[David Briggs]

My birthday was the 4th of Jan and to celebrate my Crew Chief, Doreen and I went up to Anaheim to pick up a Four Cam Ford for the Indy car.
This engine came out of A J Foyts shop back in the late 90''s and was built and dynoed by Louis Unser.
As you can see it has an unusual color scheme for a race motor ( I am sure that Jac Mac will be excited by this) that is certain to be duplicated by Historic Racers everywhere!
It will come as no surprise when I explain that the engine was rebuilt and pimped out (that is real Gold plating!) to go in( no surprise here) a Pantera!
Much developement time was done on the dyno and an electronic distributor was designed and built (with 2 pickups, more on that later) and also electronic injection.
The engine actually made it into the Pantera but it was finally decided that a 255 ci engine that idled at 2000plus RPM and developed no torque below 6500 was probably not a good choice for a 3200 lb car and it was pulled and set on a shelf for the last 10 years.
This engine became very successful for Ford and eventually morphed into the later Cosworth Ford V8's.
This engine, when running on gas, has ignition timing(at 2000 RPM) set at 51 degrees before top dead center! a little less running on methonal and nitro. The thinking behind this is that Ford felt there would be a 1 degree retard/1000 RPM (loss in the electronics) and at 9000 the timing would be about 46. And that leads to the second pickup in the distributor which retards the timing so that the engine is easier to start.
I will run it on the original Hilborn injection set up and the electronic dist (not magnetos).