Ford Has Solved The Mystery Behind The Unknown Mid-Engine Mustang Prototype

Earlier this week, Ford reached out to the public for help with identifying a mid-engine Mustang prototype. Ford Performance had found a picture of what appears to be a mid-engine Mustang mock-up in the Ford design studio from around 1966. Nobody on the Ford team seemed to be able to figure it out. Until now. Ford’s own lead archivist came to the rescue.

Ted Ryan, Ford’s Archives and Heritage Brand Manager, was the man with the answers. He has access to tens of thousands of pictures from the Ford Design Studio.

Ted talked to Jalopnik and told them the photos are referred to as styling negs since traditionally, these pictures of design works-in-progress were stored as negatives.

Starting in the early 1950s, every day in the design studio, active projects were photographed and categorized with an S-XXXX number, as seen in the photos.

The car in the photos is from the S-9955 series which has over 350,000 negatives, over 50,000 of which have been scanned. The reason it was such a puzzle to figure out is that the original inventory was destroyed in a flood.

So after much speculation, it is confirmed the car in the photos was related to the Mustang Mach 2 concept project, but it’s not exactly the same as the final released concept car. It was a mockup that was started in engineering as a packaging study, then sent over to design once the basic packaging issues were worked out.

For those of you who guessed the Mystery Mustang was an engineering packaging study for what would become the 1967 Mach 2 concept car, you were correct!