It has been 45 years since Ford’s first Mustangs rolled off the assembly line and accelerated drag-strip-straight into the hearts of North American car enthusiasts.
We’ll pay homage to the original “pony car” by taking a look at one of the originals, a 1965 that started life as a scrappy street fighter, but has spent most of its life as a weekend race track warrior.
If you’re looking at that date, doing some subtracting and figuring that the Mustang’s 45th anniversary is coming up a year short, welcome to an enduring debate that relates to the car’s provenance.
The Mustang was originally conceived by Ford Division honcho and industry legend Lee Iacocca in 1961. He wanted to build a sporty, inexpensive, lightweight, two-door, four-seater that would appeal to the emerging youth movement of the time. A prototype was readied by 1962 and the production car followed, based in large part on Falcon components, in the spring of 1964.
The 1965 Mustang seen here in its rather sinister black paint picked up an interrupted racing career again this year in the hands of Bancroft, Ont.-based Brian Thomas. I came across him at a Shannonville Motorsport Park test and tune day, his first outing in the recently acquired racer.
He says it has been on the track since 1972, originally running on the U.S. West Coast in the hands of a couple of owners before coming to British Columbia and then moving on to Edmonton, where an aborted attempt was made to return it to civilian life. It arrived in Ontario last year and was used as a track day car.
Thomas describes it as “Shelby-ized” with all the “wonderful bits” that racer Carroll Shelby (of Cobra and Mustang fame) developed for the cars to make them go fast. It now has a full cage instead of its simple roll bar, its 289-cubic-inch (4.7-litre) engine has been taken out to 302 cubic inches, fitted with a big carb “that uses much too much 110-octane gas,” stainless headers, three inch exhausts and the original top-loader four-speed gearbox and differential. Suspension and brakes have also been up-rated to suit racing usage.
In 1971, he decided to go road racing instead with a Lotus 7 America powered by a 948-cc Sprite engine. But after three seasons of “racing on a shoestring,” he sold the car and brought to an end that chapter in his life.
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