This woman was raised with Fords and Chevrolets, then she chose sides.
Miss Maverick is a 500-plus-horsepower 1973 Ford Maverick Tess Wood regularly takes to the drag strip. She’s doggedly pursuing the eighth-mile stock short block record with seven years of heavily modifying her beloved car to achieve that lofty goal. It’s always great to see someone with a vision transform a car they love into something more, whether it’s a muscle car, an off-roader, or whatever else.
It sounds like Wood’s father was a balanced man who had both a Chevy and a Ford truck. She grew up working on both, but there came a point early on when she made a decision to go with the Blue Oval and not look back. Not everyone’s going to agree with that, but it’s fair to say she’s doing just fine right now.
This Maverick has a fully-built engine and a supercharger bolted on to force feed it. For something extra, Wood installed a nitrous oxide system. She says it’s making over 500-hp. Seeing it rip down the drag strip in the video, that’s an entirely believable number.
Considering Mavericks were developed by Ford as an alternative to the Hondas, Toyotas, Mazdas, BMWs, and other fuel-efficient foreign cars which became popular during the oil crisis in the 1970s. This has kept the prices of classic models from soaring, unlike Mustangs, which was partly the appeal to Wood since she didn’t have a big budget.
Transforming this Ford Maverick from a ho-hum car to something monstrous has been a trial-and-error process for Wood. “Build it, make it faster, break it, figure out how to fix it, and then make it faster again,” she says about the process.
Currently, Wood says she’s running 5.89 seconds in the eighth mile, which is pretty impressive. But she’s not content to stop there as she’s constantly looking for ways to shave a hundredth of a second off that time.
Image credit: YouTube
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