SALEEN SOLUTION; After decades of Mustangs, Saleen discovers the truck.(product information of Saleen Inc.)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Saleen made its reputation in Mustangs, producing tens of thousands of them in the more than 20 years of the company's existence. Mustangs are fine things to make, since everyone loves to go fast. But when you look at the numbers, Ford sold only 166,000 Mustangs last year while moving almost 800,000 F-series pickups.

Now, we ain't necessarily math wizards, but it appears there are more truck customers than Mustang buyers. This occurred to Steve Saleen, too, and he made the S331, Saleen's first large-scale custom truck. (He did a production run of 50 Ranger pickups for homologation purposes in his wild SCCA truck-racing days in 1987. "Of all the racing I've done, the trucks were by far the most fun,'' Saleen said.)

The S331 has everything you'd expect of a Saleen: a big fat supercharger underhood, big fat wheels and tires in the wheel wells and big fat aerodynamic add-ons over the rest of it.

The aero stuff is solid injection-molded plastic and includes about every edge of the truck-grille, skirts and rear spoiler, to name three. The hood is aluminum and includes a hole for "heat extraction.'' Saleen engineers say the heat extractor hole works.

Air goes to a two-stage intercooler on the S331 Supercharged model from a 2.3-liter screw-type compressor. The screws are from Lysholm, but Saleen designed the rest. The air makes just one bend before feeding into the blower, located in the valley of the V, and then into the intake runners. Because the flow is so smooth, temperatures stay lower, and the whole thing needs only 5.5 psi of boost to bring power to 450 hp and torque up to 500 lb-ft. The normally aspirated S331 three-valve model still gets 325 hp and 380 lb-ft with bigger injectors, better airflow, custom ...