Book Review: Mustang Boss 302 with LED Strip Lights by Cooleric2000
With the reemergence of the Dodge Charger R/T, the 45th Anniversary Edition of the Chevrolet Camaro and now the new Ford Mustang Boss 302, it’s safe to say “Welcome back, Detroit. America has missed you.”
If America is to rise to a new dawn, it may just be because these street machines roar up our core. It’s time once again to go out and yell, “Give me my muscle car!”
p146If you have not salivated over a street-legal hot rod recently, have forgotten James Garner tooling around the beach in his Pontiac Firebird on the Rockford Files or thought coolness would never again grace auto design drawing boards in an age that is getting gooier daily…prepare to drool.
Words blur like dotted white lines on a dark empty highway, and life is just cool as can be in the new book: Mustang Boss 302: From Racing Legend to Modern Muscle Car.
A passionate group of Ford engineers spent years bringing to birth the most sophisticated Mustang yet — the 2012 Mustang 302 Boss, with everything trick, hot and ready to rock.
From the 1960s pony car to this moment – a modern muscle car is reincarnated for the driver who wants a real racer for the street. No more mamby-pamby toys whose idea of performance is 0-60 mph in double digits of time.
Stack this book on the coffee table with that special edition “Hugo Boss 2008 Prize,” printed by the Guggenheim Museum you hold so dear. Slide it over with your prized copy of “Caribbean Houses: History, Style, and Architecture” fanning your fantasies.
Watch the scramble as gathering hands instead reach to hold this new legend with its dizzying cover of the bad-boy black Mustang Boss 302 Laguna Seca with race-red trim debuting with its heritage, a 1970 grabber-orange Mustang Boss 302.
p63bWho but the boss author of everything Mustang, Donald Farr, should write and compile this classic? The man who created the 1983 epic Mustang Boss 302, Ford’s Trans-Am Pony Car: a Complete History and is the editor of Mustang Monthly, still tunes a mean bass guitar when he rocks at Mustang fests. Wait until the Laguna Seca convention – you know there will be one – when he no doubt will be playing a rendition of Dick Dale’s “Wild, Wild Mustang” with Farr surf rocking.
In an age of “it’s all mine,” give credit to John M. Clor, Ford Racing Performance Group Communications Manager and self-described “Mustang book junkie,” for bowing to the king by having Farr compile this book. Clor had material ready to print but “quietly took a back seat” – which he couldn’t do in the Laguna Seca since it doesn’t have one – for the good of the project.
That sacrifice, his judgment call, is just one clue of many why this book and this project car may be symbolizing a positive turn of inertia in America.
And who but a master of racing and car books, MBI Publishing Company, should print this book? It has all of their quality touches of layout, beauty and editing that make it a must-have from the get-go.
Consider Ford Motor Company in the depths of the depressing recession, circa 2008, green-lighting such a project, keeping it secret from the inside out with the code “747,” and creating a car that appears as fast in real life as a jet.
p63aParnelli Jones, the iconic racer from the 1960s, calls it “a race car with a license plate.”
If I emphasized highlights marked in my edition, pretty much required would be a reprinting of the whole copy. Here are a few selections from the 160 pages chocked full of brilliant color images and notes from the “treasure troves,” as Farr called them, that he reveled in at Ford’s World Headquarters.
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