Ford Mustang 2nd Gen

Dick Nesbitt's studio won this one on proportion. The brief was a car two sizes down from the 1973 Mustang that still read as a Mustang from thirty feet, and the answer was to keep the long hood and short deck intact, shrink everything around them, hang the running horse in a formal grille and put a fastback roof on the hatchback. Ghia's involvement is real rather than badge-deep. Ford had taken 80 percent of the Turin coachbuilder in 1970, and the influence shows in the tighter, more upright European detailing; from 1973 the Ghia name became Ford's top trim level across the whole range, starting here. The opera windows and padded roof on that car are pure Detroit personal luxury, and the body underneath them is not. Two body styles only, notchback and 2+2, with no convertible at any point. The most consequential piece of design on the car is one nobody was ever meant to look at: the front suspension crossmember, drawn tight enough to fit a subcompact, and now the most copied piece of Ford engineering in American street rodding.

Ford ran no factory performance programme for this car, which makes what happened around it stranger. Charlie Kemp and Jimmy Dobbs began designing an IMSA Cobra II in November 1975 with under two months to the 24 Hours of Daytona. Bob Riley engineered the chassis and Jack Roush built his first road racing engine for it, a fuel-injected 351 Cleveland running a dry sump. The car was clocked at 212mph at Daytona and took three top tens from six starts in 1976, including runner-up in the season finale, blowing itself up with some regularity in between. The drag racers did better. Don Nicholson won the 1977 NHRA Pro Stock world championship in a Mustang II, the only Winston title of his career, and the Blue Max funny car ran a Mustang II shell to victory at the 1975 US Nationals. None of it had anything to do with the car in the showroom, which shared a silhouette with the racers and nothing else. That gap is the honest summary of the Mustang II's competition record: the shape was welcome everywhere, the mechanical package was welcome nowhere.

Two things carried the Mustang II into the culture, and Ford planned neither. The first was Charlie's Angels. Jill Munroe, played by Farrah Fawcett, drove a white 1976 Cobra II with blue stripes, and for a generation of American teenagers that car, rather than any 1965 fastback, was what a Mustang looked like. The second is stranger and far more durable. The Mustang II's front suspension, a compact crossmember carrying coil springs, disc brakes and a rack, turned out to be exactly the right width and exactly cheap enough to graft under a Model A, a T-bucket or a 1950s pickup. It became the most widely used independent front suspension in street rodding, and firms including Heidts have been selling new kits built around it for more than thirty-five years. The rest of the Mustang II's cultural life has been spent as a punchline, and the joke has now run so long that owning one has quietly become its own form of contrarianism.

Nobody preserved these, so most of what you meet has lived a hard life, and almost none of what went wrong is mysterious. Rust is the recurring bill: cowl vents that fill with leaves and leak into the footwells, door bottoms and rear quarters, and on hatchbacks the tailgate surround. The urethane bumper covers hide their own corrosion and give it away by going wavy. Mechanically the 1970s show up in the plumbing rather than the hardware. Vacuum lines perish, the emissions controls on a 1975-onward car are a maze, and a carburetor adjusted by five previous owners is the usual reason one runs badly. The rubber mounts isolating the front subframe perish too, and a car that has gone loose and boomy at the front is often just asking for bushings. Interior trim, badges and package-specific parts are the genuinely scarce items. The owners who enjoy these cars most are the ones who accept that a Mustang II is a 1970s compact wearing a famous badge, and stop asking it to be something else.