Driving a car hard always adds to the wear and tear, but the DOHC is a very strong and reliable engine and is designed to rev. There are all ready Cobra engines in the 100,000+ mile range with no real patterns of maintance problems. The Lincoln version of the engine has been around since 93 with out any real problems either. The only time people seem to run into trouble is with botched installs or bad tuning with superchargers.
Have you ever wondered why the DOHC is so freaking big? Almost as big a Boss 429 big block? Its because those suckers are built. Craw under the car and check out the ribbing cast into the block. It pretty cool. The block is cast by and Italian company called Teksid, which specializes in high perfomance street and race car blocks. The weakest peice appears to the pistons. They are very good with dealing with presure, but they really can't stand any detonation at all. But that's easy enough to avoid as long as you don't fall into the trap of running the on the absolute ragged edge of tuning to trying to squeeze out that last 5 hp. I've never heard of any one throwing a rod in one of these engines. The crank is an extremely good peice. Forged steel from a German company called Gerlach-Werke. I would love to see some one break that sucker. The main bearing caps are also 6 bolted. 4 though the top, and 2 cross bolts that go though side of the block and into the bearings. A very strong setup.
The Cobras also have a windage tray, crank wiper that works pretty well.
The old chevy truck 350s redline at something rediculously low, so 5000 probably sounded pretty fast.
As long as you take care of it, the Cobra engine will take a high reving beating for a long time and be just fine. On the other hand that T45 POS is a completely different story...
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