Old Stig approves of the new Mustang

11 November, 2015

The all-new Ford Mustang has been singled out as being the ultimate stunt car by Ben Collins — best remembered for his role as Stig on a certain BBC TV motoring programme.

Collins — whose movie stunt-driving credits include Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre, Mission Impossible, and The Dark Knight Rises — has just completed filming on his own film, Ben Collins: Stunt Driver. Check out the video of Collins discussing the Ford performance line-up back in September, 2015:

In that film, a Ford Mustang beats an array of high-performance road and competition cars during 48 hours of explosive, high-speed challenges featuring aerobatic planes, helicopter gunships, and military machines.

Check out the video of the Ford Mustang in action below:

 

Performance art

Shelby’s targets were Superformance — a South African company that wanted to sell its versions of these cars in the US — and the US-based Factory Five. Their defence was that the name and shape of the Cobra car were abandoned when Shelby American ceased production of these particular models back in the 1960s.
Shelby countered with: “We spent millions of dollars creating the name and the car and winning the world championship. These knock-off-car guys don’t deserve the credit or the profit for what my team and Ford accomplished in the ’60s.”
Superformance painted an even bigger target on its back by also producing a version of Shelby’s Daytona coupé. Other cars in its production stable were Mk1 GT40 and 1962 Corvette Grand Sport replicas, but we’ll focus here on the Daytona.

Design accord

You can’t get much more of an art deco car than a Cord — so much so that new owners, Paul McCarthy and his wife, Sarah Selwood, went ahead and took their Beverly 812 to Napier’s Art Deco Festival this year, even though the festival itself had been cancelled.
“We took delivery of the vehicle 12 days before heading off to Napier. We still drove it all around at the festival,” says Paul.
The utterly distinctive chrome grille wrapping around the Cord’s famous coffin-shaped nose, and the pure, clean lines of the front wing wheel arches, thanks to its retractable headlamps, are the essence of deco. This model, the Beverly, has the finishing touch of the bustle boot that is missing from the Westchester saloon.