Not so fast, Maverick!

Writers want a great hook for their story – by which I mean a single, punchy starting point that pops a reader's eyes wide open.

Here's mine: No car has generated more first-year sales than the Mustang did, ever. Not before. Not since. Not the Model T, not the Model A, and certainly not some flashy Chevrolet.

Pretty good hook, right? I like it because it raises a question that I intend to spend about 250 pages answering: Why? Why would this car, at that moment, set a sales record that has stood for more than 40 years?

But there is this one nagging issue: I'm not sure that my hook is true.

This much I do know. Between April 17, 1964, and the car's first birthday a year later, Ford sold more than 418,000 Mustangs, and proudly claimed the car's first year the greatest in automotive history. The previous record-holder, Ford said, was its own Falcon, which sold just over 417,000 cars in 1959-60.

I believe that 1965 boast to be true. After all, if you can't believe a claim by the greatest car salesman of them all, Lee Iacocca, who can you believe?

Truth be told, though, I can't yet prove that the Mustang record still holds up. In fact, most car people I've encountered in working on the book doubt it.

So much time has passed, they say, and the car market is so much bigger now. Probably the Taurus surpassed it, one might offer. Or the Explorer. (I've been talking to a lot of Ford people, this being a Mustang project.) Or the Chrysler minivans, another Iacocca smash when they hit the market.

To those suggestions, I have this to say: Thanks, but no, no and no. In their first year, none of these vehicles came close to Mustang. In fact, the Taurus, an immensely successful car, didn't match the Mustang's first-year sales number once in its 21-year run.

Still, my sources' doubt has become my doubt. How will I ever know for sure? Why isn't there some record book somewhere, some know-it-all with the facts I want right at his fingertips?

Then, just over a week ago, I spoke with Bill Benton, a retired Ford executive. He was a perfectly good interview subject who, with a single question, made my heart sink.

What about the Maverick? he said.

After we hung up, I hit the web. The first site I checked indicated that the Maverick, another Ford product, was introduced on April 17, 1969, the Mustang's fifth anniversary. That I didn't mind.

And then I saw this: "The Maverick broke the first-year sales record set by the Mustang in 1965," the site said. "It was Ford's most successful car launch ever."

Bummer.

Wikipedia was ambiguous.

"The Maverick was a huge sales success," its entry said. "Nearly 579,000 units were produced in its first year."

Double bummer. But what to make of the very next sentence? "This rivaled the record-setting first year of Mustang sales (nearly 619,000), and easily outpaced the Mustang's sales of less than 200,000 in 1970."

Clearly, the Wikipedia writers were counting Mustangs differently than Ford did. Maybe there was hope.

Next day, I asked a Ford archivist who has been feeding me facts for months now. She came up with a press release that made me smile again. It was dated April 17, 1970 – one year to the day after Maverick hit the market – and this is how it began:

"The first of the domestic auto industry's new small cars – the Maverick – celebrates its first birthday today with more than 340,000 sales to its credit."

And so the hook lives – for now. And you know what? I'll take it.

(Can you point me to a source that would help resolve this question, one way or another? If so, comment away. Or e-mail me.)

What next? A book!

As you can see, it's been months since I posted, and as you might guess, it's been every bit as long since I worked on the car.

Two points in my defense. First, it's been a nasty winter. The snowbanks along our driveway are 10 feet high. The garage isn't heated.


And second, late last summer, the veteran writer in me conquered the newborn mechanic. (It wasn't much of a fight.) As a result, I have a contract to produce a book on the first year of the Mustang for the University of Michigan Press. I signed the deal in September, and the manuscript is due in October 2009.

When the weather warms, I will return to work on the car. My goal for 2008 is to clean and paint the engine compartment and the chassis, then turn the car over to a body shop next winter, so I don't have to leave my real car in the driveway when the weather turns frosty again.

But until the book is done, it's Job One. Among other things, this means you're more likely to see posts now about book research than rust removal.

Already I've had a lot of fun. In October I spent a week at Ford's research center, and in January I spent another week looking in an advertising research library at a Duke. On both trips I had terrific help from my brother, Mike, who I have Tom Sawyered into thinking that research work is glamorous, fascinating and irresistible.

With the help of Mustang Monthly, a publication of the Mustang Club of America, I've also introduced myself to the world of Mustang lovers, and more than a dozen have already written me to share their first memories of the car from 1964. (I'll start introducing them in later posts.) And I've begun the processing of tracking down and extracting memories from retired Ford executives and workers. (More on that later, too.)

Enough for now, though. After all, it's been months since I last wrote, and I wouldn't want to overwhelm you!