Lots of great opinions here. My son and I put a basically stock 351W 2V (converted to 4V with a set of shorty headers) engine in his '68 and it is a really nice driver. A bit more torque that is kind of fun. We didn’t want to build a car for shows, we built it to drive. It handles great with a larger front sway bar and the Shelby drop. Some day it will get some aluminum heads to let us raise the compression and EFI. In every respect it has greater potential than we need driving it the way we do. I think you would like it.
I have several FE powered Cougars and I love them. Torque is good. I love chirping the tires on the one / two shift. With the 2.79 rear axle they can also be Interstate cruisers of the first order. Very comfortable. Part of that is the very heavy engine in the nose. It just gives the car a sense of purpose.
My advice is to think about how you will actually use the car and then find a way to make your arm chair fantasies happy with that. It is so easy to look at big horsepower numbers and get excited about that… Then you end up with a car that won’t idle, that your wife doesn’t want to ride in cause it sounds like high school, that overheats at the slightest jam in traffic… And then it just sits.
A long time ago, actually I think I was a college sophomore, one of my friends had this little robin’s egg blue Triumph Spitfire roadster. It had a an 1150cc engine, maybe 70 horses on a good day. It had these little bitty skinny wheels with equally skinny tires. If you stacked all four of those tires in a pile it would have been about as wide as one N50 14 on the back of my high school Cougar. All the guys made fun of that car. After all we were into real cars and real performance. He just laughed us off.
The thing is, I never saw him driving that car alone. He always had some good looking young thing in the seat beside him. He even had one of those wicker picnic baskets to put on the trunk top luggage rack. We spent money on parts and fuel he spent money on cheap wine and cheese. We eventually realized that we had passengers to… usually another guy that liked the sound of those Thrush glass packs. If we were really cool the stereo was the only thing louder…
He would drive that car slowly through campus, some beautiful young thing, with the wind tugging at her pony tail, beaming next to him, the tiny four banger bubbling along with the ferocity of a popcorn popper. I watched in amazement as every young girl’s head was turned by that little car; didn’t they know it was slower than molasses? They seemed to not care. It was as if every coed on campus was of a single mind: I’ll have what she’s having.
My point, if I have one, is that more horsepower and better handling don’t always add up to more fun. I think my friend discovered that enough was enough. While we were all dreaming of the great times we would have AFTER we made all of those “improvements” he just went straight to having a good time.
Now I am a very, very, long way from trying to impress coeds, and also a long way from high school boy racer ambitions. Most of what I learned about both would be hopelessly obsolete now anyway. For me today it really is about the ride. And that means not turning my old cars into new cars. In the end I want them to retain the feel of the way they were. When people stop you, or wave at your old Cougar, they are saying: I want to have what he’s having. To each his own…