(See Cover) The trim white car rolled restlessly through the winding roads of Bloomfield Hills, like a high-strung pony dancing to get started on its morning run.
In that auto-conscious Detroit suburb, where people can spend whole evenings talking about the virtues of a taillight, it did not go long unnoticed despite its lack of identifying insignia. Groups of children on their way to school turned to stare at it and point. The driver of a Volkswagen raised his fingers in a V-for-victory sign. As the car picked up speed and headed south ward toward Detroit, a flickering trace of satisfaction crossed its driver's impassive, hawklike face.
He carefully knocked the ash from his Ignacio Haya Gold Label cigar into the shiny new dashboard tray. At each traffic light, his dark eyes surveyed the car's interior and his fingers roamed over every piece of metal and fabric within reach. At one light, the driver of a Chevrolet Impala pulled along side and mouthed through his closed window: "Is that it?" He was left behind in the exhaust. As the white car approached a school bus and slowed again, the win dows flew up and the children in side chanted: "Mustang! Mustang! Mustang!" This week Ford's new Mustang sports car, one of the most her alded and attention-drawing cars in autodom's history, drives into showrooms all over the U.S. In it rides both a big bundle of Ford's future and the reputation of the man who daily test-drives a different Mustang between Bloomfield Hills and Dearborn. The man is Lido Anthony Iacocca, general manager of Ford's Ford Division, which accounts for roughly 80% of the company's sales.
He already has quite a reputation. At 39, after 17 years in the auto business, this tall, rugged son of Italian immigrant parents is the hottest young man in Detroit and probably the most ingenious automotive merchandising expert since General Motors' hard-selling' Harlow Curtice.
From the fertile brains of "Lee" Iacocca (rhymes with try-a-coke-ah) and his staff at Ford have sprung most of the major themes that dominate the U.S. auto industry today: the return to car racing, the intensified appeal to the youth market, the trend to the low-priced sports car. Sold by Iacocca to the top executives of Ford, often over their initial disapproval, these themes have first become Ford policy, then gone on to set the pace of the industry.
But so elephantine is the gestation period of Detroit's new models that, in Iacocca's three years as head of the Ford Division, the Mustang is the first car that he can call completely his own, from blueprint through mock-up to production line (see adjoining color pages).
Ferrari Flare. As his firstborn, Iacocca has produced far more than just another new car. With its long hood and short rear deck, its Ferrari flare and openmouthed air scoop, the Mustang resembles the European racing cars that American sports-car buffs find so appealing. Yet Iacocca has made the Mustang's design so flexible, its price so reasonable and its options so numerous that its potential appeal reaches toward two-thirds of all U.S. car buyers. Priced as low as $2,368 and able to accommodate a small family in its four seats, the Mustang seems destined to be a sort of Model A of sports cars —for the masses as well as for the buffs.