Steve Magnante's 1001 Mustang Facts. Steve Magnante

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СКАЧАТЬ NASCAR super speedway competition, where it raced in fastback Torinos and Mercury Cyclones, not Mustangs. Despite its hefty $1,208 surcharge over the Mach 1, it is public record that Ford lost money on each of the 1,358 Boss 429 Mustangs it built (859 in 1969 and 499 in 1970). As for Shelby’s Mustang, he was stuck with 789 unsold units at the end of the 1969 model run, which had to be re-badged and reassigned 1970 VIN numbers. That Shelby and Ford ever considered combining the two unwieldy programs just doesn’t make sense. Let’s call this one a myth.

      146 Did a casual lunch bet between Ford high-performance product boss Jacques Passino and plucky East Providence, Rhode Island, Ford retailer Bob Tasca result in the 1968 Mustang Cobra Jet? According to interviews published in CarTech Books’ The Tasca Ford Legacy, author Bob McClurg recounts how Tasca had built a 428 demonstration car called the KR-8 (for King of the Road with a 428). Based on a Medium Gold Metallic 1967 Mustang GTA hardtop, Tasca’s garage replaced the 390 with a 428 Police Interceptor topped with 427 medium-riser heads, hot cam, and a cowl-fed 8V induction setup. Ford’s Passino saw the car but was sure his Experimental Garage had built a better car in the form of a Candy Apple Red GTA fastback that packed an exotic 427 with LeMans origins. Even though Tasca’s car was beaten three straight during the quarter-mile shootout at Ford’s Dearborn Test Track, the use of an economical Thunderbird-sourced 428 proved to Passino that the engine had potential he hadn’t previously considered. The fruits of this showdown were unveiled in April 1968 as the Mustang Cobra Jet.

      147 Tasca’s 1967 KR-8 Mustang was one of many freestyle engineering exercises that persuaded Ford to offer similar retail replicas. A 1962 collaboration with Andy Hotten’s Dearborn Steel Tubing (DST) resulted in a 6-barrel 406 big-block Fairlane 500 that ran well in NHRA A/Factory Experimental competition and planted the seed for the eventual 427 Fairlane Thunderbolts of 1964. Unlike the dragstrip-intended 406 Fairlane, Tasca’s KR-8 was meant to show Ford management how to remedy the Mustang 390 GT’s poor street credibility by showcasing the performance (and sales) potential of a 428 Mustang seasoned with a well-chosen gathering of components from Ford’s parts bins.

      148 As one of the top-selling dealers in the nation, Tasca had a direct line to the decision makers at Ford, running right up to Henry Ford II himself. Tasca also enjoyed a healthy relationship with the automotive press. When Hot Rod flew feature editor Eric Dahlquist cross country to test Tasca’s Mustang KR-8, Dahlquist challenged Hot Rod readers to flood Ford’s mailbox with demands to offer the 428 in future showroom Mustangs. Although no actual ballot was presented in the November 1967 issue of Hot Rod, the story’s title page included Henry Ford II’s mailing address and a simple Yes/No vote box. According to a recent interview with Dahlquist, “Thousands of ballots turned up at Ford’s offices, most simply torn out of the magazine (page 58) with the ‘yes’ circled. Henry Ford II’s personal secretary Jim Cummings about went crazy.” Soon after, a Ford public relations man called Dahlquist to say, “Enough already, we’re going to build it.”

      149 When Carroll Shelby transitioned from the use of Police Interceptor 428s to Cobra Jet 428s halfway through the 1968 GT500 production run, he added two letters to denote the extra-performance units; KR, and the GT500 KR was born. By all accounts the letters stood for King of the Road and were inspired by country music star Roger Miller’s 1964 number-1 single (in the Hot Country category) of the same name. Oddly, Tasca’s full-year-earlier use of the designation was lost in the shuffle and is rarely recognized today when the 1968 Shelby GT500 KR is discussed.

      150 Tasca Ford used the KR-8 designation on not only the gold 1967 Mustang hardtop development mule car, but also a series of performance improvement packages that could be installed on brand-new Mustangs in Tasca’s service department. The gold coupe was lost one night when Bob Tasca Jr. crashed it into a utility pole.

BODY AND INTERIOR

      151 During an April 1994 celebration of Mustang’s 30th anniversary, former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s 1967 Mustang convertible seemed more clunker than treasure. Before a gathered crowd of camera-toting spectators and various officials, but he grasped the door handle and pushed the latch button but the door remained shut. This forced him to reach inside and open the driver-side door using the inner latch. It seems that the rod linking the external door handle to the latch had become disengaged, a common problem on tired Mustangs.

      152 Although this book is all about the Mustang’s many splendors, the new 1967 Mercury Cougar was actually a better place for rear-seat passengers to spend long hours on the road. That’s because when the Cougar’s designers added an extra 3 inches to the Mustang platform’s wheelbase (111 versus 108 inches) they didn’t squander it on cosmetics. They could have extended the cowl-to-front axle distance to get a longer, sleeker hood, similar to the approach taken when General Motors stretched the A-Body LeMans/Chevelle to get the 1969 Grand Prix and 1970 Monte Carlo. But function prevailed over form and the extra inches were placed beneath the passengers; Cougar’s rear seat legroom jumped from Mustang’s 28.8 to 31.7 inches.

153 Speaking of Cougars and Mustangs, one item shared among all 1967–1973 Cougars and Carroll Shelby’s 1967 Mustang GT350 and GT500 was the sequential taillamp treatment. Thanks to multiple relays that cycled power to the taillamp filaments in series, signaling for turns triggered a nifty light show. To defuse overt copycat criticism, Shelby omitted the Cougar’s 22 vertical chrome bars in favor of a simple translucent red lens. All 3,225 1967 Shelby Mustangs received the modified Cougar taillamp treatment.

      154 In 1968, Shelby once again raided the Ford corporate parts bin for a unique taillamp treatment. This time, the donor was the 1965 Thunderbird, which used the same sequential blinker system as the Cougar but with the red lenses divided into six segments. To camouflage them from their Thunderbird roots, assembly workers removed the standard black painted outlines with lacquer thinner (by hand) before installation on the 4,451 Shelby Mustangs built in 1968.

      155 The 1965 Thunderbird sequential taillamp assemblies returned on the 1969 Shelby Mustang. This time, the laborious task of removing the black painted borders was eliminated, thanks to the blacked-out taillamp panel assigned to all 1969–1970 Shelby Mustangs. This meant the lamp assemblies could be installed right from the box. A total of 3,153 1969 and 1970 Shelby GT350 and GT500 Mustangs were fitted with surplus 1965 T-Bird taillamps.

      156 Raising and lowering the side window glass in all pre-1971 Mustangs was done strictly by hand using traditional rotary cranks. Surprisingly, power windows were not available from the factory during Mustang’s peak sales years. By contrast, competing Camaro and Firebird pony car models offered power side windows from their 1967 launch onward. Oddly, the Mercury Cougar offered power side glass starting in 1969 ($104.90) but Mustang didn’t, not even on the most costly Shelby GT500 convertible, despite its $5,027 base sticker price.

      157 Rotund Mustangers appreciated the new-for 1967 Tilt-Away steering wheel. For an extra $59.93, the vacuum activated system rapidly swung the steering wheel hub 45 degrees inward any time the driver’s door was opened. Cars so equipped came with a metal vacuum canister bolted below the passenger-side hood hinge, or under the battery tray (depending on engine size, presence of A/C, build date, and build plant). To prevent accidents, electrical circuitry ensured that the transmission was in Park (or Neutral) and the ignition key was in the off position before an electric solenoid triggered the vacuum motor to kick the wheel inward for easy exit.

      158 The convenience of the Mustang Tilt Away steering hub was short-lived. Federally mandated anti-theft measures for the 1970 model year caused Ford (and all of Detroit) to move the ignition key switch from the dashboard to the steering column to form part of the ignition-steering wheel interlock system. The revised steering column clashed with the Tilt-Away hub so the system was canceled after 1969. A simpler up/down-only tilt steering wheel took over for 1970 and beyond. Its simpler components led to a price reduction to $45.

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