We few brave souls that make up the tech side of things over here at Stage 3 Motorsports have started on our own mid-generation website facelift. While we're pretty good at our jobs, our improvements aren't going to get you any more horsepower or project a giant Stage 3 logo onto your ceiling from the back of your monitor. Still, we're pretty sure you'll like some of the changes we're making to make your life and online shopping a little easier. Most importantly, we're adding a new ''Top Sellers'' sub-category to each of our main site sections. As the name implies, these categories will list all of our best-selling Mustang performance parts for a given time span and give you an idea of what kind of gear is propelling your competitions to quick times around the track or at the drag strip. Currently, we have our 2012 GT/ V6 Mustang Top Sellers, our 2007 to 2012 GT500 Top Sellers, and our 2005 to 2009 Mustang GT Top Sellers up and running with the rest coming as quickly as possible (hopefully before Stage 3's big move). Each category contains many common Mustang performance parts including the usual hodge-podge of cold air intakes, exhaust kits, and body accessories, but the top items in each section are what's most interesting.
The performance parts that an owner of any particular car not only comment on some that vehicle's shortfalls from the factory, but on the general strengths of those cars to begin with. By taking the top three ''best-sellers'' from each of our Top Seller categories we get a picture of each generation's strengths and flaws and a bit of look into the minds of their drivers:
First up, we have the 2005 to 2009 V8 Mustangs. You'd assume that the Mustang generation stuck with the fairly weak 4.6L Modular V8 would stack on massive power-adders to keep up with the hearty 5.0L V8 of 2011 and up GT Mustangs, but you'd be wrong. The top selling items for the first of the S197s are the ROUSH rear wing, ROUSH rear springs, and the ROUSH Complete Suspension kit. Unsurprisingly, all three Top Sellers are from our good friends over at ROUSH, but the wing is a bit of a mystery. It does look good, and maybe that's all it needs. The rear end of the pre-facelift S197s was always a little bland and adding some stylish texture is always a good thing. The suspension upgrades, especially the complete kit, make a lot more sense. While the 300 flywheel horsepower levels were adequate for excellent straight line performance, throwing a heavy, rear-wheel drive Mustang with lots of power has always been a bear, and eliminating body roll, increasing chassis stiffness, and altering the spring rates and ride height in one fell swoop makes that heaviness disappear, helping to keep the Mustang between the lines and give it a more enjoyable feel.
The 2007 to 2012 GT500s present a little bit different of a story than the ''more standard'' GT Mustangs. The top three selling products for the GT500s are the ROUSH Cat-back exhaust kit, the Steeda Ultimate Induction Pak, and the Steeda Power Pak. If a GT500 is one thing, it's audacious. Why not make it more so? The ROUSH Cat-back adds sound, and both of the Steeda packages add huge power gains onto the already massive 550 flywheel horsepower of the GT500's supercharged 5.4L V8. If you've spent the money on a GT500 in the first place, you might as well make sure everyone within five square miles knows it.
The new 2011 to 2012 Mustangs actually prove a little bit tougher to decipher. The top three products for the newest Mustangs are an SCT X-Cal 3 Tuner with a Stage 3 custom tune, DG Custom's hood struts, and DG Custom's Headlight Splitters. The tuner makes perfect sense. Not only do you get a handy device that can read trouble codes, but Stage 3 Motorsports' own custom tuning can pull an extra 30 horsepower out of your Mustang with just a reflash alone, while qualifying you for our Loyalty Tunes Program that gets you free tunes for life on selected tunable products that you buy from Stage 3 Motorsports. I can at least understand DG Custom's hood struts. They're good hood struts and the prop rod should have been left behind in the late '60s. Why our customers are just now declaring war on the crappy hood prop is beyond us. The headlight splitters may seem silly at first. They're almost a trivial little bit of hardware that adds a small touch that most people don't really notice. What the splitters really say is that the post-facelift S197s are beautiful and are arguably some of the most gorgeous cars to have rolled off Ford's assembly lines. You don't need to do much to these cars. 412 crank horsepower is plenty for most, but a little extra from a tune is all well and good. Small tidbits like the headlight splitters simply add on to the aggressiveness of the body styling without drawing attention away. And the hood struts? Well, screw the hood prop.
Then again, this is just our opinion, and we'll see how the paradigms shift as time goes on and the new model years are released. We plan on keeping up with our ''Top Seller'' categories and updating the products on a regular basis, so make sure to check back fairly often. Something you may also notice with our 2011 to 2012 Mustang GT Top Sellers is our new template. We're testing it out here first, and while it's a small change, it has less clutter and better pictures that will eventually help us clean up the entire site. Contact us to let us know what you think or to place your order for some of your Top Selling Mustang performance parts. We'll be adding a brand new 2013 Mustang section here shortly, on top of a few other changes that we're not quite ready to reveal yet.
