You don't think there's a chance Ford surprises us by sneaking a few very late 2017s in like they did with those very limited 2015 GT350s?
Agreed! I did the same thing with a highly modded Fox and had a number of resulting issues. The prospect of re-engineering/upgrading an entire car to keep up with the latest didn't seem very wise from a time or residual value perspective.
Trinity is a great motor but has weak rods if you're modding. Replacing those is very costly and time-consuming. Trinity also gives up higher-rpm power due to no variable cam timing, DOHC motors are perfect for VCT so it's a huge wasted opportunity to take advantage of the upside of DOHC. Also, over-rev is limited to 8-seconds due to piston speeds, I'd like a full-time redline of 7K. The oil pump drive gear fails at elevated power levels as well. Great engine but the Modulars are now outdated, they just leave too much on the table compared to what Voodoo is capable of. They made a ton of incremental improvements to Voodoo (head flow, valvetrain stability, etc.). If they made a 5.2 in cross-plane configuration (or even flat-plane) with more durable bottom-end components with boost and 720+ how would that not be more attractive than Trinity?
The cost of engine development for the 5.2 is already largely taken care of so making tweaks to that engine makes sense from a business perspective. Hameedi said Voodoo was the biggest engine program in SVT history so there's that.
A freaking wet-dream engine would be a shorter-deck version of the 6.2 in aluminum with its 115-mm bore spacing (5.4-5.8 liter displacement) fed by twins. From my understanding the blocks are made at a 3rd party foundry already, as are the bare heads so a clean-sheet engine in low-volumes could be feasible from a cost perspective. In reality it's probably pie-in-the-sky but would be an amazing surprise.
It will be interesting to see how they get 720+ from a Coyote/Voodoo based engine if that's the route they choose.
