When we first laid our eyes on this 1977 Ford Granada, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that despite being over 40 years old, it was in great shape. The bad news was under the hood, it was having a lot of mechanical issues. This car had clearly seen better days before we found it symbolically positioned across from a graveyard. So we made it our goal to not just bring this Granada back to life, we were going to catch everyone off guard once you put your foot on the throttle.
At first, the plan was to merely fix up the Granada to be road-worthy again. But then we had the bright idea of transforming it into the most unlikely sleeper car you’d ever see! Because the car itself was already in good condition, we turned our focus to giving it a long list of aftermarket performance upgrades.
Of course, we can’t have a project without something going wrong. It just so happens that the wall we ran into also happened to be the beating heart at the center of this project. The plan was to rework the Granada’s stock engine, which also happened to be in good shape. So what went wrong? The cylinder heads we ordered were not compatible with the engine we intended to work on. Thankfully for us, we had another small block from a previous project (which was already thirty over) that we could use in its place. All that we really had to do was build it back up and camouflage it with some of the original parts to play into the deception of a sleeper.
So once we felt our Spicy Sleeper Granada was ready for the road, we actually conducted two tests. The first was in “street mode” where we casually drove around town like it was just another Ford Granada, and nothing else. Then we went over to “drag strip mode” where we took it to the drag strip to see what kind of numbers we could produce. Fair to say that once the final round of testing was done, we were left very impressed!
