[geeks] F*n sweet car... has anyone seen this car yet?

[Chris Byrne]

Actually you cant say the Mustang was started WAY before the Camaro because
at the time ford launched the mustang it was the fastest developed car in
its history. There were several mustang like concepts prior to Lee Iacocca's
championing of what became the 1964-1/2 Mustang but that particular project
took if I recall correctly 14 months from first sketch to first prototype,
and then another four months for a production ready car. That's incredibly
fast even by todays standards and at the time was ridiculously fast. The
Camaro design was launched probably a year after the mustang design was, it
just took a normal length of time (usually between four and seven years).

There have been several books written about the high speed low drag
developement of the mustang, and it's featured prominently in most books
about ford and about Iacocca because it really skyrocketed his career.

I have been both a mustang and a camaro owner and I much preferred the
camaro, but that's probably because I owned a '69 camaro and an 84 mercury
capri (it's a mustang guys, most parts are interchangeable, only its even
uglier than the standard fox mustang).

Heres how I'd break it down

64-1/2 mustang is the ultimate pony car. Its the first and the purest
Any '60's to '72 mustang cobra, GT, BOSS, or MACH, plus anything that carrol
shelby touched kick the shit out of any camaro cool factor wise
Every Mustang built from 74-75 til '87 was complete shit (actually most
american passenger cars built in those years were complete shit). The
mustang-II was one of the worst cars ever built and the fox/fairlane/ltd
platformed mustangs werent really mustangs they were rebodied econoboxes.
Hell the low end fox mustang was essentially a slightly better looking
escort.
>From '87 on the 'stang started getting better. The last of the fox body
models had pretty good powerplants but their baisc platform was still shit.
The new body models were a hell of a lot better but still had a basically
poor chassis design until the changes to the most recent model Cobra (the
indy suspension is very good)
The newest cobra and other special editions have reached near to the level
of goodness (though still cant touch the coolness) of the original BOSS,
MACH, Cobra and GT mustangs.

The '69 camaro is one of the coolest cars ever, however it is still not even
close to as cool as the aforementioned coolest stangs
the camaros of the mid to late 70s and early 80s out classed the mustangs of
the same time in every way, while still being total shit.
The IROC era camaros were far better than their contemporary mustangs, and
started being less and less shitty up til the next generation.
The next generation (early 90s on) camaros were actually pretty good though
very unrefined and much better performance than conmtemp stangs
With the most recent revisions the stang bypassed the camaro in performance
and coolness for the first time since 1972

All that being said the Mustang has outsold the camaro in every year that
they were both produced, sometimes by as much as a factor of 10 to 1.

Chris Byrne


> -----Original Message-----
> From: geeks-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:geeks-admin at sunhelp.org]On Behalf
> Of David Passmore
> Sent: 10 May 2002 22:27
> To: geeks at sunhelp.org
> Subject: Re: [geeks] F*n sweet car... has anyone seen this car yet?
>
>
> On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 04:28:04PM -0500, Shawn Wallbridge wrote:
> > Except that the Camaro was in development _way_ before the
> Mustang came out.
>
> The Mustang was in development way before the Mustang came out... and the
> production Camaro didn't come out til '67, almost three years after the
> Mustang was introduced. I believe Camaro design started in '64.
>
> David
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks