Giugiaro Ford Mustang Concept

It's no surprise, given his profession, that Fabrizio Giugiaro grades new-car designs the way a mountaineer might rate peaks (for him, the Bentley Continental GT and the VW Phaeton merit 8000-meter admiration). But when he first gazed upon the redesigned-for-2005 Ford Mustang, 'the most beautiful Mustang I'd seen in decades," the 41-year-old son of legendary auto designer Giorgetto Giugiaro knew immediately he'd found a new Everest. He had to climb it.

"I remember talking with J Mays [Ford chief creative officer] at the 2005 Detroit auto show," recalls the younger Giugiaro, now styling director of Italdesign Giugiaro SpA, the Turin-based company his father founded in 1968. "I said, 'I want to do my next concept car for Ford,' and J -- whom I've known for a long time --said, 'Great. You can base it on any Ford model you want.' Well, right away I said, 'I want the new Mustang!' And J, he sort of paused for a moment and replied, 'Um, for that one I'll have to check.'" Giugiaro chuckles at the memory. "Of course, soon after he came back to me and said, 'Okay.'"

From that initial discussion in Detroit arose the sensuous machine you see here, star of last November's Los Angeles auto show (where it made its world debut), scene-stealer at Detroit in January and currently headed to Switzerland, where its European coming-out party will take place at the Geneva motor show mid-March.

Before Giugiaro's baby departed for the land of chocolate and Rolexes, though, Motor Trend nabbed this one-of-a-kind, multi-million-dollar ponycar for an exclusive drive - that's right, it's a fully functioning automobile - on the road course at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Fabrizio Guigiaro even jetted in from Italy to brief us (and clock a few tire-smoking laps himself).

At this point, you might reasonably ask why a designer who admires a car's look would want to change it. Well, for one thing, tweaking Mustangs runs in the Giugiaro family. In 1965, father Giorgetto created a Mustang concept while working at design house Bertone (see story this issue). But for son Fabrizio, the 2005 Mustang's arresting lines and hallowed profile represented a challenge he couldn't ignore. "It was a very delicate proposition," he admits, "but it was also necessary for us to do so. I wanted to show that we could make a new design - not better, but different - while still representing the icon, maintaining the Mustang's identity. Also, it's important for the business of Italdesign to show that we can create concepts that are real, working cars, not just fantasies. I've driven this Mustang Concept all around Turin - my father and I drive all our prototypes." Noticing our aren't-you-afraid-of-a-fender-bender? raised eyebrows, Giugiaro shrugs his shoulders. "After all, they are cars."

The Mustang Concept developed over an unusually long gestation period, Giugiaro acknowledges - partly because work on the project was interrupted when Giorgetto Giugiaro diverted much of Italdesign's resources to create his Ferrari 612-based GG50 concept car, unveiled in 2005 to celebrate the master's 50th anniversary in the car-design biz (and, yes, father and son regularly drive the GG50 around Turin). With the Ferrari one-off completed, though, Fabrizio again turned up the heat on his Mustang. "I made some early sketches, some too retro and some too far out. I'd started with a three-box design [hood, greenhouse, trunk], but that ended up looking too normal. So I made a modification, basically a two-box-and-a-half shape, like a fastback. I immediately went with that direction. Also, my Mustang is smaller, lower, wider - more like a Corvette. When I built my first model, though, I thought it was too small in the rear end. My father ended up working with me quite a bit on the rear design."