling good idea to us!
Ok great, so swapping a 2018-up crate engine is complicated as hell, right? Not at all! It’s no more complicated than any previous generation Coyote, thanks to Ford’s M-6017-M50B controls pack kit ($1,699.99, street price). Though the 2018 Coyote engine is application-specific, it is still nearly plug-and-play after a few power and ground connections have been established. A standard fuel pump (with a higher static fuel pressure of 65 psi) supplies the rails just as previous generation Coyotes. One bit that might throw people off is the 2018’s dual-mass flywheel that can be simply exchanged for a standard 2011-’17 clutch/flywheel assembly.
The M-6007-M50C 2018 Coyote crate engine ($8,499.99, street price, new) is the exact motor found in any 2018-up Mustang GT. The methodology behind our testing was to follow the process in which an engine is normally modified. Here, we started with the 100-percent stock engine, down to the air box and catalytic converters. We will then add a JLT cold air intake on 91 octane, and later optimize for E85 fuel.
On The Dyno
Strapping down the 2018 Coyote on Westech’s engine dyno was no different than any other Coyote we’ve tested. Our engine fired up instantly and we could tell immediately that the Gen 3 is a much smoother running engine than earlier Gen-1 and -2 designs, thanks to charge-motion control valves built into the intake manifold. After a break-in cycle, we went WOT with the bone-stock calibration. This resulted in an astonishing 496.8 horsepower and 427.4 lb-ft of torque. That’s about 60 more horsepower than we see from previous-generation Coyotes. A big portion of that gain is the incrementally superior design of the 2018-up intake manifold, which we’ll cover at a later date. In any event, this third version of Ford’s Coyote reactor core offers impressive power on par with competitive offerings from Mopar (the 392ci Hemi crate at 485 hp for around $8,400) and Chevrolet Performance (the 6.2L small-block LT1 with 460 hp for around $7,800).
Cold Air Intake & Tuning
Oftentimes the first modification to a Mustang is an intake and exhaust. With no full exhaust on tap, we went straight to JLT’s cold air intake for 2018 Coyote Mustangs (part No. CAI-FMG-18, $349 street price). There are two methods for delivering denser, cooler air to a Coyote-equipped Mustang: a stock mass air flow (MAF) sensor housing diameter that normally doesn’t require a tune, or a larger MAF housing and intake pipe that requires a tune. With more air comes more horsepower, but the MAF curve in the software must be accounted for.
JLT uses a full 4.2-inch diameter intake tube with no taper to reduce any possible airflow restriction. JLT increases the overall MAF housing diameter 20mm. We went with the oiled filter, but JLT also offers a dry version as well. The cold-air intake installed on our Coyote’s throttle body in a matter of minutes and also included a different silicone coupler for the GT350 intake manifold testing we’ll be testing later. Eddie Rios of Addiction Motorsports used HP Tuners software to optimize our 91-octane tune for the new intake. All in, we broke 500 horsepower with 511.7 hp and 433.9 lb-ft of torque. That was a respectable gain of 14.9 hp and 6.5 lb-ft of torque.
Optimizing on E85
Cold air intake, check. What’s next? For most Mustang enthusiasts, it’s either headers or an E85 tune. With an E85 tune being the easiest, we opted for that. Westech Performance stocks a slew of Rockett Brand Racing fuels, but for our testing purposes, we were most interested in their balanced E85. Full bolt-on 2011-’17 Mustangs require an injector upgrade when moving to E85, but since the 2018 has both DI and port injection, there’s plenty of fuel margin to go around. A couple of partial pulls allowed Rios to get the timing and air-fuel ratio where he wanted it. Another solid gain put us at 532.5 hp and 451.1 lb-ft—an addition of 20.8 and 17.2, respectively.
Having dyno tuned several Coyotes, we were blown away by the power from such modest changes. If this were a Gen-1 Coyote, that kind of increase would costs us a Cobra Jet manifold and headers to barely outperform the numbers we’re already making. Keep watching Car Craft in 2019 as we bring you much more on Ford’s new Gen-3 Coyote crate offering because this Coyote is howling at the moon for more!
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