What is the Mustang Project?  It’s not just about the car…

No, it’s not just about the car, or what list of modifications I’d like to do, though that is certainly part of it.  Sit back and let’s take a cruise down my Mustang memory lane…

Like so many other folks, I fell in love with a lot of things when I was a kid.  One of them was the Ford Mustang.  I can’t remember the first time I saw one, but I remember being about twelve years old and getting a Mustang t-shirt, which I wore until it was a faded rag.  I remember getting Publishers Clearing House stamps in the mail - do you know what one of the top prizes was?  A red Ford Mustang GT convertible.  I cut the photos out of every mailer and had a patchwork of GT convertible pictures plastering my bedroom wall.

My first car was a 1980 Ford Mustang.  It was a white and blue coupe with a dreadful four-cylinder engine that did 0-60 in 18 seconds right off the showroom floor.  In every way it was a pile of junk but I loved it.  Reality eventually surrounded me and I ended up parting with it.  A few years later I got a white 1966 Ford Mustang coupe with the classic 289 V8.  I drove it for months but it had no working interior lights, no heat, no radio, no carpets… but I loved it.  And while I owned it I picked up a blue 1965 coupe for parts.  Again, reality surrounded me and I ended up parting with them before leaving for college.

A few weeks after I graduated I saw it sitting in a small car lot near Wal-Mart.  It was a red 1994 Ford Mustang convertible.  It was only a V6, and though I wanted a GT, I had already fallen in love with it and a few days later I drove it home with a crazy wild-eyed grin on my face.  This was my first real car, the first car that I’d financed.  The first car that I didn’t have the title of in my hands the moment I drove home.  For thirteen months and two days I owned that car, and though it was not perfect – in fact, it had many flaws – it was mine and I loved every second of it.  Alas, it was not meant to be, and one fateful morning a Cadillac cut across traffic and my convertible was sent to the junk pile.  That was in August of 2000.

Now here we are, almost eight years later, in 2008.  Amazingly, I never quite found my way back to Mustang ownership these past eight years.  Frugality, practicality, and all that jazz has kept me away from another of the fantastic ragtop that I once had.

But fate has rewarded me.  How has the universe graced me with just desserts?  The fifth-generation S197.

Ford did a complete overhaul of the Mustang for 2005, referred to internally as the S197.  I won’t get squishy and blab endlessly about how awesome it is, because you can Google and find any number of a zillion reviews saying just that (or check the Reviews section).  But I will say that this will be my next Mustang. A twenty year journey has led up to this.

That’s the Mustang Project.