A Faster Horse Page #6

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and we drive the car.

That in itself

is an emotional event.

We had our senior

management out in Arizona.

We had a lot

of aspirational vehicles,

and I'm talking things

like Porsche 911,

and then we also had

our m1 prototype

for the upcoming mustang.

What we're gonna do - You'll each go in cars,

and Dave and frank

are gonna be in one pair,

then you'll flip.

This vehicle

had to be world-class.

We're gonna sell it in Europe.

You have to be world-class

to be in Europe.

You're going against

the big dogs

in those other markets,

so you set your targets

from an aspirational standpoint.

We had police cordon

off all the roads.

We went around the tops

of all the mountains around,

to make sure that there

wasn't anybody up there.

It was incredibly nerve-racking.

Nobody's seen--

we hadn't seen the car

out in the wild.

A beautiful car is great,

but if it doesn't exceed

the outgoing car,

people will be disappointed.

The toughest critic I know

is probably Dave.

He takes this stuff to heart.

The car is

definitely coming together.

It's just that it's a little

short on target on a few things.

But do we know why

or we just don't know why?

No, we have a very

good idea why.

We do wind tunnel tests,

rough road tests.

We do high-mileage drives,

low-mileage drives.

We do cold-weather drives.

We do warm-weather drives.

It's pretty difficult

to anticipate

where the next issue

is gonna come from.

- What was that?

- I don't know.

Because they come

from the left.

They come from the right.

They come from everywhere.

That's what happened.

It did fault. Okay.

Just got the camo off

just a couple days ago.

And so there were

some surprises.

The amount of camo

did some damping,

and so we have some things

that have popped up,

but we'll address them,

and we'll go through them.

We've got an entire team

of people

who support these tests

and drives.

Because we don't have a ton

of prototypes running around,

we try to do this

all analytically.

So we try to model what we

think the system is gonna do

because, really,

it's quite costly

to find the error state

in the vehicle

and then engineer it out.

We'd rather engineer

the fix in right the first time.

I will say it's surprising

how much the camo affected

the steering feel.

This is a live issue.

I mean, can at least

one of our open issues

for our engineering sign off?

Tom's the guy that

really brings it all together

and makes a proposal

to Dave to say,

"here's what it takes to get

to the next level."

Gotta give tom a lot of credit

for being the thread of mustang.

He's been on mustang

for ten years.

I always kid him

he's probably trained, you know,

at least five chief engineers.

Sh*t, man,

i rocketed down through here

about 160 miles an hour.

There is a police

officer on the right-hand shoulder.

So just be aware that the speed

limit is 55 through here.

I feel like this doesn't move

nearly as much as the other car.

Probably isn't,

and that gets into--

you remember all

the a-pillar stiffness we did?

- Yeah.

- Well, the a-pillar stiffness.

So that's why I'm trying

to get from body

and from nvh what is happening

for that sorb fix.

- It's on the torque box.

- Right.

It's down there, it's right

at the base frickin'--

and there's some massive sh*t

going on down there.

I flew out there

with the team

to one of our proving grounds

out in Arizona,

and we drive the car,

the gt version of the mustang,

and...

I wasn't quite there.

It was great,

but it just wasn't great enough.

What is it

that we don't have?

- Here's the problem--

- is it the pads?

The team worked really hard

to get us to that point,

and I just, you know,

looked at the team

and said, "guys,

i don't think we're there."

I understand people are working. We just got

to make sure they got everything they need

and there's no hold-ups

and we can go as fast as we can.

I am a perfectionist.

I don't know that

anything is ever perfect,

you just keep trying

to get there,

and you never quite get there,

but along the way,

you just keep getting better.

Roy orbison:

How could you make a car

that was low-cost and exciting?

Not easy.

In fact, often when you see

a lower-priced car

really take off,

it's because somebody's

figured out

how to bring

the aspiration vehicle down

to a lower price,

and that was certainly

the inspiration

to create the mustang.

For some reason, it just wasn't

working very well.

Several studios

had a crack at it,

and it really wasn't coming

until iacocca decided

he wanted to have

a competition and give--

I think it was seven

design studios each a crack

using the exact same packet.

I figured if you're gonna make

a really inexpensive car,

we had to build it

from something inexpensive,

and Ford had the falcon,

probably the least expensive car

on the planet.

We decided to try to use it

as a base,

the proportions

and the stance and so forth,

and I was the cop to make sure

these guys didn't cheat.

I was at the Ford studio

when hal sperlich came in

and said, "iacocca wants

to see some new designs."

And we only had about

three weeks to do it.

So I went home,

sat at the kitchen table

and I sketched out four

or five quick sketches.

When I joined Ford,

they called me the farm boy.

I was working

with a bunch of guys

from New York and California.

They were doing airbrushed

drawings of beautiful cars,

and I thought,

"I'm in the wrong spot.

I can't compete

with these guys."

Came to the big showdown,

and there was iacocca

and myself and a few others

and, of course,

the fathers of each

of these seven cars,

and there were, like,

three or four

that were fantastic.

They picked my sketch

to be put on the driver's side

of the Clay.

Iacocca said,

"you know, this is the car."

I remember Lee turning,

and he said, "we got it."

So that was it.

When it was approved,

it was a cougar,

and the symbol

on the grill was a cat.

That didn't last very long.

Someplace along the line,

the marketing axis

under Lee's leadership

decided that the car

should be called a mustang,

not the cougar.

There's something

so uniquely American

in the word "mustang."

He knew it could be used

for marketing.

Iacocca knew that anything

that he would propose

to Henry Ford

was going to be a problem

because Henry

didn't want to launch

off into another

financial disaster.

The eyes of the American people

will be on edsel.

In the case of the mustang,

you're saying,

"we can sell

this large number of cars

in a market that will exist

once we bring this car out,"

but we couldn't say,

"here's proof this will work,"

'cause there wasn't any proof.

This came--

this came from the gut.

That time,

it took about $75 million

to get a car from concept

into production.

Lee brought Mr. Ford over.

You got to remember,

Ford motor company

wasn't a democracy.

It was a totalitarian state,

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