With Its Rare Color, Is This 1986 Mustang Just Your Style?
There are a lot of Ford Mustangs. Millions of them. Creating a Mustang that stands out in a crowd can be difficult, but occasionally you stumble across one that somehow becomes more than the sum of its parts. It catches the eye and keeps attention. Not for any crazy reason, but just because it has a certain special feel to it. That’s exactly how I felt the first time I saw this 1986 Mustang GT.
My soft spot for cars of the 1980s has been growing as of late, but it still takes something special to get me excited about cars that came from that bounce-back time in the auto industry. Horsepower was on the return and styling was not terrible. In fact, in the right color just about every car from the 1980s looks decent. Until today, I never knew that all I needed to like Fox-body Mustangs was some Dark Sage exterior paint.
Despite this car being nearly half a decade older than me, I’ve never previously crossed paths with it or one of its doppelgängers. That’s likely due to the relative rarity of the color. The combination of this nice dark green with the light tan of the Sand Beige and Buckskin interior was optioned on just 78 cars. Spread that out over the thousands of highways and byways of the US and it’s obvious why I never got to see one.
This one is optioned like the one I would have wanted to discover, too. The GT package lends some performance to back up the nice looks, namely a 200-horse 5.0-liter HO V-8. The power figure sounds meager, but with 285 lb-ft of torque on tap, these cars move pretty well if you are looking for a sporty driving experience, especially when paired with the five-speed manual transmission. It’ll still turn the tires but is much more likely to turn heads as the crowd moves around this pony rather than it running through the crowd.
Is it the rarest Mustang? Hardly. And that’s fine. It’s still a neat car that grabs attention for the right reasons. A car that almost demands a second glance and then still your brain needs a second to put together why you stopped to look at it. While some get this with a paint-to-sample program, there are plenty of cars that come in great non-boring colors and trims if you are just willing to get a little nerdy. If this one is just right for you, be sure to raise a bidder paddle at the upcoming Mecum Kansas City auction on December 7th.
