If you're of a particular vintage and have a proclivity to appreciate automobiles chances are you are have fairly fond feelings of early "Fox-body" Ford Mustangs like our '79 here. I know I do. Especially the legendary 1982-1993 "5.0" models. While they were extremely long in the tooth when Ford finally put them to pasture after 2004, personally, I give them credit for being the cars that started the end of the "Malaise Era" of cars. However, let's be brutally honest, shall we? At the time of it's introduction, the 1979 Mustang seemed like such a watershed automobile mostly because of what it replaced. That being the 1974-1978 Mustang II, the most vilified Ford since the Edsel.
We can't pin all of the vitriol we have for the Mustang II on the fact that Ford loosely based them on their sub-compact Pinto. You ever drive a Pinto? They handled like go-carts and had grippy brakes like no other domestic at the time. In short, they were a ball to drive. Sure, they were ugly, under-powered and pretty deadly when hit from the rear but they were fun. Save for brakes, steering gear, rear axle and part of it's floor pan, there really wasn't that much Pinto in a Mustang II anyway. But don't blame it's Pinto DNA for the reason the Mustang II was so awful - blame it's styling. Whereas the original Mustang was based on the Ford Falcon, certainly a far cry from a movie star handsome automobile, what Ford's stylists did with the Mustang is the stuff of legend. These things? They're just flat out clumsy looking. And even if they handled like a Pinto, which of course they didn't because they were four to five hundred pounds heavier, that wouldn't be enough to assuage how homely looking they were.
The Mustang II had a two-inch longer wheelbase than the Pinto and was overall six inches longer so you can't blame the size of the canvas for its design either. Although, perhaps if these cars were generally larger they wouldn't look so darn shrunken. At certain angles in pictures, it's actually not half bad looking. Helps if you blur your vision too.
You have to give Ford some credit for at least being forward thinking with the Mustang II since planning for it started years before the first gas crisis. By the time the '71 "big" Mustang rolled out, what there was of Mustang's sporty image had all been worn away by competition and insurance surcharges on performance cars making anything deemed "sporty" incarnate evil. In the early '70's imports where gaining more and more traction as well and let's not forget that there was the looming specter of an energy crisis.
At the beginning of the first gas crisis, which all but those who had their heads buried in the proverbial Middle Eastern sand saw coming from miles away, and permanently higher priced gas, the "II" was a smash at the box office. Those buyers looking for an economy car with sporty looks, however, were not "Mustang fans" per se and as soon as the ink dried on newspaper headlines that the embargo was over and that gas prices were going to stabilize, the sales bloom fell off the "II". Cash strapped Ford slogging through the rest of the 1970's with a car emblazoned with a name that little more than a decade prior was emblematic of a Ford Motor Company with nothing but blue skies on its horizons.
It was pretty obvious right from the start that the new-for-1979 Mustang was literally and figuratively a horse of a different color. While stylistically it was still a far cry from Mustang's of 1964-1970 yore, note how we gently side step the 1971-1973's, it checked all the right boxes on what fans of the literal breed expect from a sporty "pony" car. The fact it actually handled well was like apples and carrots to a hungry foal reared on a diet of dry grass.
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