If you are going to add power to these I would go forced induction.
The later transfer case is direct drive. They are more frigile. Than the LSD early one. Use really good gear oil in them as there is only 3/4 of a quart in them. Make sure the seals are inspected regularly and at the first sign of any leeks they get changed. These are usually killed by people not servicing them.
The trans is supposed to be a non serviced item (so said the service manual). However the shop manual said that doing things like driving the car in dust or warm weather you should change the driveline fluids ( including the trans) every 40k. . That is if you don't want it to blow them up.
These cars benefit from the use of top quality fluids. Swapping them all over to Amesoil or Mobil One or Redline (or any other top shelf brand) makes the car much happier.
the rear alignment (particularly the camber) is fixed at the factory and is Only adjustable via moving the rear subframe around. If you see a car with the rear camber out of spec or worse one side is out look really carefully for accident damage. The fix is to get Volvo top links. If I remember they are from a v60 but don't hold me to that. They are a bolt in and are adjustable allowing you to either fix an alignment issue or add more camber fir fun or in some cases the rear springs sag and you need to then correct the camber or you start eating tires.
Speaking of tires. These car are super sensitive to being out of alignment. I think it has to do with the direct drive driveline. You will kill a brand new tire in 100 miles or less if the cars is out of spec. Toe is the biggest thing and side to side is equally important as having the rear and front toe correct as an out of spec rear tire can cause lots of scrub on a front tire due to the direct drive AWD system. Another thing is the AWD system is very sensitive to tire size. You must maintain equal tire sizes on all four tires. And by size I mean tire ware. Same tire type/size at all corners but some are new and some are to the cords will do bad things to the driveline. Especially the later transfer cases. Again a result of the direct drive in the later ones. The early transfer case cars were not nearly as sensitive to this with there viscous coupling letting the front and rear spin/slip a bit independently from each other. These are cars that you really want to replace tires as a set and rotate them at very regular intervals. I found doing 3k synthetic oil changes and at the same time rotating tge tires gave optimal ware to the tires making them last much longer and it kept tge driveline happy.
Tge interior is upscale/euro Ford. Not exceptional by today's standards but a very nice place to be. The controles are well thaught out. Materials are ok with a bit more use of plastic than you would think but if you expect tarted up Ford and not Jag you will be ok with it.
These are generally good cars. They have specific needs (like any European car). And since the demographic that purchased them were not car enthusiasts most used ones will need a campkete service to bring them back to good working order.
Stay away from the 2.5l cars they are anemic compared to tge 3.0 cars. A manual 3.0 car is a unicorn but they are out there. The auto trans in these I believe is a zf variant. It is a decent auto. I had one and it was one of the best auto trans cars I had driven at the time.
Headlight adjusters fail due to poor design and poor quality plastic. There are kits out there to fix them but strategic use of thin bailing wire to set the projectors worked fine for me. Adjustment was then reaching in to the housing and twisting a wire with a needle nose pliers.
The fly by wir throttle in these cars can be problematic. The peddle or the throttle body seem to fail at random. Keep a set of spares in the trunk with the tools to replace them as the car goes in to limp mode when they trigger a fault code. Most time a complete shut down and restart of the car resets things but it will keep happening and more and more frequently you will want to swap the parts. The throttle seemed to be the most frequent failure. I actually still have a spare one sitting on my tool box.
