Mustang Club of Maryland

Even though the two-seater Mustang I sports car of the early 1960s later went on to influence the GT-40 far more than it did the four-place production vehicle that bore the same Mustang name, that doesn’t mean Ford didn’t try out a few two-seat Mustang designs over the years, one of which has survived to the present day and will appear at next month’s Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance.
According to owner Bill Snyder, Ford itself built this experimental two-seat fastback Mustang from a pre-production chassis shortened 16 inches and stuffed with a 260-cu.in. V-8 bored and stroked to 302 cubic inches. Designer Bill Vince Gardner came up with the fastback profile to fit the shortened wheelbase, which Dearborn Steel Tubing – the same company responsible for the Ford Thunderbolt – rendered in fiberglass with a prominent fuel filler above its small ducktail spoiler. Snyder said the Mustang then traveled the country with Ford, which is how Snyder first encountered it, but Gardner apparently felt too strongly attached to the car to let Ford crush it afterward, so he stole it and walled it up in a warehouse in Inkster, Michigan.

As the story goes, Gardner then didn’t pay any rent to the warehouse owner and Ford already filed the stolen car claim and collected the settlement from the insurance company, so the Mustang ended up in the hands of the latter six months after Gardner hid it away. Snyder eventually bought it from an executive with that insurance company, fulfilling a nearly 50-year dream to own this particular car.
According to Gary Witzenburg’s Mustang: The Complete History of America’s Pioneer Ponycar, shortened two-seaters almost perennially appeared in the course of Mustang history even though Lee Iacocca and his product planners had settled on a four-seat configuration almost from the beginning. One of the earliest such Mustang-based two-seater concepts came about in 1964 when designers toyed with different implementations of the fastback body style while a more radical fastback appeared in October 1966 as a proposal for the 1969 model year refresh. “We went through a period where we were chopping about six inches off the back,” Gail Halderman, the Mustang’s design chief at the time, told Witzenburg. “But then we went to two inches and finally back to where we had started because we still had to package a spare tire, fuel tank, and some luggage room back there.” None of these other shortened two-seater Mustang design studies appear to have progressed beyond the clay model stage.

The Gardner Mustang will appear at Amelia Island as part of the concours’s What Were They Thinking? class, which annually highlights automotive history’s misfits and oddities. The Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance will take place March 8-10 at the Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island, Florida. For more information, visit AmeliaConcours.org.

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