Grand Prize
As American classics go, none is more famous than the Ford Mustang. That’s what makes the special editions and oddities so interesting – cars like this 1972 Grandé. Yes, Ford put the accent on that last ‘e’, even though it wouldn’t be right for either French or Spanish. These days it sounds like something you’d order from a posh coffee chain, but when the model was introduced for the 1969 model year, perhaps we were more easily impressed.
We tend to think of the first-generation Mustangs from mid-1964 to 1973 as endlessly successful, breaking all sales records and leaving the rest of the industry weeping into its beer. The truth is that Ford set itself such a high bar, so early, that after the Mustang’s peak year (607,000 cars in 1966) it was scrabbling around for ways to maintain those levels. This was
