9781422273951

The Mustang was based on the Ford Falcon. This one has been highly modified.

was undoubtedly one) surrounded themselves with loyal acolytes: Iacocca’s group called itself the “Fairlane Committee,” and met early on Saturday mornings to discuss a new type of car they called “small-sporty.” At this point, Henry Ford II was not included in the deliberations. The first clay model was for a sporty little two-seater, mid-engined, and open-topped, with a gaping air scoop. It was shown to a group of sports car enthusiasts, who thought it was great. Iacocca later recalled: “I looked at the guys saying it—the offbeat crowd, the real buffs—and said, That’s for sure not the car we want to build, because it can’t be a volume car.” His gut feeling was backed by Ford’s finance department, which thought the two-seater would sell a paltry 35,000 cars a year, which, for a mass-producer like Ford, was not worth pressing the “go” button for on the production line. Then Iacocca dealt his master stroke, ordering that two bucket seats be added in the back, transforming the pure sports car into sporty family transport. “Up until that point,” Donald Frey later recalled, “we had been thinking two- seaters. But [Iacocca] was right; there was a much bigger market for a four-seater.” Even the conservative money men agreed that four seats would widen the Mustang’s appeal, perhaps to 100,000 a year, they said, though Iacocca thought it would be about twice that figure. Better still, basing what was now a 2+2 coupe on the existing Falcon platform and engines meant it would cost relatively little to get the new Mustang into production: a $75 million investment for 100,000 sales a year was more like it. In the summer of 1962, the stylists got to work, and Dave Ash came up with the long hood/short trunk shape that would became familiar to several generations of American Ford Mustang 11