Rare 4-Cylinder Muscle: 1985.5 Ford Mustang SVO

A four-cylinder Mustang wouldn’t normally be something you would think of as a collectible, but every rule has an exception, and this one comes with the letters “SVO” attached. “Special Vehicle Operations” is what that spells out to, and it was Ford’s internal skunkworks back in the 1980s, producing special versions of various Ford models, including the familiar Mustang. If that’s starting that raises your interest, check out the 1985.5 Mustang SVO that Tony Primo found for us.

Special Vehicle Operations was founded at Ford in 1980 expressly to enhance the company’s involvement in motorsports. They tuned cars for both IMSA and SCCA road racing. In 1984, the group inaugurated a limited production run of Mustangs, which were sold by Ford dealers from 1984-86. Later in the 1985 model year, 400 or so of these were tweaked to produce the max horsepower for the run, 205. 1986 models made due with 200 hp. All were turbo-charged four-cylinders which benefitted from special factory tuning to wring max power out of 2.3 liters of engine. Also involved was the use of an air-to-air intercooler to make the intake charge more dense and hence increase performance. Add to that a small shopping-cart’s worth of enhancements, like a Hurst-shifted 5-speed, Koni shocks, and four-wheel disk brakes, and you’re out on the exotic edge for the day. Over three model years, about 10,000 buyers agreed that this car, despite the familiar turbo lag of its force-fed engine, was worth taking home. That wasn’t enough for the company to continue the Mustang SVO experiment into the later years of the 1980s, however.

You could geek out on the technical aspects of this Mustang as a pinnacle of domestic engineering (for the time) in a day when the Mustang GT 5-liter V8 produced the same horsepower from a much larger displacement. Or you could make this your new collectible for its own sake. This version, despite having passed over 93,000 miles, is remarkably clean. The paint is original. The bi-plane rear wing, often seen starting to distort in shape with age, looks straight and perfect. Under the hood, with lots of space left to spare, sits a decently clean engine, about right for the Thursday night cruise crowd to admire. The interior, too, is in great shape. If you did end up just driving the car as a unique way to get around, there’s nothing you’d have to do to make it easy to live with.

A Mustang GT coupe in this model year cost about $10,200. This car would have been nudging $15,000. So an asking price of $8500 is in the middle of the depreciation curve, a good spot to grab up a car that will eventually increase in value. I’ve heard Seattle is beautiful this time of year, so maybe a trip up there, whether you buy the SVO or not, would be a nice idea. Check out this ride here on craiglist, where the seller also includes a history of the model and some of its technical features.