MILLION DOLLAR MUSTANGS


One of the most interesting Mustangs ever made is missing.
When I say “Missing” I mean I, as a historian, can’t account for its whereabouts.

It could be in a museum, somewhere, gathering dust, its historical significance lost to whoever owns it.

Anyway here’s the scoop. Way back in 1964, L. Scott Bailey, publisher and founder of Automobile Quarterly a sort of hardbound magazine, decided to promote his magazine by making a deal with Carrozzeria Bertone, a famous coachbuilder, to design and build a Mustang for him.

Not an easy task considering the stock Mustang had a unibody. So it wasn’t like a car with a separate frame that they could design a body for, then plop it onto the frame as they did a year earlier for the 1963 Corvette Rondine.

Nevertheless Giorgetto Giguario, then a young mop—haired beginner at Bertone, designed a car that had all the grace of a European GT car. And Giugiaro should know what that means for at the same time he as designing Alfa Romeos, Ferraris and Maseratis.

In 1968 he left Bertone to start his own design firm, Ital Design and now is the world’s most recognized car designer. In fact Ital Design recently designed a concept Mustang for Ford, which kind of returned Giugiaro to one of his earliest American involvements.

Let’s go back to the Bertone Mustang.

The nose had hidden headlights and horizontal grille bars, and strongly resembles the Mazda RX-2. This was no accident for, despite telling the world that Bertone wouldn’t help the Japanese carmakers (Italians were worried the Japanese cars would outsell theirs) Nuccio Bertone was secretly designing cars for Mazda, among them the Capella that became the RX-2.

The Bertone Mustang was also a fastback with a side profile similar to the 1965 Plymouth Barracuda and also the later RX-4 Mazda Luce two door coupe.

It was finished in a light turquoise and had an exquisite tan leather of that color
Italians call “goose beak.? If there’s any doubt Giugiaro designed the car, look at the side vents—the same ones he used on a Maserati 5000GT and several other cars. It was his trademark at the time.

The dashboard looks much more like a European car with the gauges all clustered in a hooded binnacle, and a center console. The steering wheel of course is aluminum spoked with a wood rim.

The car was shown at the NY Auto Show and various venues in the US and we are sure
Mr. L. Scott Bailey got his use of it, though one wonders if he ever really owned it, as this writer once saw it parked at Ford Motor Co.

At any rate, the car disappeared from the show circuit and the only two rumors the author has heard concerning its wherabouts is that a Greek ship captain bought it and that somehow later a fake journalist showed up at a Monte Carlo auto showroom and saw it on display and asked if he could take it out to “photograph it for a magazine.” Neither the car nor he was ever seen again. If you find this ploy unlikely your author once used the same ploy to borrow a Lancia race car from an Italian showroom. But I returned it intact.

I predict that, given the mania for one off special Mustangs, that this car would fetch up to $1 million in an auction like the Barrett—Jackson Scottsdale event, if properly promoted in advance. Maybe they could fly in ol’ Giugiaro, now grey-haired and venerable, to pump up the car like they have Carroll Shelby pump up some of his rarer cars that have rolled across their auction block of late.

So there is is, Mustang fans. You know what it looks like. You have the names of two countries where it was last seen. A very cold trail, admittedly, but a trail nonetheless.
Good hunting….