Lido ‘Lee’ Iacocca came from humble beginnings. The son of the owner of the Orpheum Wiener House in working-class Allentown, Pennsylvania, he studied engineering at the local university, Lehigh, and went straight into a trainee engineering spot at Ford on his graduation in 1946. Initially shy and awkward, Iacocca’s dealings with regional dealers made him tougher and sharper. Recognizing an up and coming executive, in 1956 the Ford Motor Company sent him to that mecca of selfimprovement, the Dale Carnegie Institute, to hone his public-speaking skills. Thereafter, Iacocca became increasingly confident. When the Mustang concept surfaced, Iacocca not only recognized it as a winner but also as the means of muscling his way to the top. On the way up, both he and Ford forgot many others who had been equally responsible for the car’s gestation and birth.
The Mustang, even more than the Thunderbird, was aimed squarely at the younger driver. It seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the sixties with its racy bodywork and suggestion of raw power. Henry Ford II wanted the car to be called the ‘Thunderbird II’, while Ford car division executives originally tagged it the ‘Torino’ (a name hastily withdrawn when it was pointed out that this Italian name might draw unwelcome attention to Henry Ford II’s Italian mistress). Yet Mustang – a name coined by Ford’s advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, after both the horse and the legendary wartime P-51 fighter – was the clear winner in market research.
In truth, the Mustang was not a new car. Iacocca’s department had merely put Bordinat’s body on to the conventional underpinnings of that most mundane of family sedans, the midsize Ford Falcon, and had borrowed the engine from the run of the mill Ford Fairlane. The Mustang’s lengthy bonnet did not conceal, as it implied, an enormous power train in the manner of the pre-war Bentleys, Bugattis and Cords; much of the forward space was actually empty. The interminable hood was all just for show, all style and no content. Iacocca later admitted that he had merely taken a Falcon and ‘put a youth wrapper around it’ – and this, he boasted, ‘was done for less than $50 million’. In contrast to the family-friendly Falcon, the Mustang’s rear seats were all but useless – only fit for ‘legless children’, as one critic wrote – while its trunk was tiny. Consumer campaigner Ralph Nader later categorized the Mustang as ‘a hoked-up Falcon with inadequate brakes, poor handling and marvellous promotion’. ‘Like most American cars,’ he concluded, ‘the Mustang abounds with new and startling engineering features carried over from 1910.’ Nor was Nader alone. Road Test magazine found that the Mustang was unstable at high speed, while Car Life derided the car’s ‘teenage rear suspension’.
Yet in spite of the critics’ warnings, the Mustang was a winner. This was due not only to Bordinat’s inspired and flexible design, which offered sleek fastback, coupé and convertible options, but also to Iacocca’s energetic marketing. Iacocca ensured that two hundred of America’s leading disc jockeys – opinion formers for the crucial market segment of sixteen to twenty-five yearolds – were each provided with a free Mustang. This helped garner the car very favourable publicity from the youth-oriented radio stations, if not from the motoring press. Four hundred and eighteen thousand Mustangs were sold in the first year, and an astonishing total of over one million in the first eighteen months.1
Ford’s Thunderbird found itself outflanked and outpaced by its young cousin. The stylish, youthful ‘personal car’ of 1955 now looked dated and middle-aged. Sales had already been slipping fast in the early sixties; the 1961 redesign, giving the T-bird a more futuristic, space-age look and a pointed nose, did little to affect the slide. In 1967 the car was distanced from the Mustang by more conservative styling and a four-door option, and ended up resembling a small Lincoln. The 1971 sixth generation Thunderbird proved to be the model’s nadir; the provision of a large V-8 engine was more than offset by the car’s heaviness, making the new Thunderbird’s performance no more than modest, while its body style was that of a middle-aged Mercury. Harley Earl’s original concept was belatedly revived in the 1983 T-bird, but the magic was gone and in 1997 the model was finally discontinued. A retro-styled coupé/convertible of 2002, powered by a Jaguar V-8, was similarly unsuccessful and was terminated in 2005.
Chrysler reacted to the news of the Mustang’s imminent launch in an over-hasty and slapdash manner, fitting a crisply styled fastback roof with a giant rear windscreen to the undistinguished Plymouth Valiant compact to make the Plymouth Barracuda. A V-8 engine option was available, but otherwise the engines that Plymouth offered for the Barracuda were the same as for the Valiant. The Barracuda did beat the Mustang’s public release by two weeks, but was widely recognized as a decidedly inferior product; in its best year, 1966, only thirty-eight thousand Barracudas were sold – a fraction of the Mustang’s astronomical sales. The car lost its Valiant nomenclature for 1965, and in 1967, in a belated attempt to endow it with more youthful appeal than its staid parent,1 it was furnished with flared hips, curved body panels and a more determined nose. In the late sixties Barracudas were even offered with ‘Mod Top’ vinyl roofs finished in flower-power motifs, trying to associate what was still basically a Valiant family car with the hippies of Haight-Ashbury.
Meanwhile, Chrysler’s Dodge division, envious of the runaway success of the Mustang and jealous of Plymouth’s early start, slapped a fastback rear and a V-8 engine into the 1966 Dodge Coronet to create the Dodge Charger. With its tapered lines and hidden headlamps, the ’68 Charger was a huge success and, much to Dodge’s delight, the model soon eclipsed its Barracuda cousin. AMC, too, responded quickly to the Mustang, but their new Tarpon was even less thought out than the Plymouth Barracuda, being little more than a Rambler Classic compact fitted with a fastback roof, and sales were accordingly dismal. In 1965 the unfortunately named Tarpon was rebranded as the Marlin, and quietly withdrawn in 1967.
GM, meanwhile, spent more than two years deliberating its response to the Mustang. When the result appeared in September 1966, the Chevrolet Camaro2 used the same basic formula as the Mustang: a short, 109 inch wheelbase (short for America, if not the rest of the world) and distinctive, racy styling. As the Mustang was adapted from the Falcon, so the Camaro was in essence a remodelled Chevette. Like the Mustang, the Camaro incorporated fake louvres and air scoops, which did not actually do anything but did look suitably impressive and fast. And, like the Mustang, it scored a palpable hit.
In 1964 GM’s Pontiac division also got in on the act when their chief engineer, John Z. DeLorean, re-engined an existing Pontiac compact to create a Mustang rival. DeLorean had joined GM’s Pontiac division from the ailing Packard in 1956, initially as a senior engineer in charge of advance planning. Encouraged by his boss at Pontiac, Semon ‘Bunkie’ Knudsen, DeLorean began to widen the model range at Pontiac, previously associated merely with staid and stolid cars. Pontiacs, asserted DeLorean, should compete at both ends of the market, and to that end he tested his new ‘muscle car’, the Pontiac Tempest of 1959, at racetrack meetings. The subsequent new strategy for the division treated Pontiac almost as a separate company from its GM partners, and drove a coach and horses through Durant’s much-vaunted and time-honoured policy of market sector equivalence. It was also ultimately to lead to confusion in consumers’ minds – a confusion that had serious consequences when GM began to falter in the 1970s.
In 1961 Knudsen was moved to head GM’s mass-market division, Chevrolet, and DeLorean became chief engineer at Pontiac. Here he was partly responsible for the crude new Tempest, a car that Road Test magazine branded ‘probably the worst riding, worst all-round handling car available to the American public’. De Lorean then shoehorned a five-litre V-8 power plant into a Tempest to create 1962’s gutsy Pontiac GTO, which he named in homage to Ferrari’s outstandingly potent 250 GTO coupé of the same year.1 Designed by Bill Porter, the car did not look as special or attractive as the Corvette and the Mustang, while its unresponsive steering and antiquated drum brakes were poor. It also sported the raised waist that was to become such a tedious and unsightly stylistic cliché
of the late 1960s and the 1970s.1 But the GTO was undoubtedly fast and, marketed as a ‘factory hot-rod’, sold well. (In 1967 Chrysler confirmed the GTO’s triumph by impersonating it with its equally formidable Plymouth Belvedere GTX ‘gentleman’s muscle car’.) Meanwhile, the incorrigibly self-promoting DeLorean took sole credit for the GTO’s achievements – though, in truth, he was only one element of a larger team. Perhaps a larger share in the GTO’s success should be assigned to Ronny and the Daytonas’ million-selling single, ‘G.T.O.’, which, while little more than an extended commercial for the car, actually reached number three in the pop charts in 1964.
Not every classic sports car of the sixties came from Europe or America. Toyota responded to the E-Type, the Sting Ray and the Mustang with the remarkably advanced 2000GT of 1967. Manufactured by Yamaha, as Toyota then did not have the plant for such an unusual job, the 2000GT brought Japan to the attention of the world’s car buyers for the first time, demonstrating to even the most sceptical motorist that the Japanese could produce a sports car that could rival the best of Coventry, Stuttgart and Detroit. Toyota’s rear-drive, hard-top coupé was designed in-house by Satoru Nozaki, whose flowing contours and lowslung body made the car an instant classic. In 1967 America’s Road and Track magazine described the 2000GT as ‘one of the most exciting and enjoyable cars we’ve driven’, and declared it equal, and in some respects even superior, to the legendary Porsche 911.
Even Toyota was surprised by the car’s success. Only 351 production 2000GTs were built,2 and as early as 1970 second-hand models were selling for vast sums. Toyota also neglected to capitalize on the car’s filmstar status – earned when, instead of using another Aston Martin as the featured car in the 1967 Bond film You Only Live Twice (partly shot in Japan), the producers chose a Toyota 2000GT1 as the car owned by Bond’s girlfriend, Aki.2
The year after the 2000GT appeared to great acclaim, Ferrari demonstrated that it could still make world-class cars with the Ferrari 365 GTB/4 of 1968. The 365 was soon known popularly as the Daytona, after Ferrari’s 1-2-3 finish in the 24-hour Daytona race of 1967 (though the 365 itself was not actually racing that day). Sharply designed by Pininfarina, the Daytona was, like the Toyota 2000GT, hailed as an instant classic. But, again like the 2000GT, the model’s popularity caught the manufacturer unawares. Only 1,284 Daytonas had been manufactured when production was stopped in 1973. Ironically, in the subsequent years the Daytona gained a reputation as one of the finest sports cars of all time, which in turn prompted film and television appearances in productions as varied as Gone in 60 Seconds, The Rookie and Miami Vice. The principal beneficiary of these star turns was not the Maranello factory, which had long stopped making the Daytona, but the dealers who traded in used Ferraris. Once more, the motor industry found itself surprised by success.
Unhappily, the failure to exploit market opportunities was a trait with which the world’s auto manufacturers were to become increasingly identified over the next two decades. By the time the industry had started planning ahead and was properly responding to customers’ demands, for many firms – some as illustrious as Ferrari – it was simply too late.
1 It was Disney perennial Dean Jones.
1 Moon, and the rest of The Who, were banned not just from all Holiday Inns for life but also from the city of Flint.
2 The Motown suffix was added in 1959 for a Smokey Robinson release.
1 Seven years later Gordy sold the Motown label to Boston Ventures Management.
1 Sturmey was editor of The Cyclist magazine and in 1895 founded the periodical Autocar (starting a rival publication, Motor, in 1903). He is nowadays perhaps better known for his three-speed Sturmey-Archer bicycle gear hub.
2 White and Poppe was bought by Guildford-based commercial vehicle manufacturer Dennis in 1919.
1 Which in turn prompted the retirement of Sir Reggie Rootes.
2 The Cardinal was launched as the Taunus 12M a week before the Cortina, on 21 September 1962. Its lines were even more unashamedly American than those of the Cortina, the sales of which it never matched.
1 The fabled Lotus-Cortina was the brainchild of Ford of Britain’s director of public affairs, Walter Hayes, who was himself responding to Lee Iacocca’s directive that Ford should get involved in motor sport in order to give the company’s products a more youthful image. When the excellent Mark II Cortina was introduced, Ford took the project’s direction out of the hands of the talented but unreliable Lotus boss, Colin Chapman, and rebranded the car the Cortina-Lotus.
2 A week later the millionth Anglia left Dagenham, too.
1 Michelotti’s ‘Ajax’ project of 1962 gave birth to the frontwheel-drive Triumph 1300 of 1965 and its progeny, the Triumph 1500, Toledo and Dolomite.
1 And monarchs, too: Queen Elizabeth II loved her personal P5, which can still be seen at the Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon, Warwickshire.
1 The company name derives from the company’s founder, Lionel Martin, and the Aston Hill hill-climb in Buckinghamshire, which Martin adored.
2 Ian Fleming’s novel of 1959 had described Bond driving a DB Mark III, but Fleming agreed with the producers’ request to substitute Aston’s latest model.
1 In contrast to the rugged appearance of his TR4, which was dominated by its vast headlamps.
1 He had been knighted four years previously.
1 Technically, British Leyland was formed as the British Leyland Motor Company (BLMC) in 1968 and only became British Leyland in 1975. In 1978 its official name was changed again, to BL Ltd (BL plc after 1978) and in 1986 BL was renamed the Rover Group. However, the term British Leyland and the acronym BL are used throughout this book in order to avoid confusion.
2 Ferrari’s splendid models remained beyond the pockets of most drivers. Even the Porsche 911, and its stablemate the 912 of 1965, initially sold in relatively low numbers.
1 As Eduardo was climbing down from his seaplane as it rode on the water, the aircraft hit a floating log, which in turn caused his head to hit the still-revolving propeller.
1 And this despite a tragic personal life: Gianni Agnelli’s son and heir, Eduardo, was an introverted, disturbed and obsessively religious man who committed suicide in 2000.
2 Alfa Romeo was added to the Fiat empire in 1986 and Maserati in 1993.
1 Russian fishermen did the same with the Moskvich 2140 of 1976, which was loosely based on the Simca 1307 of the previous year. Moskvich had prospered after the Second World War, making poor copies of the pre-war Opel Kadett, with machinery bodily transplanted from the ruined Opel works to Russia.
1 Two years earlier, Rolls had established commonality of parts between all Rolls and Bentley cars, thus effectively extinguishing Bentley as an individual marque.
2 Other European imports, aside from the bestselling Volkswagen – by far the biggest foreign seller in the US during the decade – generally fared less well.
3 Sold in the US as the XK-E.
1 The C4 version of the car of 1984 eliminated the brand’s unique, cat-like curves, which were thankfully reinstated in the C5 of 1997.
1 In 1967 a Mercury equivalent, the hard-top Cougar, was introduced, with distinctive front grille panels hiding the headlamps.
1 By 1970 the Valiant family resemblance was wholly severed.
2 Together with its Pontiac clone, the Firebird, which sported a now-traditional Pontiac split-front grille.
1 The Italian acronym GTO (Gran Turismo Omologato means, literally, ‘registered to race in the GT category’) had hitherto been used only for Ferraris. Its adoption by Pontiac prompted a howl of protest from the Ferrari tifosi.
1 And which was subsequently compared to the styling of a Coke bottle, an analogy that never seems to tire of repetition.
2 Most were painted red or white.
1 The film’s 2000GT was a fake convertible not then commercially available.
2 During shooting, the actress playing Aki, Akiko Wakabayashi, proved unable to drive the GT2000 fast enough to realize the key
scene in which she rescues Bond from Osato’s headquarters. The ‘Aki’ we see in this scene is actually film runner Mick Messenger, dressed in a long black wig. He pulled off the scene adeptly in the first (printed) take, only to crash the car in the second.
11
Heroes and Villains
The mid-1960s marked a watershed in the public perception of the motor car. As early as 1911 the editor of the magazine Living Age suggested: ‘From being the plaything of society [the car] has come to dominate society. It is now our tyrant, so that at last we have turned in revolt against it, and begun to protest against its arrogant ways.’ Fifty years later these words finally came true and the automobile switched from being a national hero to society’s villain. In 1965, Congress passed the first serious attempt by the US government to curb car emissions, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Act.1 But there was no initial response on the part of the complacent and conservative US manufacturers. As a result, the first car maker to offer the American public a reliable, clean, fuel-efficient small car was Japanese.2
In the 1950s the car had symbolized material success and consumer confidence. Now it was pilloried as an enemy of society and a potential coffin. In 1973 J. G. Ballard published his searing novel Crash, whose characters’ relationships were defined by the charge of crashed and crashing automobiles. The following year, the American artists of the Ant Farm Collective buried a line of ten old Cadillacs in the ground near Amarillo, Texas, to create the prescient Cadillac Ranch, in which the baleful, interred rear ends of GM’s finest formed a line of tombstones for the Golden Age of the motor car.1
Life of Automobile, The Page 29