FORD MUSTANG

Two superb stunt drivers, two aggressive cars, lots of clashing metal and a huge cinematic fireball at the end. The car chase in the 1968 film Bullitt set new standards for the day and was recently voted the best in film history. A Ford Mustang GT 390 Fastback driven by Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) duels with a Dodge Charger 440 driven by a pair of assassins down the jagged hills of San Francisco to the soundtrack of squealing tyres and howling V8 engines.

The scene gave rise to one of the most hotly debated questions of all time, at least among car buffs, pub bores and, er, motoring journalists. Could the Mustang, with 50 less horsepower and less torque than the Charger, really have caught and overtaken the bigger car, forcing it to career off the road and explode? Some say the Charger had the edge in raw speed but the Mustang was tighter in the corners. Perhaps.

Others say the weight of an extra person in the Charger slowed it down and tipped the balance in favour of the Mustang. Maybe.

The only way to answer the question was to get two cars identical to those in the film and race them head to head. So that’s what we did, right down to the colour (highland green for the Mustang, villain-black for the Charger).

Naturally, Andrew Frankel’s imposing height and menacing demeanour cast him as the bad guy, but it quickly became apparent that he had nabbed the better car. The Charger is a classic Yank tank — a two-ton barge with a 375bhp engine. The Mustang should have the advantage of being lighter, nimbler and better. But it doesn’t because it handles every bit as badly as the Dodge: the weight is distributed wrongly, the live rear axle was a liability on the damp Silverstone track, and it’s held together by pop rivets and paint.

You wouldn’t expect the Mustang to drive as if it had modern ABS or traction control. The trouble is it doesn’t have much of any other type of control either. Its suspension feels like a waterbed and it steers like an old mattress. It was as much as I could do to keep up with Frankel even though he could barely see out of his sunglasses. Furthermore, had I wanted to force his more solidly built Charger off the road I would have needed a demolition crane. The Mustang would have folded like a tin can.

The problem was that the Mustang, which still holds the record for the fastest-selling model in history, was a quick-sale, pile ’em high car. Ford could have given Warner Brothers something quicker for the film — like the 390bhp 427 Fairlane — but it wanted to promote a car with mass appeal.

In reality the baddies in the Charger (which for the film was driven by Bill Hickman, the same stuntman behind the wheel in the famous French Connection car chase) would easily have outrun Bullitt’s Mustang (actually driven by McQueen and Bud Ekins, his old buddy, famous for the motorbike stunt in The Great Escape).

But once you start confusing reality with fiction you’re lost. There are plenty of anorak websites reminding us of the flaws in Bullitt. For example, alert viewers will spot that the Charger actually misses by a long way the line of petrol pumps it was supposed to have hit moments before the fireball. It also loses an impossible six hubcaps at various stages during the chase; the same green VW Beetle gets overtaken repeatedly by both cars; and the Mustang had no wing mirrors when it arrived at the car wash but had one on the driver’s side when it drove away.

Okay, so the Mustang wasn’t as good as the scriptwriters made out but there’s another consideration: pose value. This is directly related to coolness (the precise formula is pose value = coolness x the number of onlookers). McQueen was cool even though he dressed for the film like a Liberal Democrat MP in a brown jacket and turtleneck sweater.

Likewise the hastily built Mustang was miles cooler than any other car of its day — and still is. It was a piece of classic design translated into metal. To give you an idea of how it scores on the coolness scale, if the Mustang were at the North Pole, an Aston Martin DB9 would be on the equator in terms of relative coolness.

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