Mustang purity was maintained, but I can say from having worked more than 150 road-race events as a 24 Hours of Lemons official that a stock 1989-1997 Probe will annihilate a stock 1989-1997 Mustang on a road course (given drivers of approximately equal skill levels), even when the Probe has a four-cylinder engine and the Mustang has a V8. Some model names are just more sacred than others. ![]() The Capri name hadn't been quite as sacred here, though it started out on a Lincoln in 1952, became a trim-level designation for the Mercury Comet in 1966, moved to a European-built Ford sold by Mercury dealers (though never formally given Mercury badging here), then went onto the Mercury-badged Fox Mustang for the 1979 through 1986 model years. Meanwhile, North American Mazda dealers were able to sell a mechanically identical and similar-looking coupe called the MX-6, and the Probe's bread-and-butter Mazda 626 cousins rolled out of the same plant in Flat Rock.įord's Mercury Division had done well enough by pasting its badges on the Australian-built Ford Capri here, despite that car being a front-driver based on the Mazda 323 platform. The Probe ended up enjoying respectable sales numbers and most folks in the blue-oval world seemed happy enough. So, Ford kept the Fox Mustang in production ( through 1993 or 2004, depending on how strictly you define a Fox) and dug up the name used on the 1979-1985 Probe concept cars for use on the erstwhile fourth-generation Mustang. Who could object to that? When news of the next-generation Mustang with its Japanese ancestry, wrong-wheel-drive and non-V8 power (never mind that most first-generation Mustangs were sold with straight-six engines) leaked via Autoweek in 1987, however, the howls of outrage were immediate and deafening. ![]() The Mazda design with a hot V6 engine would eat up a Fox Mustang on any race track involving corners and it just looked fast. This all made perfect sense if you discounted the emotional attachment Americans had developed for V8-engined rear-wheel-drive Mustangs starting a couple of decades before. The Ford Mustang went onto the new rear-wheel-drive Fox Platform for the 1979 model year (ending a shameful five-year interregnum of Pinto-based Mustangs) and sales were strong as the 1980s progressed … but the suits in Dearborn and Hiroshima cooked up a plan to put the Mustang on a modified Mazda 626 chassis starting with the 1989 model year. The automotive world was making a massive shift into front-wheel-drive machinery by the dawn of the 1980s, thanks to the fuel-economy and interior-space benefits derived from driving the front wheels with a weight-saving engine/transaxle package, and memories of the 1979 Oil Crisis remained vivid. Here's one of the final Probes sold in the United States, found in a San Francisco Bay Area car graveyard. ![]() One of the more interesting products of the Mazda-Ford partnership (which was terminated when Ford sold off its Mazda stake in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis) was the Ford Probe, a sporty liftback coupe sold for the 1989 through 1997 model years. The 1991 and later Escort was sibling to the Mazda 323/ Protegé, for example, and Mazda was able to cash in on the SUV craze early by selling Ford Explorers with Navajo badges. ![]() By the middle 1990s, Ford owned a third of Mazda and had profited handsomely through the use of Mazda engineering in its vehicles. Junkyard Gem: 1997 Ford Probe The final model year for the would-be Mazda Mustangįord's partnership with Mazda began in the early 1970s, when the Mazda Proceed pickup went on sale here as the Ford Courier.
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