Photos by Drew Shipley, courtesy Auctions America.
When the wall at the back of the rented building came down, a few bricks fell inward. Nobody present – not even the owner of the building – knew what the wall concealed or even why the guy who had rented it put the wall up, they just knew that the wall had to come down. And when the dust cleared, they found that the bricks that fell inward had landed on the plexiglass rear window of an odd little Mustang that raised a whole lot of questions that haven’t been conclusively answered even today, almost 50 years later, when the Mustang has been slated to go to auction.
What happened after the discovery of the shortened two-seater fiberglass-bodied Mustang in that warehouse in Inkster, Michigan, appears rather straightforward. The warehouse owner, who only tore down the wall after the guy who rented the space about six months prior – Vince Gardner, a veteran car designer who had worked for Cord and Auburn in the 1930s and Studebaker in the 1940s and 1950s – failed to pay all but the first month’s rent, either alerted the authorities or Ford directly. The Mustang, considered stolen after it disappeared from a Detroit-area warehouse in May of 1965, went to Aetna, the insurance company that had previously cut a $10,000-plus check to Dearborn Steel Tubing, the company that turned the car out a year or two prior.
Aetna, based in Hartford, Connecticut, then shipped the Mustang back to its headquarters, where it sat outside for a year or so until one of its executives bought it, titled it, put about 11,000 miles on its tri-power 302, and then placed an ad for it in the December 1968 issue of Hemmings Motor News. He found a buyer in Bill Snyder, a Cleveland-area print shop owner who had seen the car both in the May 1965 issue of Motor Trend and in person when the Ford Custom Car Caravan made a stop at a Cleveland-area dealership; Snyder inquired about buying one then – “The Motor Trend article made it sound like Ford was going to start producing them,” he said – but was told that it was just an idea car not meant for production.
So Snyder jumped at the chance to buy the show car. He repaired the rear window and repainted the Mustang from its cracked candy apple lacquer to black primer, then drove it around Cleveland for another 4,000 miles before socking it away. He kept it in storage for the next few decades, until Bill Warner, chairman of the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance, learned of the Mustang in 2011 and told Snyder that if he restored it, Warner would feature it in the concours. Snyder did, and Warner did.
But its pre-brick-wall history had some peculiarities, starting with the VIN: 5S08F100009, which indicates a 1965 Mustang convertible powered by the F-code two-barrel 260-cu.in. V-8 – specifically, the ninth Mustang to come off of the assembly line at Ford’s pilot plant in Allen Park, Michigan, according to early Mustang historian Bob Fria. Fria said that alone makes the car significant, given that his research shows that only 15 pilot Mustangs were built in November or December 1963 (all notchbacks or convertibles) and just three of those 15 – including Snyder’s – are known to exist.
Some of those 15 underwent destructive testing, while others went on to be evaluated by race teams and other departments within Ford Motor Company. According to Fria, Ford’s records show that three of the 15 – the eighth, ninth, and 10th – went to Andy Hotton at Dearborn Steel Tubing. The eighth and 10th were reportedly scrapped, but the ninth went on to become something else. Snyder said he suspects that Ford had Dearborn Steel Tubing finish the Mustang with a scratch-built fiberglass fastback body and a custom-built tri-power 302-cu.in. V-8 specifically for the Ford Custom Car Caravan with Vince Gardner’s help.
According to Snyder’s account of the car’s history, the Dearborn Steel Tubing-built fastback toured the country as the Mustang III, and once the Mustang finished its six-month tour on the caravan, Snyder said that Gardner learned that Ford planned to scrap the shortened Mustang and thus stole it to prevent its destruction, secreting it away in the Inkster warehouse. “I think it was Dearborn Steel Tubing that filed the stolen car report,” Snyder said. “Though I still don’t know how it became (Dearborn Steel Tubing’s) property or why Ford would turn the title of it over to Dearborn Steel Tubing.” Ford later declined to prosecute Gardner, Snyder said, because Gardner was still doing pre-production engineering work for Ford.
However, auto historian Mark Gustavson, who has been researching the Ford Custom Car Caravan for an upcoming book, said Ford didn’t commission the shortened Mustang and that the company’s only direct involvement with the car came when Ford leased it from Gardner for the third edition of the Ford Custom Car Caravan.
“Gardner was an accomplished designer and needed no prompting from the Ford design studios,” Gustavson said. “There is no extant research that demonstrates that Gardner built the car to FoMoCo styling directives. It is not evidence that Ford owned the shorty Mustang because this car appeared in Ford Custom Car Caravan displays. Many independently-owned cars were leased by Ford for display in the Ford Caravan.”
Gustavson points to the DiDia 150, the so-called Bobby Darrin dream car; the Bill Cushenberry Silhouette; the Mustang Pegasus; and a number of vehicles built by George Barris as examples of cars that independent customizers built and that Ford spotted and leased for the Custom Car Caravan.
He said he believes that Ford probably only became aware of the shortened Mustang once Gardner had already built it and entered it in a car show at Cobo Hall in Detroit. At the time, Gardner worked either directly for or as a freelancer for Hotton and would thus have had access to pre-production cars through Dearborn Steel Tubing. (Indeed, in his book Mustang Genesis, The Creation of the Pony Car , Fria notes that in 1963 Ford sent a Falcon chassis to Dearborn Steel Tubing for Gardner to convert into what would become the Mustang II show car.)
Whatever Gardner’s motivations for bricking the Mustang up in a warehouse and then not paying rent on the space, Gustavson didn’t say, but the answer perhaps lies in a profile on the designer that Michael Lamm wrote for the October 2007 issue of Collectible Automobile, in which he noted that Gardner battled mental health issues throughout his life. A loner and a misfit, Gardner worked feverishly on projects and gained the trust of his mentor Gordon Buehrig, but also seemed to have trouble working with others, holding down jobs, maintaining relationships, or even staying in one place for too long. His troubles led him to spend part of the early 1940s in a mental institution and drove him to attempt suicide at least twice before killing himself in 1976.
“The history of the car is a lot more nuanced and complicated than the simple claim that Gardner just stole the car and hid it away,” Gustavson said.
Gustavson also calls into question that the Mustang III moniker was applied to the shortened Mustang. While a car on the Ford Custom Car Caravan did appear to go by the Mustang III name, Gustavson said it was applied to a Barris-built car. Though, as Gustavson noted, “these sorts of car name oddities occurred regularly.” This, of course, is counter to the Motor Trend article, which identified the car as the Mustang III.
Snyder, who displayed the car under a Mustang III banner this summer alongside the Mustang I and Mustang II concept and show cars, said that he’s “not certain that (the Mustang III name) is a very important part of its history,” but maintains that Ford commissioned the Mustang. “Vince Gardner couldn’t have bought it because the VIN is a pre-production number,” Snyder said. “It had to have been Ford that did this car. I have the correspondence back and forth between Dearborn Steel Tubing, Ford, and the Inkster Police Department.”
Regardless of its history, the Mustang nowadays sports a full restoration back to its original candy-apple red paint and black interior. The 302 engine and automatic transmission remain original to the car, Snyder said, and though he describes it as a great driver, he doesn’t take it out much because of its uniqueness. “We like to drive our cars, we don’t like to just have them sitting around, which is one reason we’re selling it,” he said.
The Mustang, which will cross the block at the Auctions America event in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has been estimated to sell for between $400,000 and $600,000.
The Auctions America Fort Lauderdale sale will take place March 27-29. For more information, visit AuctionsAmerica.com.
More gadget review in www.mamaktalk.com
