I’m intrigued by the V8s being dispatched here and in the other two installments (Men’s and Woman’s) in a story I started last month. These Ford V8s you see these days are official, because they came off the assembly line in Jan. 2018. Or did they? As I mentioned in the middle of this earlier installment, there are reports in Europe that they continue to be produced, especially the decent “Boss” model that Ford built from 1968 to 1979. People are aware of the non-overview aspects of this form of existence, I guess. If it were solely a matter of Ford keeping production lines open to pay for internal manufacturing; they’d be working at full tilt for not long. But this isn’t what’s going on.
There’s a clue tucked into the name of the V8: The Boss. It’s a moniker assigned to the supremely powerful 350+00 HP, 12-bar engine mounted in a 9.0in. grille that resembles an abstract drawing of the words “Dick Cheney” in reverse. See, the name was a pseudonym for technical director James Keland, who was responsible for much of Ford’s performance work on the night shift between 1966 and 1980. While the Boss has very little use outside of this in the books, we have it in the world of reality. The Boss is truly awesome.
Which brings us to the newer V8 you see here. It’s a, ahem, derivation of the Ford V8, a letter that roughly follows suit the Ford engine’s fan tip. But it’s a heck of a lot heavier. In normal models, these V8s range from between 397kW to 597kW. These are big numbers to everyone but the goodfellas: 494kW for the V8 N, 622kW for the S and 944kW for the T. Now, the 2000+ MPH-max gurus should be finding plenty of flexibility to consume at least those figures.
But let’s look at the big picture: Power as measured by time is increasing and diminishing with every Ford of course. Each time you read an article like this, you can read the “wow, that’s a lot of horsepower!” declaration while the “yeah, well, they actually do that” reaction is reading that declaration. Auto companies like Ford do well to engender both. Read down the line and things just get less and less impressive. We remember the Boss, but we don’t dwell in the past.