Homebush Mustangs

Mustang has a long history in this country, dating back to an ingenious marketing ploy in 1965 and 1966 that was more about Falcon than that first ponycar. To celebrate the return of Ford Australia-delivered Mustangs, we wind the clock back 50 years to a little known chapter in the blue oval’s local history.

Story: Luke West

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In summary

Ford Australia's Bill Bourke aimed to place a new Mustang in every showroom to give the American-styled 1966 XR Falcon a fighting chance with buyers.
Converting left-hand drive Mustangs to right-hand drive at Homebush proved a nightmare, forcing engineers led by Bill Tafe to rework the non-symmetrical dash and firewall.
Only 209 of the planned 400 Homebush Mustangs were ultimately converted and sold, but they still helped the XR Falcon succeed on the Australian market.

The plan was simple: place one new Mustang into every Ford showroom across Australia. Use the car that had taken America by storm to sprinkle its magic on the upcoming, 1966- release, XR model Falcon.

Easy in theory, a nightmare in reality.

The scheme was one of those occasions when a car company’s marketers forged on with a project that left the engineers cursing their interdepartmental colleagues. Converting those image-building machines to right-hand drive once they landed from the States would prove far more difficult than anyone within Ford believed.