I love a good automotive mystery! So reader Jayden P’s recent sighting has me intrigued. He spotted this 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 a few weeks ago while driving around in Twin Falls, Idaho. He snapped a couple of pictures and decided to come back another time to have a closer look. Unfortunately, when he stopped by recently, the car was gone. Perhaps the owner decided to move it out of sight? Maybe someone stopped, made them an offer, and it’s now on its way to receiving a full restoration? We may never know what has happed with this Mach 1. Hopefully, someone that knows more about this car will see it and share the story behind it with us!
As you can see, it looks like someone started restoring it, but they didn’t get much further than pulling the engine out and sanding the paint off. I struggle to understand the thought process that leads so many to start out their classic car project by sanding all the paint off. I get the desire to fix body damage and to make the car look great again, but body work is challenging, paint is expensive, and old oxidized paint is a better base to paint over than rusty metal. It seems to me like getting it running and driving should be priority number one, then worry about cosmetics once you can drive the car to the paint shop to get a quote on what it’s going to cost to get it painted. With paint jobs easily costing $10k or more these days, restoring the paint that’s there seems like a much better option. At this point, the only option for this Pony is a coat of fresh paint.
From what Jayden could tell based on the badges, this car was equipped with a 351 V8. This isn’t the most desirable of engine options for the Mach 1, but that isn’t to say this isn’t a desirable car. Examples in drivable condition can easily go for $30k+. If this one could be had cheap enough, it would definitely be worth restoring. That brings us back to the question of what exactly happened to it. Is it parked somewhere else now? Has it been moved indoors? And will it ever see the open road again?
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Jayden be brave and knock on the homeowners door.
99.9 % of the time I found the homeowners to be very
friendly and helpful. Next time your in the area stop by and ask them what happened to the car.
By the way the only time I did have trouble I had a shot gun pointed at me and told ” The car ain’t for sale “.
my dad had that happen once, only the car was for sale, he was wanting a mustang (1st gen) outside of my town its ford country, so there was this shop and they had a bunch of old fords everything (back then if you wanted ford muscle thats where you went) they had about 4 mustang couples and my dad at the time was drive a 79 camaro well he stoped and got out and he got about 5 steps and then someone pop’s out from behind one of the cars with a shotgun and he was like what are you doin here drivin that, my dad imeaditly put his hands up and he said well i was lookin for a mustang, the guy puts the shotgun down and was like oh well then your in the right place.
Hoss / Piston … it’s a good thing you don’t have a gun problem in your country.
I haven’t had the chance to go back in a while but I did notice a mistake in this article. The first time I talked to the guy, we got into talking about the options the car was equipped with. It had the 351 Cleveland, paired with a 3-speed automatic transmission. He also kept reiterating the fact that it was a base model Fastback, not a Mach 1.
Eyes wide open in ADA county! Had I spotted I would have bought on the spot.