Greg Schneider, Contributor
Inspired by the late '60s Mustangs, the 2005 GT has a 300-hp, V8 engine that, like the body, can serve as an excellent base for all kinds of inspired mischief.-CONTRIBUTED
WASHINGTON:
IT IS A beautiful spring day, sun glinting off the Potomac, birds chirping, the whole bit. A Honda Civic coasts through a crowded marina parking lot that spot's taken, that spot's taken, that spot ... Whoa, what's this?
A row of half a dozen Ford Mustangs appears: restored classics from the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in a brand-new 2005 model. The Civic driver stops and gets out. He stands, slack-jawed, staring at the menacing Mustangs. His Civic idles meekly behind him, door open, forgotten.
It would have been a great TV commercial as the scene played out half a dozen weeks ago at the Washington Sailing Marina.
IMPROMPTU CAR LUST
The impromptu car lust was exactly what Ford was hoping for when it rolled out the new Mustang last fall, and Americans have provided it in numbers even company executives didn't expect.
Sales are up 25 per cent from last year. Ford has had to increase production, to 192,000, a 70 per cent increase over last year.
Like a Beatles album, the car is one of those rare products loved by critics as much as the public, and proves that despite all the news about Detroit automakers stumbling financially, they can still get things right once in a while.
"This is the best Mustang ever produced,'' said Brad Barnett, who runs an enthusiasts' website called TheMustangSource.com. "`It's all-American. Baseball, apple pie and Mustang are
all-American.''
VIETNAMESE IMMIGRANT
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the new Mustang is largely the creation of a Vietnamese immigrant named Hau Thai-Tang.
At 38, Thai-Tang is younger than the car itself, which debuted in 1964. He and his family escaped from Vietnam as Saigon fell in 1975, and he was hired at Ford as an engineer shortly after college. Despite his unusual
background, Thai-Tang was well aware of what was at stake when he landed the assignment as chief engineer on Ford's most iconic product. Or maybe it was because of his background.
This car symbolises so many things about America,'' he said. "There's so much made in the media these days of the stereotype of the ugly American overseas. But there is a lot of very positive images of America that don't get mentioned enough, and I think in many ways the Mustang embodies those things.''
Qualities such as "strength, power, confidence, freedom and the sense of inclusiveness,'' he said, were always in mind as he oversaw decisions about how to design and build the new Mustang.
Sometimes it takes a distant vantage point to see America quite that way. After all, it was Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville who captured the spirit of American democracy in essays in the 1800s, and fellow countryman Frederic Auguste Bartholdi who created the Statue of Liberty. Think of the Eastern Europeans of the early 20th century who shaped American cinema: Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer; or French designer Raymond Loewy who created the streamlined S-1 locomotive that was the pinnacle of 1930s railroading.
In the auto industry, it was another Asian American Larry Shinoda, held in internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II who designed the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, arguably the top rival to the Mustang as the quintessential American car.
"There is probably a dynamic there that allows a for lack of a better word an outsider to express what all of us would like to say,'' said Wes Brown, an auto industry marketing expert with the consulting firm Iceology Inc. Thai-Tang, Brown said, "was able to express his love for everything American better than someone who was born here.''
Thai-Tang knew war his whole childhood. His family was comfortable his father was a schoolteacher and South Vietnamese army conscript; his mother, a clerk for Chase Manhattan Bank but their Saigon neighbourhood was no escape from combat. Viet Cong would infiltrate the city at night, he said; one morning the family opened its front door and found an enemy fighter shot dead on the stoop.
During trips to the countryside, Thai-Tang and his younger brother saw bodies of Viet Cong guerrillas strung up by the roadside. An uncle and aunt both died in the war.
When Thai-Tang was around five-years-old, his father and grandfather took him for a treat: The U.S. military was staging an exhibition of tanks and planes and other military hardware. But what really stood out was a group of souped-up Mustangs, brought over by U.S. drag-racing legend Al Eckstrand, to boost troop morale and promote safe driving for soldiers headed back home.
Accustomed to Vespa scooters, Volkswagen Bugs and the family's crank-started Citroen, Thai-Tang hardly knew what to think of the powerful Mustangs. They were "just totally out of this world,'' he said. "As a kid, you envisioned this big country, wide open spaces. The people are big, and here's this car that's big and muscular you envision it driving out West somewhere. The freedom, and escape.''
In 1975, as South Vietnam was about to be overrun by the communist north, Chase Manhattan Bank selected Thai-Tang's family for relocation to America. They had to listen for a signal Armed Forces Radio would play Bing Crosby's White Christmas and leave small bags packed by the front door.
The song aired one day in April. The family rushed to a rendezvous point, pausing only to leave keys with Thai-Tang's grandfather, then caught one of the last planes out before Saigon fell.
Resettled in Brooklyn, nine-year-old Hau plunged directly into public schools, despite knowing almost no English. He was a whiz at math, though, and gravitated toward engineering. After college, Thai-Tang interned at Procter & Gamble, where he quickly grew tired of an assignment to design twist tops for orange juice containers.
So he went to an interview at Ford, where someone met him at the airport in a company car: a Mustang. ``I thought, 'How cool is that?' '' Thai-Tang said.
Too cool for a newcomer, as it turned out. Mustangs were the prestige programme within the company, and after Thai-Tang was hired, it was years before he got anywhere near them. But he did wind up working on rear-wheel-drive vehicles, a shrinking part of the business in an era when most Americans came to prefer front-wheel drive. Mustangs were the last major rear-wheel-drive car at Ford, and when the company decided to re-design the car a few years ago, Thai-Tang was coming off successful work on the Lincoln LS. He was in a perfect position to take on the Mustang job. When he was named chief engineer, a top executive congratulated him for winning a 'stand and deliver' opportunity.
"The implied message is, you're accountable. High-risk, high-reward,'' Thai-Tang said. He didn't need reminding. "There's the additional burden of eight million customers who bought the car over the last 41 years. You realise they're looking to you to not screw it up.''
Hau Thai-Tang does not come across as a Steve McQueen type of guy. His carefully composed demeanour - wire-rimmed glasses, trim business suit - conceals a dry, self-deprecating wit ("an Asian guy who's good in math: imagine that,'' he quips). His iPod doesn't get any wilder than classic rock, Black Eyed Peas, Gregorian chants and - of course - several versions of White Christmas.REDESIGNED CAR
But it was McQueen, the 1970s movie tough guy, whom Thai-Tang looked to for inspiration in pulling together the Mustang. He put up a poster of the actor in the work area where, at peak, some 200 team members collaborated to create the car. McQueen's scowl, he said, set the look for the car's front end, the headlights set back under the rim of the hood to suggest the same air of menace.
Workers used the McQueen movie Bullitt, which featured a Mustang in wild car chases, to get the engine sound for the new car, tuning its exhaust pipes like a musical instrument, seeking the right rumble and roar.
Engineers and designers hung out with enthusiasts at Mustang clubs and rallies. They watched how Mustang owners lived with their cars, and had customers clip pictures from magazines to illustrate their feelings about the brand.
By the time the redesigned car rolled into showrooms, with its retro-flavoured looks and updated technology, it had enough pre-orders to debut as a hit. Critics had a few complaints - the car has a solid rear axle instead of independent suspension; stability control is unavailable - but by almost any measure, the new Mustang was a home run, and one of the few highlights for Ford at a time of financial peril.
Thai-Tang has since been promoted to oversee development of all Ford's advanced and performance vehicles. But he continues to travel the globe touting the car, speaking at such places as the marina, where members of several Mustang clubs showed up. At a Mustang show in Europe, enthusiasts from several countries arrived wearing cowboy boots. At U.S. rallies, Thai-Tang inevitably runs into Vietnam War veterans eager to meet him.
"In some ways it brings a little closure for them to realise, 'Hey, it wasn't a lost cause,'" he said. "They made a difference in people's lives. People resettled in America and were able to contribute to this new country.''
Thai-Tang made sure he got that message to Eckstrand, who had organised the Mustang show in Vietnam. Now living in Florida, Eckstrand has been amazed to see Thai-Tang credit him in television and newspaper interviews. The two men spoke by phone, and Thai-Tang sent Eckstrand a book about Ford products, inscribed to the man who inspired the 2005 Mustang.
"I was so proud,'' Eckstrand said, his voice breaking with emotion. After three years of touring those cars around Southeast Asia in the 1970s, he said, he has always been haunted by the thought of all the children who came out to see them. Now he knows that at least one not only made it out, but accomplished something remarkable.
The Washington Post
