There are 2 different types of "performance-minded buyers" The one who race on the drag strips, and the one who race on the road course.
The SVO was NOT for the drag strips people, and the reason that it flopped is because it cost 6000$ more than the V8 in 1984. You do get a host of mechanical upgrades with the SVO which should've been on the V8 GT, but ultimately only 1 actually ended in regular V8, and that was the quad-shock system, which included a set of horizontally mounted shock absorbers to control axle tramp. Rednecks who bought the V8 wouldn't have paid more for the Koni suspension, bigger brakes, and the much improved TRW steering system. All of which made the SVO in the same class as those more sophisticated imports of the 1980's, and no, not just the Japanese imports like the Supra or 280ZX, but pretty close to the Porsche 944 as well. It was not a car stuck in the pre-historic, it was a car for sophisticated people who wish they could have something better, a good package overall, not people who only aspire to copious amount of everything to compensate what they don't have. Oh, and Ford didn't lose money on the SVO. That's gotta be something innit?
I mentioned the SVO before so that you'd maybe educate yourself more about the history of the car itself. But it seems to me that you hadn't done anything else apart from merely mentioning it here because you don't know anything else. You left out the Carburetted 2.3 Turbo of 1979, which got 132hp compared to the "4.9" V8 140hp. That one had a host of mechanical problems such as oil starvation which completely ruins the Turbo. And you seems to completely forgot about the "Mustang II", which for a while, did not even have any V8 option. The dork age for the Mustang was not the Fox Body, but rather the Mustang II of 1974-1979.
