Ford Mustang Bullitt
50 years on from Hollywood’s finest ever car chase, the evergreen Bullitt Mustang has been reborn. Want one? Join the queue...
If this limited-edition Ford Mustang Bullitt hasn’t immediately topped your must-buy-for-2018 list, you may need to check your vitals. A surprise reveal ahead of the Detroit motor show, the new Bullitt is a special edition that marks 50 years since Steve McQueen fred up his gorgeous, Highland Green Stang and decided to lay down one of the best movie chases the world has ever seen across San Francisco in 1968’s Bullitt.
“It’s my favourite Mustang,” explains the Stang’s chief designer, Darrell Behmer. “Devoid of stripes, spoilers and badges. It doesn’t need to scream about anything, it’s just cool.” And that, it most certainly is. We start with the classic 1968 Bullitt Mustang’s exterior hue being deployed to excellent efect here – Dark Highland Green – but it’s also available in Shadow Black.
As Behmer notes, there are no spoilers or stripes, but there are 19in aluminium wheels, subtle chrome accents around the grille and front windows and red Brembo brakes. Inside, there’s much leather, a 12in digital LCD instrument cluster, and unique green accent stitching on the dash, door panels and centre console. And the seats. Oh, and when you start it, the LCD screen gets a Bullitt welcome screen.
Also when you fre it up, you’re onto a good ’un. There’s a 5.0-litre V8 here, producing “at least” 475bhp and 420lb ft of torque, along with a top speed of 163mph – 8mph more than the normal Mustang GT. On top of that there are active exhaust valves for noise, an Open Air induction system and GT350 intake manifold with 87mm throttle bodies, coupled with a new powertrain control module calibration for “optimal performance”.
Because it’s a special car for a special year, you get a special treat: there’s a manual gearbox on board, equipped with a white cue-ball gearknob in a nod to the original. Plus, everything you get in
the Mustang GT’s Premium and Performance pack is bundled into this 163mph lump of nostalgia.
Three options are available: an electronics pack including better audio, memory seats, nav, blindspot info and so forth, the MagneRide semi-active suspension, and Recaro black leather seats.
“When making a Bullitt,” Mustang chief engineer Carl Widmann notes, “there are certain things it absolutely must have. It has to have the right attitude, it has to be unique in some way from a Mustang GT, and, more than anything, it has to be badass.”
Badass enough that at the Barrett-Jackson auction in Arizona on 19 January, the very frst 2018 Ford Mustang Bullitt sold for $300,000. A lot, considering the limited-edition production one will cost signifcantly less. However, the full $300,000 went to the Boys Republic, a school and treatment community for youth at risk, and a school which Steve McQueen himself graduated from in 1946. VP