“The test car with its 428 Cobra Jet engine has 2140 of its 3607 lbs. balanced on the front wheels and that’s with a full gas tank.”
It may just be that this time the stylists I have done too good a job. Look at the Mustang Mach I and you expect miracles—drive it and they are not forthcoming. The pieces are there—most of them anyway—but the sum is far short of its parts.
Understand that we’re not saying high speed is a new deal. Speed has been the thing with cars since the very first bucking, snorting horseless carriage appeared to change the ways of the world. If early, awkward devices were slow, at least the fenders were shaped like birds in flight and the radiator ornaments were windblown figurines. Who could forget the intuitively streamlined boat-tailed speedsters of the Twenties or the Chrysler Airflow of the Thirties or the GM fastbacks of the late Forties? Those were the happy, innocent days when a teardrop was the slipperiest thing going. Can you imagine telling Henry Ford that what the 999 really needed was a chopped-off tail and a spoiler?
But now, in The Year of the Automobile 1969, your car can’t even be clothed in semi-Edwardian fashion unless at least one end—and preferably both—has flaps. Enter the Mustang Mach I, fashionably spoiled at the rear and not lacking competition inspiration on any other part of its anatomy either… read the full article in the November 1968 Issue of Car and Driver >
