NoOp Comment: Yeah, we knew... Mustangs rule!
---------------- By NATALIE NEFF Dear ________,
Alas, we've been remiss. With all the attention given these days to you oh-so creative SoCal kids, your pimp import rides and all the wannabes across the country (yeah, you're legit, we know), too long has passed since last we waxed poetic on the state of the Mustang nation. After all, not every red, white and blue-blooded car guy dropped tran to run with the sport compact crowd. Folks from every wide place in the road have been modifying the late-model Mustang since Dearborn foaled the first some 25 years ago, and they're still at it.
We're not talking rodding stuff. Chopping and channeling have been around since at least '32. The importance of Mustang and its amen-ability to customization is that it helped turn the runt that was the automotive aftermarket into the $29 billion behemoth we know today.
What does that mean to you? Simply, that that Erebuni body and those Kosei rims don't make you original. Nothing you've done to your ride hasn't first been done on the Mustang.
"Mustang should be credited for revitalizing the aftermarket, which was really an Edelbrock manifold and Holley carb thing until the 5.0 Mustang came around," says Scott Oldham, editor of Sport Compact Car magazine. "The Civic was next. And it rode that wave, because without the 5.0 Mustang, tuning a computer-controlled motor was foreign." That's foreign as in "unknown," not foreign as in Japanese, got it? The 5.0 Mustang? That's so, like, 1986, right?
Maybe, but what Mustang started hasn't gone completely the import way. Mustang tuning still exists; we've tried to find out just how much.
While the Specialty Equipment Market Association can't tell us what chunk of the retail aftermarket is Mustang's, we do know the industry as a whole grew by double digits in those early electronically controlled 5.0-liter days (1986-89). It saw just 7.7 percent last year. SEMA does track the "compact performance" segment, however, "since its infancy in 1997 when sales were only $295 million." A decade of Mustang tuning had built the nursery for that infancy.
A little millennium-style gumshoeing yielded these factoids: amazon.com hawks almost as many Mustang magazines (six) as import tuner books (seven). And while Googling "Mustang tuner" vs. "import tuner" resulted in 63,000-plus hits vs. more than 159,000, on a marque-by-marque comparo, "Civic tuner" yielded 41,900 and change. Not bad for an old horse, eh?
Kenny Brown, Roush, Steeda, et al. are galloping along, largely on the backs of their modded Mustangs. But with larger piles of cash thrown at imports every year, you might think the popularity of Mustang tuning has reached a saturation point. Hardly. Just ask Eric Cheney.
"When we started, we blew our estimated projections out of the water by 600 percent the second month," says Cheney, owner of Xtreme Mustang Performance in Aliso Viejo, California. "And it's only getting bigger and stronger."
Cheney founded XMP three years ago after building a performance shop at the Ford dealership where he worked. Now instead of just selling them, he builds cars for Ford, showing off his Mustang one-offs at SEMA and International Auto Salons?next to all those hot import rides.
"You can get absolutely ridiculous power out of these cars," says Cheney. "It's fun to pull up next to a powerful little six-cylinder import like the Supra and beat it.
"People saw what you could do with muscle cars and wanted to do the same. The import guys had to look somewhere to get the ideas."
Seems even the guy making a living out of following the import scene concurs.
"Whether they admit it," says Oldham, "Honda guys owe the 5.0 guys a debt of gratitude."
So next time you're sitting at a light, just before the guy in the Mustang blows your doors off?or even if you do beat him?nod your head in respect.
Patrick '93 Cobra '83 LTD