I bought the Mustang in 1989 after looking round for a project. Although I really like the 60’s Mustangs the prices being asked in Holland at the time were a bit extreme especially when a lot of them were real basket cases. I settled on a Mustang 3 Ghia from 1979 which I found by a dealer in Katwijk, it wasn’t in the best condition but it had a 302ci small block V8 (5.0L) and a 4-speed manual box and I didn’t pay much for it. I drove it for a while but it was a bit of a slouch and smoked a little, the engine compartment was also a real mess with a lot of the environmental things not working effectively. To be honest the sort of additions that were used in the US at the time were BS. So eventually I decided that there was only one thing to do – a complete custom restoration. The photo above was taken in ’96 if I remember correctly, after I had imported a set of Centerline Racing Alloys and Mickey Thompson Indy Profile retro tyres. It didn’t always look like this though.
From the time that the car was first finished in ’91 we used to attend a lot of meetings. The car was built with drag racing in mind but I wanted it to be street legal, it was therefore never a particularly comfortable car to drive long distances. Through the summer seasons the most popular meeting on the American Car scene in the Netherlands was the Saturday Night Cruise in Scheveningen near The Hague. It wasn’t much more than a number of cars parked in a small industrial park near the harbour and sea front but you needed to be there early to be sure of a place. During the evening cars would leave now and then to cruise up and down the boulevard while somebody else kept your place free until you returned. To be honest the number of people who actually built cars and maintained them like I do could be counted on your hands and although we had some interesting discussions with these guys most of the time I was explaining to others why and how certain things were done. Trying to share knowledge. You tend to stand out as a non-national (foreigner) and I believe I got a bit of a reputation for having the ‘knowledge’. Sometimes guys with a particular problem with their car would come over and tell me they had been told to go and talk to the English guy with the blue Mustang.
Some years later the local council decided to close down the meeting due to nuisance being caused on the boulevard by people with old American shit that wasn’t welcome at the meet. We were moved to an industrial park somewhere else in the town which was nowhere as much fun so I eventually stopped going. By the time I bought the BMW in ’98 I was just about done with the American Car scene but it would be another three years before I found a buyer for the ‘Stang.
Above is the trophy I won at the Show’n’Shine Sunday meeting we attended in Arnhem in 1997, it was for the class Post ’73 Mustang. It was quite unexpected as I don’t attend these meetings with any attention to try and win something, it’s just a way of showing what I do and talking to others about it. We had arrived quite early on the Sunday morning and were quite close to the main show area. I spent the first hour or so doing a little polishing to get rid of the dead flies we’d picked up on the way. Then we spent some time talking to people who stopped to look at the car and meeting old friends who had also arrived. We then left the car to go and inspect the other cars, which turned out to be quite a lot as they had spread into two more fields after we arrived. We also spent some time by the food and drink in the main show area. when we got back to the car a little later there was a card under one of the windshield wipers informing me that the judges had been around and had selected the car for the final of the prize-giving. It was a pity I’d missed them as I could have told them about how and why I had done the work on the car. I didn’t think any more about it until later in the afternoon while I was in discussion with another owner when someone came over to tell me that he was certain that the car had been named during the prize-giving and that maybe I should get over to the main stand to enquire. To be honest I wasn’t even aware that it was taking place and by the time I got over there they had finished the ceremony and were packing up to go home. I told them that I was the owner of the car and they fetched the cup out of one of the boxes and sort of presented it to me. Shame we missed the main event
A week after the Show’n’Shine Sunday there was a drag race meeting in Drachten in the north of the country. I went up on my own with a tent packed in the back of the car planning to meet some other guys I knew from the American Car circuit. On the Saturday was qualifying and the eliminations took place on the Sunday. It wasn’t a bad weekend, the weather was perfect, unlike weather I have experienced at Santa Pod Raceway in the UK in the past. But unlike Santa Pod it wasn’t that well organised. Due to restrictions on the event times enforced by the local authorities it made the days quite short and so everything was extremely rushed. Another thing was that it took place on an airfield which was itself not too large and it was not possible to let the faster cars run any more than 1/8th mile instead of the usual 1/4 mile. The class I ran is was ‘Street’ which just about covered everything that was legally allowed on the road and therefore encompassed a pretty wide spread of ET’s (elapsed time). As they were just running heads up racing as opposed to a handicap system it meant that the chance of doing any good was pretty small. There was actually a pretty large entry for the class, about 25 cars or so, and after a couple of practice runs I managed to qualify 13th which wasn’t too bad. During qualifying it became obvious to me that nearly all of the competitors had arrived with the car on a trailer and a lot of them were running cheater slicks. Cheater slicks were a tyre you could buy in the US which were basically slicks with a couple of shallow tread grooves cut in them and a DOT (Dept. of Transport) approved stamp. Having a short life they were not what you’d normally use on the road, just racing. I had arrived fully road legal with genuine road tyres so I was at a disadvantage from the start. On the timing slips it was obvious I was losing out in the first 60 foot, as I couldn’t get enough grip. A simple burn out was not enough to get the street tyres sticky. In the eliminations on the Sunday following the normal rules with a 16 car field meant that I would be up against the number 4 qualifier and as it was heads up racing I didn’t stand much chance. I got beaten off the line, as was to be expected, but by half track I was catching him up but couldn’t do it before we crossed the line. It wasn’t bad considering it was the first time the car had been raced, this not including all the traffic light duels I had with boy racers in hot hatches running around our home town.
Mustang - Part 1
Mustang - Part 2
Mustang - Part 3