The post ended by saying, “So, there you go, Ford Performance. Now you can sleep at night.” But in reality, that post declaring the mystery was solved while we were just beginning to receive the more than 100 emails about the mystery from Mustang people all over the world was quite unsettling. Worse, it cut short our little “guess what these photos are?” contest, spoiling it for those who wanted to claim our Ford Performance mini-flag “prize.”
Regardless, we had no choice but to wait until all of your responses came in as planned, and then catalog them all. Then, we took the best clues among them (which identified the project as involving then-Ford contractor Kar-Kraft – the shop that worked on the GT-40, Boss 429 Mustang and a variety of Ford prototypes and concepts) and sent it -- along with much of your input -- to Charlie Henry. He’s the author of the award-winning 2017 hardcover book, “Kar-Kraft: Race Cars, Prototypes and Muscle Cars of Ford’s Specialty Vehicle Activity Program.”
Our thought was, now that the Ford info was out, was there any more that we could learn from those photos from the enthusiast side of things? Since Charlie Henry literally “wrote the book” on Kar-Kraft, we asked him if he could use our reader info to do a deep-dive story on the Mach 2 protoypes that Kar-Kraft had worked on for Ford. We’ll have his full investigative report in the Enthusiasts section of FordPerformance.com in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we’ve gone back and reviewed all of the reader responses sent to
ClubHub@Ford.com to our original mid-engine mystery story to see if we could identify which one, or ones, could be considered the “winner” of our Ford Performance mini-flag prize for the best clues. It wasn’t an easy task.
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Among the scores of emails we received, more than half weren’t guesses at all – but rather tips on the names of people who were said to be involved with the project and or who we might want to contact to try and find out more information. Many of the tips came from folks in the Ford community – either employees, retirees, writers, historians or Ford club members and enthusiasts. Both Jeff Jacobucci, Team Shelby’s Mountain Region Director, and Joe Dietz of the Denver Mustang Club, suggested that we get in touch with Bill Riley, whose father, Bob, worked on the prototype at Kar-Kraft. So we hooked them up with Charlie Henry, who had himself weighed in as it being a Mach 2 precursor pilot car. SAAC-MCR club founder-turned-FordPerformance.com photojournalist Jeff Burgy flagged it as a Mach 2 Concept prototype, as did author Marty Schorr, as well as Ford retiree/historian Wayne Ferens. Noted auto journalist/authors Matt Stone and Paul Newitt offered kudos on brining the story to light – all while more than a half-dozen North American auto media outlets picked up the piece with stories of their own.