Why not? Sure they had crappy heads, exhaust manifolds, and ext, but who said you HAVE to keep that stuff? We're mustang owners, and we want to have fun, Were going to modify it anyway. If not, you can find some E7TE's pretty cheep to give it a bit more power. That is if it even is a 5.0. I'm not touching my '82GT cause theres not too many around PERIOD, and on top of that, STOCK with low miles. Have fun, I say get the '83, And dont think about changing the front end to look like 87-93..