Canadian fabricator Kyle Scaife has created a monster. He did what would be considered unthinkable to many purists by mixing the genes of Ford and Chevrolet’s most iconic performance cars into one hot rod that looks like nothing else on the road.
It started with a 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda that Scaife worked on in the shop where he works. It sat on bags and had a Viper V-10 engine. It was in the shop around the time Ken Block’s Gymkhana 7 came out which stars an all-wheel drive 1965 Mustang. These two custom cars inspired Scaife to do a build of his own.
He set out to look for something cool and wasn’t dead set on a Mustang. The car that ended up working for the body was a 1967 Mustang with no engine or transmission. The powertrain for the build came from an unlikely donor, a 1999 C5 Chevy Corvette with a 5.7-liter LS1 V-8 with a salvage title that Scaife picked up for just $6,000. Scaife says he’s planning on doing some modification to the stock LS1 engine at some point. He says he’s considering one or two turbochargers or just bolt-on mods.
He decided to buy a whole car rather than just an engine so it could provide other necessary parts like a transmission, wheels, suspension, etc. Had he just bought a Ford Coyote V-8 engine, it would have cost him about the same as a whole Corvette.
Scaife says he’s a fabricator, not a mechanic, so the mechanical work was more of a challenge than the body work for him. The car sits on a custom tube frame designed and built by Scaife. It was a learning experience and the end result is a unique build that appears to be exactly what he was going for.
Follow @mustangkyle on Instagram for more. What are your thoughts on this crossbreed?