I have one... my buddy and I built a very low buck offroad race truck several years ago. Our goal was to have as little as possible into it so we reused a lot of stuff from previous race/offroad trucks and a lot of junkyard stuff. It included a 302 from an '86 Grand Marquis... we knew absolutely nothing about it other than the previous owner said it ran great.
Dropped it into the race truck, wired and plumbed, and it fired right up! Figured that was good enough to go racing. We found out very quickly that a 150hp engine is very inadequate with a C6 behind it and 3.50 gears! And our cooling system was not working very well... that poor motor spent several hours at 240+ degrees and promptly boiled over when we crossed the finish line. But we took 2nd place!
If that wasn't enough, we raced it again a couple months later. We had to quit when the trans started slipping on the second lap and wouldn't go up a hill. Mud and water had gotten into everything and we were out of spare tires!
The next year we went for round three. We put 5.38 gears in the axles and ran it again, figuring that it would be faster if we could run high range with deeper gears rather than low range with high gears. Well, we were right, it was a big improvement on prerun day! But something took a crap on race day and it had a bad miss the entire race, was running hot again and I figured the engine was toast...but we finished...with the slowest time of any truck!
Funniest part of that race was halfway through the second lap, I saw what looked like an air filter on the track. I couldn't really tell but it sure looked familiar. I made a conscious decision to just keep going and hope that either it wasn't mine and if it was, hope to not suck in too much dust. Several hours later we crossed the finish line and I immediately hopped out and checked... sure as shit, it was MY AIR FILTER.
The MAF screen was totally clogged up full of dirt and grass seeds! Needless to say, it was not running well at all.
For s&g, we cleaned it up, replaced the MAF sensor, did a basic tuneup, and put a new fuel pump in it...and it runs like a champ again. I can't believe it. Those 302s are so reliable...if it survived torture levels to that degree, it must be a good engine!