The Ford V8 So Fast a Government Tried to Ban It

The Ford V8 So Fast a Government Tried to Ban It

In 1972, an Australian newspaper ran a story about a car that didn’t exist yet.

It claimed Ford was about to sell ordinary people a sedan that could do 160 miles an hour.

Within weeks, politicians were debating it in Parliament.

A state government threatened new laws, and Ford quietly canceled the car before a single customer could buy one.

The thing they were all afraid of wasn’t the car.

It was the engine inside it.

This is the story of a Ford small block that was so good it embarrassed Ford’s own flagship engines, got handicapped by racing officials on three continents, scared a government into action, and then refused to die for another decade on the other side of the world.

This is the 351 Cleveland.

Act one, where it came from.

To understand why the Cleveland made so many people nervous, you have to understand the war it was born into, and that war started at the very top of Ford.

In February 1968, Henry Ford the second did something that stunned Detroit.

He hired the president of his biggest rival’s performance division, Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen, straight out of General Motors, and made him president of Ford.

Knudsen was a true believer in horsepower.

He’d helped build Pontiac and Chevrolet into performance powerhouses, and he brought that obsession with him, pushing hard for faster cars, bolder styling, and racing engines.

But there was already a brilliant, ambitious man at Ford who wanted the president’s chair for himself, Lee Iacocca, the father of the Mustang.

And in a company that insiders literally called Ford’s, possessive, as in the family’s private kingdom, there wasn’t room for two kings.

The knives came out.

On the night of September 10th, 1969, Henry Ford the second didn’t even fire Knudsen himself.

He sent his vice president of public relations, Ted Mecke, to Knudsen’s home with a message.

Mecke, “Henry sent me here to tell you that tomorrow will be a rough day at work.”

The next morning, Ford made it official.

Knudsen said, “I’m shocked.”

And Henry Ford the second replied, “I imagine you would be.”

To the press, Ford would only say, “Things just didn’t work out.”

Around the offices of Ford, they turned the company founder’s most famous line, “History is bunk.”

Into a grim little joke, “Bunkie is history.”

But here’s the twiSt. The performance programs Knudsen had been championing didn’t die with his career.

They were already too far along.

And the most important of them was a clean sheet engine being finalized at a plant in Brook Park, Ohio.

That plant gave the engine its name.

The 351 Cleveland was cast and assembled at Ford’s Cleveland engine plant number two, part of what Ford internally called the 335 engine family.

It arrived for the 1970 model year, and it created an instant identity crisis because Ford already had a 351.

The older one, the 351 Windsor, was built up in Windsor, Ontario, and it was a tall evolution of Ford’s trusty 289 and 302 small blocks.

When the new 351 showed up, mechanics couldn’t always tell them apart on paper.

Same displacement, totally different engine.

Ford had to issue a service bulletin just to sort out the confusion.

The fix was simple, name them after their birthplaces.

The Canadian one became the Windsor, the new American one became the Cleveland.

And on paper, they shared almost nothing but their bore spacing and their displacement.

A 4-in bore, a 3.5-in stroke, 351 cubic inches.

The difference was in the heads, and the heads were the whole point.

Ford’s engineers did something unusual.

Instead of standing the valves straight up in the combustion chamber, they canted them, tilting the intake and exhaust valves at angles, which let them carve out intake ports far bigger than anything Ford had ever put on a small block.

That’s a Chevy trick, right out of Canuteson Performance Engine Playbook.

The result was an engine that could breathe like a race motor.

At high RPM, it inhaled.

The trade-off?

Those ports were so big that down low at light throttle, the engine could feel lumpy and a little rough.

It wasn’t designed to idle politely.

It was designed to scream.

But the Cleveland was not perfect, and the man who’d later make that famous worked inside Ford.

Bill Barr, the chief engineer on Ford’s Boss 302 program, would become one of the Cleveland’s most credible critics.

He thought the block was too heavy, and he pointed at the oiling system, those main oil galleries that, pushed hard enough at racing RPM, could starve the bearings, as one of the real weaknesses in the design.

But here’s the part that tells you everything.

Even Barr loved the cylinder heads.

He loved them so much that the Boss 302, a different engine entirely, was essentially a small block Ford bottom end wearing a version of those very same Cleveland style canted valve heads.

The heads were that good.

The Cleveland reached its street car peak in 1971 in a single car.

The Boss 351 Mustang.

This was the hottest factory Cleveland ever built.

Solid lifters, a high-lift mechanical cam, an aluminum intake, four-bolt mains, forged pistons, 11:1 compression.

Ford rated it at 330 horsepower, and almost nobody believed that number.

Magazine testers ran the quarter mile and came away convinced the real figure was well north of the rating, that Ford was deliberately understating it.

The engine pulled hard past 6,500 revolutions per minute with a sound that started as a deep rumble and turned into a wail.

Ford built only about 1,806 of them.

And then, at the very moment the Cleveland hit its peak, the company that built it started backing away.

Because by 1971, the Cleveland had a problem that had nothing to do with engineering.

It was winning the wrong argument inside its own company.

Act two, the Civil War.

Here was the embarrassing truth Ford couldn’t say out loud.

The Cleveland was a mid-priced engine.

It sat below the big block 429 and 460 in Ford’s hierarchy, the expensive, heavy, prestigious motors that powered the flagship muscle cars and carried the top price tags.

And in the right configuration, the cheaper Cleveland could outrun them.

It was lighter.

It was cheaper to build.

It breathed better.

And it made the company’s premium hardware look slow.

For the executives whose careers were tied to those flagship engines, that wasn’t a triumph.

It was a threat.

How do you sell a customer the expensive engine when the mid-range one is faster?

How does marketing explain that?

The Cleveland had broken the internal logic of Ford’s entire performance lineup.

And there was a second front.

Ford had poured enormous investment into the Windsor engine family, and the Windsor plant sat across the border in Canada.

Now, an American-built engine was outshining it.

That meant plant politics, regional politics, jobs, and pride all tangled together.

Eventually, Ford made a compromise that pleased no one.

It would phase out the short, low Cleveland block in favor of a taller deck de-stroked version called the 351 M.

It unified production and cut costs.

Enthusiasts saw it as a downgrade, and they were largely right.

But, the thing that truly killed the high-performance Cleveland came from outside Ford entirely, and it hit at exactly the moment the engine was politically weakeSt. The early 1970s rewrote the rules of American driving.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 created the EPA and gave it the power to set emissions limits the industry had never faced.

And the Cleveland’s greatest strength was suddenly a liability.

Those huge, free-flowing canted valve ports, the very thing that made it breathe, made it harder to achieve the clean, controlled combustion the new rules demanded.

The features that made it fast made it dirty.

Cleaning it up meant compromising what made it special.

At the same time, insurance companies were pricing high-horsepower cars out of reach for young buyers.

Then, in 1973, the Arab oil embargo sent fuel prices soaring and turned the muscle car almost overnight from a dream into a liability.

Ford did what every American automaker did.

It slashed compression.

The Cleveland fell from 11:1 down to 8:1 and lower.

The power that made it remarkable drained away.

By 1974, the engine wearing the Cleveland name in American showrooms still bore the name, but its soul was gone.

The internal champions who’d fought for it had lost their only argument, that its performance was worth the political cost, because now the performance was gone.

But, out in the real world, away from Ford’s boardrooms, a 27-year-old engineer refused to accept that the Cleveland’s best days were behind it.

Act three, the Outlaws.

His name was Jack Roush.

Decades later, he’d be a NASCAR team owner legend known as the Cat in the Hat.

But in the early 1970s, he was a former Ford engineer running a small operation on the outskirts of Detroit with his partner Wayne Gapp.

When Ford pulled out of racing and cut the budgets, men like Gapp and Roush didn’t quit.

As one period magazine put it, these factory performance people retired to modest buildings on the outskirts of Detroit to devote their time and effort toward the preservation of the Boss 351 for Pro Stock.

Gapp and Roush saw what Ford hadn’t fully exploited.

Those incredible heads were being choked by the rest of the engine, the wrong intake, conservative cams, and exhaust ports that production car geometry had forced into an awkward shape.

So, in late 1972, they did something audacious.

They cut into the exhaust ports and welded on a custom aluminum plate that completely reshaped them for better flow.

According to their own 1975 press materials, that one trick, the welded exhaust port plate, was credited with transforming the 351 Cleveland’s breathing.

And the results speak for themselves.

By that account, in the 1973 and 1974 seasons, Ford machines running those reworked Cleveland style heads reached the final round in 13 of the 15 NHRA national events held, with Gapp and Roush entries in nine of those finals.

The wins piled up.

Gapp and Roush took the NHRA Pro Stock world championship in 1973 and the IHRA world championship in 1974.

The 351 Cleveland, the engine Ford had walked away from, was now beating Chrysler and Chevrolet at the top of the sport.

But then the rule makers noticed.

Pro Stock at the time ran on a pounds per cubic inch system.

Heavier minimum weights for certain engine and car combinations meant to keep the brands even.

And the Cleveland teams kept finding the loopholes.

Famously to exploit a weight break for longer cars, Gapp and Roush turned a two-door Maverick into a four-door, a homely thing nicknamed the Mexican taxicab, and won with it anyway.

Every time they found an edge, the officials moved the line.

Wayne Gapp himself summed up the whole era in one word.

It was a big headache.

He compared it to NASCAR shaving fractions of an inch off one brand’s spoiler, then another’s.

The weight breaks shifted constantly, and by the early 1980s, NHRA pushed Pro Stock toward a 500 cubic inch minimum.

A move that, among other things, ended the reign of the optimized small blocks like the Cleveland.

Now, were the rules rewritten to ban the Cleveland specifically?

Honestly, no.

The handicapping targeted all the dominant small blocks and the broader parity problem.

But the effect was real.

The Cleveland was good enough, often enough, that officials kept reaching for the rule book to slow it down.

That’s not a conspiracy.

That’s a compliment written in regulations.

And it wasn’t the only government that would reach for the rule book.

Because while Americans were burying the Cleveland, on the other side of the planet, it was about to become a national hero and a national panic.

Act four, the Australian war.

Ford Australia had its own problem and its own enemy, Holden.

The two brands fought a touring car war every year, and the biggest battlefield was the great endurance race at Mount Panorama, BathurSt. To win it, you needed a fast, durable sedan.

So, Ford Australia took the 351 Cleveland four-barrel and built it into the Falcon GT HO.

And they handed the lead car to a meticulous Canadian-born driver named Allan Moffat.

In 1970, Moffat won Bathurst in the XW Falcon GT HO Phase II, leading a Ford 1-2 finish.

Then came 1971 and the car that became legend, the XY Falcon GT HO Phase III.

At Bathurst that year, Moffat qualified on pole nearly 3 seconds clear of the next Falcon.

He then did something no one had ever done at that race.

He led the entire 500-mile event from start to finish.

He even refused to pit when a stray cardboard box plastered itself across his grill.

He set a race time record, beating the old mark by more than 20 minutes.

It was, by any measure, total domination.

Moffat himself called the Phase III one of the best cars in the world.

Two straight Bathurst wins, both powered by the 351 Cleveland.

Moffat would go on to take the 1973 Australian Touring Car Championship in the Phase III as well.

For a generation of Australians, the sound of a Cleveland-powered Falcon charging up Mountain Straight became the sound of motorsport.

And then Ford Australia decided to build something even more extreme.

That decision nearly blew up in their faces.

For 1972, Ford planned roughly 200 examples of a new homologation special, the XA Falcon GT HO Phase IV with an even hotter Cleveland, bigger valves, a wild cam, a Holley carburetor.

To qualify it for racing, they had to sell it to the public.

Then a motoring journalist named Evan Green wrote a story warning that Australian manufacturers were about to put 160 mph cars in the hands of ordinary buyers.

Holden and Chrysler had their own supercars in the pipeline, too.

The press dubbed it the supercar scare.

It exploded.

The story reached parliament.

The New South Wales government signaled it might use legislation and even leverage over government fleet contracts against manufacturers selling these dangerous road rockets.

Racing officials hinted the rules might change, too, which would make the whole expensive homologation exercise pointless.

In July 1972, Ford pulled the plug.

The Phase IV was canceled before it reached the public.

Only a tiny handful were ever completed, a few prototypes and race cars.

The fastest Cleveland-powered car Australia ever planned was effectively banned by newspapers and politicians before anyone could buy one.

Decades later, one of the surviving cars would draw a bid of around $2 million.

But here’s the beautiful irony.

The supercar scare killed the ultimate Cleveland, and yet the ordinary Cleveland just kept going.

On November 12, 1971, Ford Australia had begun building its own 351 Clevelands at its Geelong plant near Melbourne.

Over the years, Geelong produced well over a quarter of a million Cleveland V8s.

They even developed their own de-stroked 302 cubic inch version and special reinforced racing blocks, some of which were exported back to the United States.

When Ford USA stopped building Clevelands in 1974, the Italian exotic carmaker De Tomaso, whose mid-engined Pantera was Cleveland-powered, switched to Australian-built engines to keep its supercar alive.

The Australian Cleveland-powered Falcons, Fairlanes, LTDs, even trucks and Broncos well into the 1980s.

Tightening Australian emissions rules, especially the standard known as ADR 27A, eventually forced Ford Australia to drop the wild big-port four-barrel heads, just as American rules had.

The unbridled era ended there, too.

But, the engine Ford couldn’t sell, and racing officials kept handicapping, and a government helped scare off the road, that engine outlived every one of the forces that tried to contain it.

Act five, the legend.

So, why does the 351 Cleveland still inspire something close to devotion 50 years on?

Partly because of how it died.

It didn’t fail.

It wasn’t beaten by a better engine.

It was overtaken by the world changing around it.

Emissions law, insurance, an oil crisis, and corporate politics.

That’s the recipe for a legend, a thing that was killed at its peak, not in its decline.

Partly because so many people believe Ford never finished exploring what it could do.

By 1971, the Boss 351 had hinted at the ceiling, and then the ceiling was abandoned.

Enthusiasts have spent half a century asking, “What if they’d kept developing it?”

And partly because it belonged to everyone.

You didn’t need to be rich.

People pulled Clevelands out of wrecking yards and built monsters in their driveways.

It rewarded knowledge more than money.

In Australia, especially, it was never a relic.

It was the heart of the Falcon GTs and the touring cars that fought Holden at the toughest circuit on Earth.

For a whole country, it wasn’t just a V8.

It was their V8.

It burned bright.

It rewrote expectations and it left behind a following that keeps the legend alive.

The questions remain.

So, here’s what I keep wondering and I want to know what you think in the comments.

What if Knudsen had never been fired?

Would Ford have backed the Cleveland to its full potential instead of burying it in corporate politics?

What if the supercar scare had never happened?

What would an Australian Phase four, a 160 mile an hour factory sedan in 1972, have done to motorsport history?

And the big one, was the 351 Cleveland actually the best small block Ford ever built?

Better in its prime than the Windsor that replaced it and outlived it?

Or does the legend run hotter than the facts?