DREAM DRIVE
MUSTANGS RUN WILD ON WOODWARD DREAM CRUISE
BIRMINGHAM, Mich. – Fifty-four years ago, Ford unveiled a stunner: a sporty coupe and convertible called the Mustang. Still a fan favourite, that first generation was among the stars of Ford’s Mustang Alley display at the Woodward Dream Cruise in August.
An estimated 40,000 vehicles and 1.5 million people showed up for the event, where vehicles drive along Woodward Avenue. Although the street starts in downtown Detroit, the cruise takes place north of it, over a 26-kilometre stretch running from Ferndale to Pontiac in Michigan. The first event took place in 1995 as a fundraiser for a soccer field in Ferndale.
The venue is an obvious one. A straight road with few traffic lights or cops, Woodward was popular for cruising — and street racing — in the 1950s and 1960s. That sometimes included automakers, whose engineers were known to take a project out now and again to see what it could do.
Whether that happened during Mustang’s development is anybody’s guess, but this time around Ford put me in a couple of old Mustangs, as well as a new-for-2019 Bullitt version, and sent me cruising down that storied avenue.
The first Mustangs went on sale in April 1964. Ford projected sales of about 100,000 units per year, but more than 121,000 went out the door in the first five months. In August this year, the company assembled the ten-millionth Mustang.
“It’s a driver’s car, a car you want to be seen in,” says Carl Widmann, Mustang’s chief engineer. “We have people who come to the car who’ve always wanted a Mustang for the last 20 years, and those who come to it and it’s their first car. It’s a two-door coupe, but you can still use it as a daily driver.”
I own old cars, but this was my first time driving a vintage Mustang. There were some minor changes when production began for full-year 1965, and so enthusiasts dub cars from the first few months — as my vehicle was — as 1964½. The clutch pedal was a little creaky, but the 260-cubic inch (4.2-litre) V8, a $75 option over the base in-line six-cylinder, purred just fine. I then traded it in for a 1966 version with an automatic transmission. Earlier this year, that car was driven in a convoy of antique vehicles from Florida to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit as a promotion for a car museum.
It’s easy to see why the ’Stang made such an impression back in the day. It wasn’t the first compact car, but it was a handsome option for those tired of Detroit’s big, thirsty, hard-to-park land yachts. The steering feels loose by today’s standards, but it was a decent-handling car in its day. And it started at a very reasonable $2,368, but could be heavily optioned for those who wanted more, including a high-performance V8 that added $442.
Those with the deepest pockets today can opt for the 50th Anniversary Cobra Jet, unveiled at the Woodward Cruise. Only 68 will be built, at US$130,000 apiece. It’s not legal for street use, and Ford won’t divulge exactly how much power comes out of its supercharged 5.2-L V8, other than to say it’ll do the quarter-mile in the mid-eight-second range.
But the Bullitt is street-legal and that’s where I took it — sitting on the right-hand side, in one built for the Australian market. It owes something to the Woodward event, as Ford uses the cars that come to Mustang Alley to get the exhaust sound right.
“There are dedicated exhaust tuners at Mustang,” Widmann says. “They have a database of every V8 Mustang sound, and they’ve done listening studies in Mustang Alley to understand the ‘frequency domain’ of what Mustang is.
“We use technology such as active exhaust, which is standard on the Bullitt, to set the character of the car in the environment of the regulatory restraints we have around the globe. We want it to sound the same in every market.”
They might have even listened to the original, the 1968 version Steve McQueen drove 50 years ago in the movie Bullitt. It was at the show with owner Sean Kiernan, whose father bought the car through a magazine ad after the studio had put it up for sale, and who later took it apart with his son to freshen it up.
“Like every other car person on the planet, we had a project car, and ours just happened to be Bullitt,” he says. Kiernan brought it back to original condition after his father’s death in 2014, and it made its first public appearance at the Detroit auto show in January, alongside the new Bullitt. At Woodward, Ford surprised him by gifting him the second 2019 Bullitt made.
Part of the fun at Woodward is that the street isn’t closed off, and classic cars cruise alongside regular traffic. Driving that first-generation Mustang, I got the thumbs-up from owners in newer ones driving alongside.
Unlike its Thunderbird cousin, the Mustang never deviated from its two-door configuration, and from that first year, it never went out of production. If you’re going to cruise Woodward, this is a pretty good way to do it.