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Wednesday, August 26, 2015

The First Mustang: Ford's Forgotten Mustang I

Looking at today's blog title, you're likely wondering how anybody could forget the first Mustang. You drift into a pleasant reverie, possibly one built on taking your first love to a drive-in, or maybe racing against your neighbor's Corvair on a deserted farm road, strictly under the radar, except that this was before the local cops used radar...  Then you take a glance at the photo below.  Wait a minute here; this car blog guy has clearly been listening to some alien vinyl.  That's not my Mustang.  And indeed it's not.  It is, however, the original Ford Mustang, the one that level-headed engineers and wild-eyed road racing fans at Ford intended us to have.

Some fairly surprising developments were beginning to come to light at conservative old FoMoCo in the early 1960s.  Before departing for the Kennedy Administration, Robert McNamara approved a downsized, International Style Lincoln Continental which echoed the era's minimalist steel and glass architecture.  Ford of England started selling engine blocks to Lotus for their groundbreaking Elan sports car, and this later tied into a "Total Performance" marketing strategy involving nippy Lotus Ford Cortina sedans and Falcon V8s, to participation in international rallies, and by 1965 to Jimmy Clark winning the Indy 500 with a Ford-powered Lotus.  First though, Ford's top brass green-lighted the Cardinal for Ford of Germany, an innovative little front-driver with four cylinders arranged in a vee, an engine design seen only on Italy's avant garde Lancia up until then.  So the stage was already set, in a way, when GM's Chevrolet Division began to sell lots of sporty Corvair Monzas (rear engine, 4 speed floor shift, bucket seats) to Ford's target youth market.  Ford's engineers responded by wondering how they might adapt the Cardinal's front-drive engine and transaxle package to a sporty, mid-engined car.  While the mid-engine layout had just become dominant in Formula One racing cars, nobody had yet released a production car with it.  When Ford's designers delivered their sketches to the prototyping shop, they also included aluminum bodywork with seats as part of the structure, so that it was only the pedals and wheel which adjusted (a feature which took a decade to appear on Maserati's Bora), and side-mounted radiators (which would show up on race cars in the 70s and road going Ferraris in the 80s).  Topping it off were a structural rollover bar (like those on then-new Ferrari sports racers), disc brakes*, and "wobbly web" alloy wheels which look like Ford yanked them off one of Clark's Lotus racers.

When the prototypes were first shown in October 1962, they seemed to herald a stunning turnaround for a company which had only a couple years earlier given up on its misbegotten Edsel.  Car enthusiasts, especially those who wrote for magazines like Road & Track, went wild. Dan Gurney turned in some test lap times which were close to those of contemporary Formula One racers (which also happened to have engines limited to 1.5 liters, the size of the Mustang's V4).  Ford was serious enough about its little auto show star that it released a brochure to underline the point.  The car's fate, however, was not left in the hands of its engineers.  Marketing studies showed that the Mustang would appeal only to a narrow segment of the target youth market, mostly people who read magazines like Road & Track, attended races and rallies as spectators or even participants, and hung out with beatniks in coffee houses (hippies, like mid-engined production cars, were half a decade away).  So the bracingly unconventional prototypes were retired to Ford's orphan garage, while Lee Iacocca directed the engineers to cook up something based upon stock Falcon parts.  As you know, this turned out to be good for the bottom line.  Stateside, the guys (and gals) with the string-back driving gloves would never even get the clever little Cardinal, and would wait 8 years for the built-down-to-price Pinto.  You know how that turned out as well.  Around a year after Mustang One went into forced retirement, though, Ford showed racing fans a prototype which, with its mid-engined layout, tapered snout and prominent air intakes, seemed to echo the spare, focused approach of the original Mustang. It was called the GT40, but it's a completely different story…

*Front discs sourced from English Fords were featured, while the rear initially had drums (perhaps the only conservative engineering feature).  Tubular space frame and aluminum bodywork were built by Troutman and Barnes, and the operational prototype was produced in only 3 months, ready for laps at Watkins Glen.

Photo and drawing credits:  Ford Motor Company

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