Designing the Mustang

Jerry Malinowski may seem like just another mild-mannered university professor, but digging a little beyond the surface reveals a list of astonishing accomplishments. Just one example: Malinowski was one of a small team of men who designed the original Mustang for Ford Motor Company.

“I started working for Ford in 1961. I was twenty-two. I was a young guy,” Malinowski said in a recent interview. “I never had the slightest inkling the car would become the hit it became. It wasn’t until it hit the showroom floor, April 17, 1964. They took orders for 24,000 cars the first day it was out—that’s when we realized we had a successful car.”

Malinowski remembers the early 1960s as a turbulent time at Ford. The so-called Whiz Kids, a group of ten World War II veterans including Robert McNamara (who becamethe president of Ford for a short while before he was named John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defense), had helped bring the company back to success post-World War II. But they were also responsible for the Edsel—a car named for Henry Ford’s son. Though there were high hopes for the Edsel, it was a dramatic commercial failure for a combination of reasons, including price, problems with quality control, consumer confusion, lack of market testing, and an imminent economic recession. The failure cost the company millions, and the word “Edsel” became synonymous with “failure.”

“Everything [the Whiz Kids] did was not successful,” Malinowski said.

Malinowski worked day and night with fellow designers Phil Clark and Jim Quinlan, creating the Mustang from 1960 until it was released in 1964. Meanwhile, the Edsel’s epic failure overshadowed just about everything else and generated a terrified-to-fail corporate environment across the organization.

“Ford just came through an incredible loss with the Ford Edsel in 1960—that’s about $2.8 billion in today’s money. They were in a quandary,” Malinowski said. “It was a time when Ford Motor Company was really questioning their sales. The problem was that the Ford cars of that period didn’t have a very good resale value. They had problems with rust. They had to do something very seriously. Fortunately, the Mustang played a big role in bringing the company back.” But no one knew that yet.

In the wake of the Edsel, Henry Ford II was determined to build a sports car to rival Ferrari and other Italian models—a car so spectacular that it would compensate for and overshadow the massive Edsel failure that struck the company across the nation. Rick Oustalet, dealer at Bubba Oustalet Ford in Jennings, remembers the impact of the Edsel’s failure on the company and its dealerships. His dad, Bubba Oustalet, founded the dealership and, in fact, was the chairman of the Ford Dealers Association in 1960.

“I lived through that time. We were an Edsel dealer. The Edsel disaster really shook everybody up,” Oustalet said. “They (the Ford Motor Company management) were very gun shy about doing anything radical.”

Creating something radical was exactly what Malinowski and his design colleagues were after as they worked on the project that at one point was called the “B52.”

“There was no name for the car when we first started the program,” Malinowski said. “That process was cloudy and an enigma. In fact, because Henry Ford (II) was so obsessed with owning Ferrari during that time, many of the suggested names were Italian.”

Henry Ford II’s desire to buy Ferrari was one of the worst-kept secrets of the time. This ambition became an underlying theme of the project and was also a source of frustrating irony. While the design team was trying to build the next great “American car,” Henry Ford II kept pushing for Italian influences.

“Henry Ford was going to have a horse on his car one way or the other,” Malinowski said. “There is a story that I tell that Ford Motor Company sent five Ford Falcons to Italy in ’61 and ’62 to the Ferrari designers. We were hearing the car should look more Italian. There was a back-and-forth between Ferrari and Henry Ford, and ultimately, he was really played with by Ferrari.”

Malinowski said that when those cars made their way back to Detroit, “they were hideous. … They didn’t have the svelteness of the Mustang—not even close.”

Still, Malinowski said the designers knew they were going after something “very American”—with their primary competition being Italian racecars. When Malinowski added vertical red, white, and blue racing stripes on some sketches, one of the studio heads suggested taking the stripes off the car and putting them in the car’s emblem.

“Phil Clark, the guy sitting next to me, took the horse and put it on top of the vertical stripes. The two pieces would merge, and that’s how the Mustang symbol came about—the horse on the red, white, and blue vertical stripes,” he said.

Malinowski explained that some of the early designs he worked on featured long hoods and short decks. “I was trying to establish some of the charisma of the 1955 Thunderbird, which was patterned after a Jaguar. All in all, the DNA of a car went through a lot of metamorphoses,” he said. “The true Mustang didn’t show up until ‘63. It was a very complex phenomenon. The Mustang project started in early 1962, called the Mustang 1, which was a two-passenger vehicle based off a Ferrari, [which] was racing in Europe.”

Before Ralph Nader doomed it as “unsafe at any speed,” the Chevrolet Corvair also played a role in inspiring the design of the Mustang.

“The Corvair was a rear-engined car. When they came out with the Corvair Spyder, with bucket seats and full-speed transmission, we had the Falcon, which was a four-seater passenger car. It was a frumpy-looking car, and Ford panicked. We had to do something with the Ford Falcon. It was really the pre-generator of the Mustang. It was proven it would work. Eventually, Ralph Nader put the Corvair out of business, but it was a big part in the motivation to do something with a car that was sporty and youth oriented.”

Through the various iterations and inspirations, Malinowski and the team continued their work styling the vehicle that would eventually become the Mustang and making specific changes to its pieces and parts.

“The corporate mantra on taillights was that your taillights had to be round—like the jet tube of an airplane. I remember butting heads with management saying, ‘Come on, guys, you’re using round taillights to all your brands.’ We changed the round taillight to a rectangle, and that would be reflected in the ‘64 Mustang.”

The Mustang prototype was built in ninety days by a firm in California, and the car was taken to Watkins Glen, New York, and driven by Dan Guerney on October 7, 1963.

“That was its debut,” Malinowski remembered.

When that car hit the marketplace in April 1964, sales soared beyond their wildest dreams. It was a mega-hit at the dealerships.

Oustalet remembers that day well:

“I was a freshman in high school, about to get my drivers’ license. My brother was sixteen, and we wanted one; but even though our father owned the dealership, we couldn’t get one because we couldn’t get enough of the cars. We built a corral in the dealership floor, with bales of hay, a fence, and everything; but it mainly sat there empty because we couldn’t keep them [in stock].”

Oustalet and his brother finally got a Mustang to share, and he remembered that he and his brother “couldn’t go anywhere without people coming out to see it—coming out of church and everything.”

Oustalet chronicles his teenage years in terms of Mustangs.

“Our first one was white. Then my dad got a black convertible Mustang with white leather. Our second one was a maroon fastback. The fastback went through the roof. It was just unbelievable, the acceptance of the automobile. That fastback was a blow-you-away car,” Oustalet said. “It took some guts to do what they did. It had a style that made people feel younger than they were, and it was so affordable. You got so much for your money. I believe the original ones were $2,368, or they might have been $2,386.”

Through the years, Malinowski has owned two Mustangs, a 1966 and a 1970.

He worked for Ford from 1961 through 1964, designing the Mustang. Then he left Ford Motor Company to work in Japan as a designer for Panasonic, helping the company veer away from the German influence it had adopted to more traditional Japanese lines and styling.  

“At Ford, we worked overtime every day to 9 pm and Saturdays. Your life was dedicated to doing that stuff. I had other ambitions,” Malinowski said. He worked in Japan for three years for Panasonic and then returned to the States, but he has continued learning and designing.

He was a member of the 1988 U.S. Olympic bobsled team and designed the bobsled used by the 1992 U.S. Olympic team, which Sports Illustrated called “the most beautiful sled the world has ever seen.”

He continues to teach industrial design at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is the coordinator of the industrial design program. Throughout 2014, he has been presenting a series called “The Enigma of an American Icon—the DNA of the Ford Mustang,” including a recent presentation at the Saratoga Automobile Museum.

Malinowski remembers the day the Mustang hit the market and the pizzazz its styling inspired across the country. He’s amazed and proud that the car’s basic design is still rooted in the work he did more than fifty years ago. Ultimately, Malinowski said, he believes that a large part of the car’s success is based in the fact “that it came from guys who loved cars.”

Photo: Concept sketches for the original Ford Mustang, which hit the marketplace in 1964. Courtesy of Jerry Malinowski.