The Misunderstood BOSS 429

Today at Unity Motorsports Garage we're going to dive into the Boss 429, the most

misunderstood

Ford engine of all time, so stay tuned, but to do this we have to go back to 1964 for some Nascar history. Mopar had been competing with the 426. Useless wedge against the Ford 427, so Chrysler set out to put hemi-style cylinder heads on the raised block 426 to create the 426 hemi and that kept things running at a brisk pace behind the car. safety Gold Smith number 26, Plymouth and Petty number 43. plymouth front row junior johnson number three dodge and pardo number 54 plymouth second string the white flag one more lap to go and richard petty still moves easy and strong richard has one last lead over second two laps over third and fourth the crowd applauds as richard petty in his number 43 takes the checkered flag and leaves richard petty walked into the winner's circle like his father did five years ago the jubilant petty team runs To greet him, this is their victory, too, they who have worked so much and so hard for the great one, this has been a great show for Plymouth, who ran one, two, three, Hardy was second and Goldsmith, third.

Ford didn't take this lightly, they knew if you won on Sunday you sold cars on Monday, so that led to the development of the 90. Wonder of the day, the big 427 sohc engine developed a ton of horsepower, but bill france of Nascar realized what was coming and decided to ban these new exotic engines for 1965, leaving the hemi and 427 sohc without a place to compete. The 1965 racing season was pretty much a runaway season for Ford and Mercury, as Chrysler was out of the picture, they focused their efforts on drag racing, so Ford went back to the 427 FE engine and did very well, in fact. , they stayed with that power. planted until 1969 in different configurations, but set things in motion for what was to come in the late 1960s, it was evident that ford was going to need a new engine to remain competitive against the hemi in the nascar era wars. bunkie nudeson. had just arrived from GM in 1968 and gave the mandate to build an engine that could dominate Nascar, which led to the

boss

429, but to make it legal for competition they had to install that engine in 500 cars, which led to the

boss

429 .mustang, the problem was they didn't install it on the cars soon enough so they left in the middle of the 1969 season running the 427 tunnel port, when you want to be the best you look for the best and that's exactly what which Ford did in 1969. he went and lured richard petty out of the chrysler camp and for the first time petty blue was now ford blue this led to a star cast in 1969 you had richard petty kell yarborough david pearson donnie allison and leroy yarborough this led to total dominance in 1969 One of the small details left out about the Boss 429 is the fact that Ford hired Holley Carburetors to develop a special carburetor just for that engine, hence the Dominator was born and, in fact, powered them to his first victory in Atlanta with Cale.

Yarborough, who are you about to see, Kell, you are here in Atlanta with a new Mercury, the first time it was raced this year and with a new engine, and I'm sure there have been some problems, well, they have for us, Chris, this new one. The Mercury spoiler also looks like it's going to be a really good race car and of course we have the new 429 Boss engine which looks like it's going to do a really good job for us but after we lost the car at Daytona , it was a total. loss, we had to build a new car, we were three days late, we arrived at the race track, but it seems that the Wood brothers are catching up quickly, so the car today is running very well and we are delighted. with this in the final lap in the final stretch the checkered flag is raised for kale yarborough everyone standing receives the box and here comes david pearson and he gets the box also finishes hello again last year this year three in a row what kind of a race, this was it, it was a tough race, so to me, it seemed like the longest race I've ever run.

I would come out in the lead and we even had two laps once, but uh, and I just tried to take it easy, but everything went well, good crew, wheelchairs did a fantastic job and this new hemi-powered Mercury Cyclone did a great job. work and everything related, you would think that with all the success that came from the Nascar supertracks, that would transfer to the street, well it didn't happen that way, the Boss 429 mustangs could barely reach the 13 second range in the quarter mile and there are many things that cause this, but it also leads to another problem that many other professional runners try to solve.

Use this engine and they didn't have much luck either, so that's where the story will go. From here you'll find out what made it great and what I wanted to give a big shout out to Sam Oxier Jr. for drag racing legend, he took the time to talk to me about the shortcomings of the boss 429 in both street application and drag racing. drag You see, he ran everything from 427 tunnel ports to 427 sohcs and the boss 429, and with his experience he was able to tell me why he thought it had failed, Ford engineers did everything they could to tame this Nascar racing engine good enough to be able to put it in the mustang.

They put a 735 cfm holly in it with a hydraulic cam and other small changes, but people complained. about this, since the engine had slow performance and was actually slower than the cobra jet cars, the first engine was designated code s, then the engineers came up with a mechanical cam and made changes to the rotating assembly to try to lighten it and that engine is called code t, you would think with those huge hemi heads that that would be one of its strongest attributes when in fact on the street and race track it turned out to be one of its biggest obstacles, the ports were too big. to be able to fill the cylinders with the air charge necessary to generate good torque when I spoke to Sam about the boss 429, he informed me about the company policy that was involved in this, you see that Ford was no longer making the cam they wanted that everyone went. to the latest and greatest boss 429 and what always looks good on paper doesn't mean it will match the gains on the track and that is the main case with this engine, the engine did not respond to typical modifications as you might think.

The assembly was too heavy, it didn't respond to induction or cam shifts and that's because the heads were designed to run wide open on supertracks, many racers just gave up and went back to the cam because they knew it worked . It wasn't until a few years ago that racers figured out how to run this engine. Ohio George Montgomery had great success with Mr. Gasser's cam with the 427 cam with the 671 supercharger. He won the 1969 nationals at Indy, but when he was forced to. To run the boss 429, he decided to take a completely different route with twin turbos; in fact, he was so impressive that the nhra banned him in 1975 because he won the 73 and 74 Gator Nationals with the turbocharged boss 429, a development of the boss in the mid-1970s. nhra pro stock heavily favored small block combinations on small chassis and nascar moved from big blocks to small blocks in 1975.

This did not create a home for the boss engine and that all changed in 1982 when the nhra imposed a 500 cubic inches and that brought the boss 429 back into the spotlight and it was going to be better than ever, the boss returned in 1981 when none other than ronnie sox drove the ford mustang in ihra pro stock. won the championship, so that was the first championship that was won with the 429 boss in the 1982 season. Bob Glidden was building a Ford Exp car. It was originally intended to run the Cleveland-based 351 engine, but when the changes in the rules, he discovered he realized he was going to have to build a 500 cubic inch engine from scratch and put it in this car, which created all kinds of handling problems.

Having 500 cubic inches under these heads made a huge difference and with Bob and Edna Glidden's tuning they took this to the next level when the t-bird chassis came out, they won every championship from 1985 to 1989. If that's not something What to be proud of, I don't know what it is, while boss 429 may have had a misunderstanding in his story. It's also possibly one of the coolest engines of all time and history has been very kind to this engine and it's now a Ford legend, so I hope you like this video and until next time, I'm Andy from Unity Motorsports, see you later.