My 1989 and 1992 Mustang LX 5.0s: Meet Thing 1 and Thing 2 – A Dose Of Double Trouble!

Thing 1: “Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars . . . ”

By June of 1993, my time working at LCP, and living in Rochester, appeared to be coming to a close. I was nearing the one year mark in a long-distance relationship with a woman in Southern California.

Earlier in our relationship, she offered to move to Rochester if I couldn’t move to SoCal at that time. I saw no reason for her to relocate to Rochester when all the opportunities were in California. This realization made the decision easier: time for me to hit the road. Go West, young man!

Regardless of one’s car interests — import, domestic, vintage, modern, off-beat, mainstream, custom, stock, or “all of the above” — SoCal had a “scene” for you. Each Orange County AutoTrader issue contained a Christmas catalog’s worth of tempting vintage purchase options; I circled multiple ads on nearly every page.

Beyond that, I found many other things to enjoy: abundant sunshine (the consistency of California weather was remarkable to this Rochestarian), lack of humidity (ditto), and many future Curbside Classics used as daily drivers.

One thing I didn’t enjoy were the traffic metering stop lights on the highway on-ramps. We didn’t have these in Rochester. I quickly learned that if the light was green, it was smooth sailing; if it was red, you stopped (Who stops on an on-ramp?) and waited for the green.

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When the red light changed to green, that was the cue to stoke the coals, stand on it, floorboard it, hotfoot it, blow doors, whatever you want to call it, as one (hopefully) quickly merged onto a packed highway where most of the motorists were hauling some serious ass.

Welcome to big-city traffic management.

 

Somewhat unnerved by the traffic volume and speed, I quickly deduced that only one reasonably priced car was up to this challenge: the Mustang LX 5.0 coupe, also referred to as a “notchback” or “trunk” model. Yes, like the Special Service Package (SSP) Mustang the police used as highway pursuit cars. If it was good enough for the police, it was good enough for me.

 

I somehow overlooked the fact that, if such a car was needed for safe highway merging, everyone in SoCal would have been driving LX 5.0s, which they certainly were not. But, with the intent of being a future “good Californian,” I‘d decided getting one was the answer to this highway merging concern.

Five-oh Fever for Frugal, Fleet Flyer

Beyond being a good Californian, at age 26 I was still (apologies to Aaron Severson) “ate up with motor.” Interested primarily in eight cylinder engines, I was easily intoxicated by the 5.0L’s prodigious torque, smooth power delivery, and a stock exhaust note that improved even on that of my friend Mike’s ‘82 GT. Ford had improved the GT each year after ‘82, then rolled out a more comprehensive model-wide refresh in ‘87. While an LX 5.0L package had been available since 1984, the ‘87 and later versions had a higher profile and were marketed as “budget performance.”

Join the Club

Four people just in my immediate circle had 5.0L Mustangs. My best friend John bought a terrific Oxford White ‘91 LX hatchback brand new, Mike moved on from his ‘82 GT to an ‘85 GT that was a bit of a “work in progress,” as in, the “work” we did on it “in” the overnight hours made little “progress.” My friend Lou had a sleek black ‘90 LX hatchback. Mike’s younger brother Matt had an immaculate Bright Red ‘85 GT that always looked brand new.

In June ‘93, I finally joined the club with my ‘89 coupe that I bought from an LCP co-worker and friend.

 

Bright Red with a Scarlet Red interior was not my preferred color combo, but at $5,500, the price was right and it only had 30,000 miles. Then, as now, I was nothing if not thrifty.

 

However, excessive thrift can lead to cutting corners, which is not a good thing. With that in mind, a few observations about this particular car:

1. Four years of outside parking had done both the interior and exterior no favors.
2. No air conditioning did me no favors.
3. Without A/C and power windows, it presented as a bit of a “special order strippo speedster special.”

Snap, Crackle, Pop

In all 5.0 Mustangs from this period, what one paid for was its fabulous powertrain; not fit and finish, not quality control, not interior ambience, not suspension tuning, not chassis rigidity.

 

Add a side of long-amortized tooling costs, and Ford could profitably sell them at a price that delivered a high “performance-to-price” ratio. In 1989 alone, of 209,769 Mustangs sold, 104,709 buyers chose the 5.0 in either LX or GT trim, a 50% take rate.

You want a cheap, fast car? Here you go — it’s cheap and fast. Don’t ask for anything else. Like the restaurant “specials” menu says: No substitutions.

In reality, it wasn’t much better than my ‘79 Capri. For example:

• Chintzy-squeaky interior plastics: While the redesigned-for-‘87 dashboard was an aesthetic improvement over the earlier cars, the interior materials themselves were still largely hard, brittle plastics. Look, but do not touch. As a coupe, my car was actually less squeaky than my friends’ Mustang hatchbacks.
• Top of the (body) pops: This was a vehicle behavior I’d never experienced previously. Nor had I heard the term until I visited my local Ford dealer and described a particular noise I heard multiple times one night on the way home from work. The shop foreman nodded. “Yep. Body pops,” he said, in a manner that implied this behavior was apparently both as common and immutable as the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

This is a four year-old car with 30,000 miles? I asked myself. Remember, cheap and fast. No substitutions.

• Chariot race chassis: The car rode reasonably well on smooth roads with the stock 15-inch wheels, but on the rough patches, the suspension lost its composure and went into full “crash-bang” mode. The Fox platform’s lack of structural rigidity forced the suspension engineers to overcompensate to make the car “handle.” Thanks, Mister Fairmont.

 

• Clingy clutch: The OEM clutch really wasn’t up to even the stock 5.0’s torque. Sometimes, the pressure plate didn’t fully disengage, which provided a soggy-feeling clutch pedal and a shifter reluctant to go into gear. It wasn’t caused by my juvenile antics; I was (seriously) not a “burnout” kind of guy.

 

Other items of note: The disc front/drum rear brakes were merely adequate for daily driving; nowhere near the equal of the car’s hyper-accelerative capabilities. Remember, cheap and fast . . . you know the rest.

Speaking of fast, the car felt spooky and unsettled at higher speeds. I spent very little extended time at speeds over 80-85 mph; the steering wandered and the front-end felt ready to fly. Not exactly autobahn-approved. Nein!

But, on a warm summer night after work, with the windows down, as I wound it out through second and third gears down one of Route 104’s particularly long and straight on-ramps, all was (temporarily) forgiven. It was a good thing that Ford teamed a gutsy V8 with a 5-speed manual and Traction-Lok rear axle, then put it all in a lightweight, somewhat janky, chassis.

Long Story Short

June bled into July, then July into August. As I commuted that particularly humid summer, I questioned my wisdom of purchasing a car without A/C.

 

Actually, I questioned my wisdom on many things, particularly moving across the country. I’d previously wrestled with anxiety during unfamiliar or transitional events; this situation was no different. As in past instances, I didn’t know it was “anxiety” per se; all I knew was, the closer the departure date became, the more wound up I felt. Also, I had a lot of “what if’s” on my mind.

 

The plan was that she’d fly to Rochester and we’d drive to SoCal together, like a Route 66 trip. As the date drew closer, our phone calls got a little prickly. She felt I wasn’t coordinating trip logistics quickly enough; I felt there was plenty of time and no need for her to squawk about it. I mentioned possibly selling my guitar and amp to raise extra funds. When I changed my mind, she seemed annoyed, as if I wasn’t willing to sacrifice.

Mostly, I just worried: about money, about our relationship, about leaving my folks, about everything.

In the end, my intuition set me straight. When I finally listened, it told me that:

1. She was stressed about me moving out, now that it was close to happening.
2. Her main concern was that we’d arrive in SoCal days early, so she’d be on time the first day of her first “professional” job.
3. She sounded unsure that things would work out between us.
4. By then, I knew things weren’t going to work out between us.
5. I was not an opportunist and wouldn’t take advantage of her and her family just to relocate to SoCal.
6. “Not gonna work out” + “Not an opportunist” = Abort Mission!

So, a little over a week before my last day of work, I withdrew my resignation letter. That night on the phone, as our conversation again grew contentious and my patience wore thin, I dropped the bomb: I’d withdrawn my resignation and wasn’t coming out.

After that declaration, some not very nice things were said, haha. But, such is the price of freedom.

Seasons Change

Not going was 100% the right call. I was way too uptight and anxious about a situation that should have been fun. While disappointed over our acrimonious breakup, I basked in the relief of no longer wrestling with the Demon of Doubt. I felt like I did after taking the last final exam of the school year—not a thought in my head.

Well, there was one thought. I found myself in September 1993 with an ‘89 LX 5.0 coupe, still living in Rochester, and pondering autumn’s imminent arrival, which meant winter was not far away. If I’d known in June that I’d be staying in Rochester, I would have never bought the car.

No Go

It was the worst choice one could make in western New York for a four-season car. Snow tires, second gear starts, weight added to the trunk, none of it really mattered. With three 75 lb. sandbags in the trunk, I received no additional traction and a trunk liner gritty with sand grains for my effort.  The car was simply too light and had too much torque. I toughed it out, but it was a handful every time.

One blustery night, on my way home from LCP, I tried two different routes to get home before succeeding on the third route. The other two failed when the grade of the road became steep enough to limit traction. Slow attack, rolling attack, “as fast as I could go in the conditions” attack. Didn’t matter, I always lost traction about halfway up each road.

 

Contrary to my wife’s opinion, I’ll take an automatic over a manual every time in snowy conditions when both vehicles lack traction control. In my experience, it’s much easier to get an automatic to crawl along in snow. There was no crawling in the snow in this car.

As the weather deteriorated at the end of 1993, I decided the LX needed to go on its way. It was a reminder of a plan in which I’d invested a lot of time, money, emotion, and anxiety (!), but that didn’t pan out.

But along the way, inexplicably, I talked myself into the idea that my LX 5.0 adventure was unsatisfying because I had cut corners and not bought a nice enough one (!). Don’t ask me; even today, I don’t know how this occurred.

 

So, being a complete delusional dum-dum, on a raw February afternoon in 1994, I handed off Thing 1 and accepted delivery on Thing 2 at Macedon Ford.

Thing 2: I truly am a dum-dum

Thing 2 was quite a fetching sight, if you like Fox body Mustang coupes. An 11,000-mile ‘92 model (of course — if one goes dum-dum, one must go full dum-dum) in Wild Strawberry Clearcoat Metallic, with a Titanium interior. My friend Mike took one look and declared it a “keeper.”

 

The original owner had even purchased a 72-month Ford extended warranty. I paid a pittance to transfer it to me, and figured between the original and extended warranties, I was protected for any unforeseen circumstances.

Not Today

Yeah, not so much. While the car generally ran fine and avoided any catastrophic issues, not surprisingly it wasn’t any better in the snow than my ‘89. The 16-inch five spoke alloys and tires rode worse than the 15-inch wheels over broken pavement. The OEM Michelins wore oddly and made the steering wheel judder. So, I got a new set of Michelins . . . and the steering wheel still juddered.

 

One day a portion of the tension spring on the driver’s side door hinge spontaneously broke off the hinge, then clanged on the blacktop as I opened the door. Puzzled, I picked up the broken piece and studied it. I assumed it was a victim of metal fatigue.

 

This is a two year-old car with 11,000 miles? I asked myself. Remember, cheap and fast. No substitutions.

“Maybe you just can’t drive Mustangs”

But the real clincher was the “Possible Driveline Lash Mystery,” or the “Clutch Mystery,” or the “’Whatever the hell it was’ Mystery”, since it was never solved.

About 25% of my shifts felt abrupt and clunky, as if I’d let the clutch pedal out too quickly near the end of its engagement point, although I didn’t. Shifting and clutching slower didn’t help. Neither did shifting and clutching quicker, not pushing the clutch pedal 100% to the floor, or any of the other 10 tricks I tried.

I went to multiple dealers, eager to put my Ford extended warranty to work. One tech confirmed the behavior but had no idea how to find the cause. The shop foreman at another dealer told me, “Maybe you just can’t drive Mustangs. Me, I can’t drive F-250s.”

I thought my head was going to pop-off.

I drove all my friends’ 5.0s over the years and never had a problem with driveline engagement. My best friend John once told me, as I drove his white ‘91 hatchback, that I drove it better than he did. “Maybe you can’t drive Mustangs” was not going to earn that dealer any praise from me on the owner experience survey.

The Beginning of the End

I’d been driving the car for about eight months by then, liking it less and less every day. One swelteringly muggy August day in 1994, I stopped at a Ford dealer to check out a new SN-95 style Mustang GTS coupe. The GTS was supposed to be the SN-95’s equivalent of the departed LX 5.0 trim. As an avowed cheapo, I wanted to check it out.

 

I took it around the block and was unimpressed. It was quiet and felt well-assembled, but had lost the “edge” that had made the Fox body ones exciting to drive. The updated interior was short on visibility, lacking the airy feel of the LX 5.0 coupe. My post-test drive assessment was that Ford had “Monte Carlo-ized” the Mustang.

But, I drove another car from their lot that afternoon. My friend Mike knew someone that had this same car in a different color. After he took theirs around the block, he gushed to me about this car all spring and summer.

Mike’s enthusiasm was on my mind as I asked the salesman about taking this car for a test drive. I’ll just say it made quite an impression on me as well; the kind that lingers like a fond memory. Could this be my next car? We’ll find out in the next installment.

 

Related CC reading:

Curbside Classic: 1979 Ford Mustang – A Fresh Start

Curbside Classic: 1979-1982 Ford Mustang – A Clean Break

Curbside Classic: 1993 Ford Mustang LX Sedan – Beating The Odds