eBay Find: If You Want Ford 302 Tunnel Port Parts, Now Is Your Chance! Bare Heads And An Intake!


eBay Find: If You Want Ford 302 Tunnel Port Parts, Now Is Your Chance! Bare Heads And An Intake!

The Ford 302 tunnel port engine was really a glorious failure. Designed to take it to the competition in the SCCA Trans-Am series in the late 1960s the all-out effort from Ford engineers to make the most power possible out of a 302 succeeded in building a legend just not the one they wanted. SCCA rules for Trans-Am mandated that the parts used on the race cars had to be homologated on street gong cars as well. The plan Ford had was to build the nasty 12.5:1 compression race motors and then build a 10.5:1 street version to make themselves legal by the rules. The street version was never built because the race motor program was such a nightmare. The problem? Ok, the biggest problem? Revs.

As you can see, the ports are massive. They were fed by huge valves as well and in order to get the most out of these heads, engines had to rev to the moon. We have read that the TA Fords with this engine were 8,500-9,500 screamers and in the world of road racing that’s not really where you want to be to make your stuff live over the long term. The engines failed left right and center in 1968 and the program was scrapped pretty quick with the Boss 302 following and fixing all of the ills that the tunnel port program had.

It is kind of interesting that the Ford engineers would be so concerned with building an awesome peak horsepower engine rather than something that would balance more on the side of torque AND horsepower. Running these mills at their performance peak was weirdly their undoing because that peak was higher than K2!

This guy is selling a set of bare tunnel port heads and a perfect dual quad tunnel port intake manifold. Seriously, this stuff is awesome and none of it appears to have ever been used before. Perhaps they were purchased from a dealer for a Trans Am build that never happened? We cannot say for sure but we can say that if you are building a vintage racer and you want to rev your stuff to the sky and have one of the coolest engines at the track, these things could be your ticket!

eBay: Ford dream parts stash! 302 tunnel port heads and matching dual quad intake


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3 thoughts on “eBay Find: If You Want Ford 302 Tunnel Port Parts, Now Is Your Chance! Bare Heads And An Intake!

  1. Dale

    I read that when the program was dropped, the remaining engines and spare parts were sold through Ford dealers and Ford parts wholesalers (Gratiot etc.) CHEEP.

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