WE need to put a stop to this 5 HP more than a GT crap.
Mickey D'Armi wrote this in his response to one of my e-mails to Team Mustang. "We have some very strict requirements here at Ford for measuring "advertisable" horsepower, and when the final production engines were certified under those guidelines, we were only able to advertise 265 HP for the Bullitt." (6/26/01) Notice he says advertisable, not actual. Big difference in light of the 99 Cobra fiasco. That's Ford's legal dept, covering A in case the Bullitt didn't produce as expected.
Art Hyde added this in another message, "We had a choice -- delay production while we sorted out the test issue or go to production because the cars did deliver what we wanted -- customers have gotten 1/4 mi times of 13.7 @ 100mph with stock tires as a validation of the performance. At the time we had to make this choice, we had 3000+ orders and because of the short build duration of the program, the delay probably would have meant we could not even build that quantity of vehicles in total." (6/27/01)
It makes sense that rather than satisfying the legal eagles they chose to satisfy those of us with standing advance orders.
To bad the Honda Ricers haven't read any of this, nor have they met our club champ JBVobra. They'd change their mids about the Bullitt being a 14.2 car.