Welcome back Mustang Bullitt and Mach 1 enthusiasts for PART 2 of this exciting and extensive interview with MRT CEO Scott Hoag, and Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords Magazine issue from November of 2002. If you’re just joining us, make sure you catch up with PART 1 first!

Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords Magazine Interview – PART 2:

We weren’t going for horsepower and torque numbers as much as we were going for performance feel in the seat of the pants. You can talk all you want about horsepower, but you drive torque every day, every way.

MMFF: Can you tell us how the Mach 1 power train was developed? It’s clearly different from any other combination Ford has yet produced for the Mustang, but it’s all made up of off-the-shelf parts, isn’t it?
Hoag: We start off with the 4.6 4-valve engine. The short-block is essentially a 2001 Cobra, but it has revised cylinder heads, heads that will be shared by other Ford car and truck products, and of course, the induction system is changed for the outside cold air, and the exhaust system is a modified Cobra exhaust.
So there are substantial modifications, and this is not a Cobra engine. We won’t have final horsepower and torque figures for a while yet. But we weren’t going for horsepower and torque numbers as much as we were going for performance feel in the seat of the pants. You can talk all you want about horsepower, but you drive torque every day, every way. We wanted more area under the torque curve.
Going from the 2-valve platform to the 4-valve platform will cost more than the Bullitt engine did. Our customers are very loyal, but also very price-sensitive. We could have designed a really neat, cool $60,000 Mustang and been amused on our own, but the customers probably wouldn’t be. Keeping the price in check was, and still is, one of our challenges.

MMFF: When the first Mustang Mach 1 was introduced, its whole style revolved around the hood scoop. The 2003 Mach 1 scoop looks very, very similar. Is it in fact a copy of the original?
Hoag: We really wanted to hold the original scoop as the centerpiece of the car, so we went and got one from our friends at Classic Design Concepts in Walled Lake, MI., and George Huisman, the owner. We had worked with George previously on a SEMA project, where we showed the aftermarket manufacturers how to work up new and different Mustangs. George has worked with us in the past, and he’s a Mustang restorer and a Mustang history aficionado.

MMFF: So you all knew from the outset that the next short-run Mustang was going to be called the Mach 1?
Hoag: That would have been too easy. There were some other things on the table at the time, cars that are still sought after, collected, written about, talked about. They’re all there, today. The question was, can we do what it takes to appropriately redeliver the name, the essence, the image? Can we afford to do it? Can we do it from an engineering standpoint? If so, what could the car become? So we went through the whole gamut, the whole litany. There were people lining up against the Mach 1 because of the expense of the shaker hood—

MMFF: But, if you put the car out there without the shaker hood, people would have laughed you out of town—
Hoag: Right. Without it, it doesn’t deliver the DNA. But it was pushed back by every activity. It can’t be made to work from a styling perspective. It can’t be made to work from a performance perspective. It wouldn’t be good from a safety perspective. It was just easier for them to say no. But we looked at it from a SEMA cooperative point of view and we leveraged that partnership with SEMA to get the aftermarket modifiers to work with us. That was the hope and the goal when we went to the sit down with George Huisman at Classic Design Concepts.
We needed to make the ’67-70 scoop. We needed to stimulate the Comfort-Weave fabric on the leather seats and the Mach 1 stripe on the seatback. We needed to deliver the essence of the original Magnum 500 wheels with today’s offset parameters and today’s materials. So George took all that information and the car we provided to him and built the “Shaker” Mustang for the SEMA show, with leather seats, not the original vinyl, the hood scoop, the wheels, and delivered the essence of the Mach 1 without saying Mach 1. He won the SEMA design award for the best segment demonstration of a Mustang Modification as awarded by J Mays and his team. That certainly opened the door with the design people. That was the equivalent of the Bullitt’s success at the LA Auto Show, at SEMA Show in 2001.

MMFF: So George Huisman’s company had already done the majority of the heavy lifting on the project, and you took it in-house from there?
Hoag: Yes, starting with the problem of using the 4.6 4-valve engine, and understanding the very sensitive and appropriate step between the Cobra in whatever we were doing. We had to be patient, and wait for the Cobra to happen the way it was supposed to happen, with 390 Horsepower and the rest of the package. When the Cobra happened, it really opened the gap between itself and the GT, and with that, we had the door open to use the 4.6 4-valve in the Mach 1. There was a little bit of a wait for the new heads and making sure that the engine could go through all the emissions certification and calibration in the little bit of time we had left to us before Job One.

MMFF: And when is Job One?
Hoag: We will deliver the first car to the dealership in the autumn of 2002 and sell Mach 1s for the entire 2003 model year. I can’t get more definite than that.

MMFF: Likewise, you only had a short time to get the interior and exterior design right and get all the contracts for the unique Mach 1 parts?
Hoag: Right. We worked very closely with corporate design, with Sean Tant, who had designed the Bullitt, and then later with Doyle Letson and chief designer Doug Gaffka. Doug was a huge help. The effort between corporate design and George Huisman’s shop was very regular, and George built the prototypes, including the one we’re sitting in. We wanted genuine stuff, with no stuck-ons or add-ons. We chose to use a plastic SMC hood because of tooling costs. And we had to make the scoop fully functional.
The chassis was set up by the same guy who did the Bullitt, Rob Eaton. We had to make the Mach 1, now with a heavier powerplant up front, behave, handle, and perform like the Bullitt. Rob and his guys pulled it together.

MMFF: You’re obviously pleased with the way the car turned out?
Hoag: We’ve got the right ride and handling, the right performance, the right exhaust note, and we’ve even got colors like the old Grabber Blue from the ’60s. We got great cooperation from Ford Division and corporate finance on the pricing and cost. And when we got the prototype all finished, we took it over to the Dearborn Assembly Plant to show it to them, show them the number of unique parts, and ask them if they’d have any problems building the Mach 1 along with the GT and Cobra. They said, “This is Dearborn Assembly, and we can build anything.” They’ve been phenomenal in terms of helping us.
Time and time again, they’ve been able to deliver everything we’ve ever asked of them. We got the green light for the production of Mach 1 in July of 2001.

MMFF: Obviously, there were a lot of things you could not have changed in a 14-month development program because you had so little time. What were some of those?
Hoag: The tires, for instance, will be the same tires we use on the GT, the same tires we used on the Bullitt, because there was no time for a completely new tire development program. Goodyear assured us they would make more. The wheels on the other hand, are completely new, very Magnum 500-esque, but made with today’s materials, today’s tools, and production methods, made by Superior Industries exclusively for the Mach 1. We fought very hard to keep the original graphics and the lower-case “m” so that anyone who sees it will know exactly what it is.

MMFF: Can we now assume that you’re working on the last special short-run car based on the SN95 Mustang before the all-new car comes along?
Hoag: You can assume that we will continue to work on exhausting all the possibilities and perhaps create some new ones from the existing DNA.

MMFF: Will that last one be a new version of the Boss Mustang?
Hoag: Well, the Boss is certainly one of the great names, as strong as or even stronger than the Mach 1, but let’s not have that conversation. When to use that name, and how to use it, and what kind of content it takes to deliver on that name, the hows and the whens and wheres, that is a continuous conversation around here. We’re still working through that. It’s a natural next step, and it’s my passion and commitment to do everything we can so that we continue to amplify what it is we’re doing to be appropriately nostalgic, with appropriate performance, from Mustang’s rich history.

MMFF: Can we also assume that you will be doing exactly the same thing once the new Mustang is launched?
Hoag: Nothing is out of bounds. We’re celebrating Mustang, and only Ford can do that.

MMFF: Will that include a special anniversary model to be released on the Mustang’s 40th Anniversary on April 17th, 2004?
Hoag: How many times does a product turn 40 years old? In this business, not many. 🐎

“MRT Performance is the intersection of passion and innovation.”
-Scott Hoag