Ford Mustang 40th Anniversary

It was a white Mustang fastback with racing decals, probably a 1968 or 1969, that captured the imagination of the man who would become the 2005 Ford Mustang's chief engineer. Hau Thai-Tang had never seen a Mustang before, even though it was the early 1970s and he was maybe six or seven years old. "It was big, powerful, accessible," Thai-Tang says. "In that context, it stands for everything that's great in America."

In Saigon, Vietnam, where Thai-Tang spent his early years, most cars on the road in the former French colony were French. Thai-Tang's knowledge of big, powerful American cars came from Life and Time magazines his mother brought home from her job with the Saigon branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Hau Thai-Tang

The Mustang, considered a compact in the United States at that time, would have been almost comically out of place in a country with narrow streets and tiny cars. Thai-Tang saw that first Mustang when his grandfather, a prominent Vietnamese businessman, arranged a private tour of a U.S. military base for him. But he didn't go home from the tour dreaming of working on Mustangs. He didn't know then that his family would someday escape Saigon as it fell to the Communist north. "My aspiration was to own a car."

Thai-Tang's family came to the U.S. in 1975, eventually settling in Staten Island, New York. The move to the U.S. raised Thai-Tang's aspirations, and he went after a job in the auto industry. He earned his engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon University (for which he recruits graduates for Ford Motor Co.) and an MBA from the University of Michigan. Thai-Tang has worked for the automaker for more than 16 years, including a stint in 1993 on Nigel Mansell's CART team and a tour in Europe from 1995-1997 working on the Scorpio.

It might be heartwarming to think that the first Mustang inspired his work on the new Mustang's chassis, but that would be false. "Excessive understeer is not good," the chief engineer says, referring to the original Mustang. "The car needs to be almost like an extension of your body. We pushed the [2005] car to make it something that can reward driving skills and also flatter the novice." When Hau Thai-Tang takes delivery of his own 2005 Mustang, it won't be white with racing decals. "I have an affinity for red."