Lee Iacocca Was Nervous About the 1967 Mustang Redesign – Fans Still Call the Result the Best-Looking Year Ever Built

Ford widened the Mustang’s engine bay for 1967 to fit its first big-block V8, worrying Lee Iacocca it would ruin the formula. Instead the redesigned fastback, with its sharper shoulder line and reworked roof, became the generation owners still call the best-looking Mustang built.

When Ford’s design team started sketching the second-generation Mustang before the first one had even finished its debut year, one man wasn’t fully sold on where it was headed. Lee Iacocca had turned the original 1964½ Mustang into a car that set an all-time first-year sales record no new model had ever matched, by keeping it light, tight, and cheap to build, and now his own engineers wanted to stretch it, widen it, and open up the engine bay for a big-block V8 it was never designed to carry. He didn’t run Ford outright, so the redesign moved forward whether he liked it or not, and he worried a bigger, heavier car would break the formula that made the original a phenomenon. What came out of that tension — the 1967 and 1968 Mustang — is the version an entire generation of owners still call the best-looking fastback Ford ever built, and Iacocca’s worry turned out to be almost exactly backwards.

Why Ford Redesigned a Car That Was Already a Hit

The pressure to redesign the Mustang had nothing to do with the original selling poorly — it sold spectacularly. The problem was competition on the horizon. Chevrolet and Pontiac were readying the Camaro and Firebird for the 1967 model year, and both were being built from the ground up to accept big-block engines the first Mustang’s engine bay simply couldn’t fit. Ford’s answer was to widen and lengthen the car enough to make room, without touching the 108-inch wheelbase that had defined the Mustang’s proportions from day one. The 1967 model grew about 2 inches longer, roughly 2.5 inches wider, and a half-inch taller than the 1965-66 cars, and the front track widened to accommodate the FE-series 390 cubic-inch V8 — the first true big-block ever offered under a Mustang hood.

That widened engine bay is the whole story of why the ’67-’68 cars look the way they do. The hood grew a more pronounced center crease, the grille opened up, and the fastback’s roofline was reworked with a faster taper and a distinctive concave rear window — the detail owners and fans still point to first when they talk about why this generation looks so much better resolved than the original. It wasn’t just a facelift; it was a car re-engineered around a bigger engine that then happened to come out looking sharper for it.

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The track widened right along with the body — from 55.4 inches to 58 inches up front and from 56 to 58 inches in the rear — which is a bigger change than it sounds like on paper. A wider track lowers a car’s visual stance and improves its actual handling balance, and combined with the redesigned sheetmetal, it’s a big part of why the ’67-’68 cars read as more substantial and better planted on the road than the original, even though the wheelbase never moved. Ford also used the extra width to open up the cabin and dashboard, addressing complaints that the original car felt tight inside for a lot of drivers.

The Numbers Behind the Redesign

The engine lineup tells the rest of the story. The solid-lifter 289 High Performance V8 — the beloved 271-horsepower “Hi-Po” K-code that had defined the original Mustang’s performance image — was in its final year for 1967, phased out once the 390 big-block gave Ford a more marketable performance option. Then, at the end of December 1967, Ford answered a challenge from Tasca Ford in Rhode Island, which had proven a 428-cubic-inch V8 could turn the Mustang into a genuine drag-strip threat. Ford’s factory version arrived for 1968 as the R-code 428 Cobra Jet, officially rated at 335 horsepower — a figure most enthusiasts and period magazine testers agreed was deliberately conservative.

The redesign didn’t slow the Mustang down in the showroom, either, at least not right away. Ford built 472,121 Mustangs for the 1967 model year against 285,748 Camaros, meaning the redesigned pony car still outsold its new rival by a wide margin in its first year of real competition. Sales cooled to 317,404 for 1968 as the novelty of the original car faded and the muscle car market got more crowded, but by then the Mustang had already proven the bigger, big-block-ready redesign hadn’t cost Ford the war it was fighting Chevrolet over.

What Still Makes the ’67-’68 Fastback the Fan Favorite

Ask owners of these cars what sold them and the answer is almost always the same: the shoulder line and that fastback roof. Long-time ’67 and ’68 fastback owners consistently describe the redesign as keeping everything that made the original Mustang recognizable while giving it a more “planted” stance and cleaner proportions — sharper character lines over the wheel arches, a lower beltline visually, and a rear window angle that reads faster and more purposeful than the 1965-66 cars. It’s a rare case of a corporate compromise — bigger car, bigger engine bay, tighter federal safety timelines coming for 1968 — producing a design that most fans consider an improvement rather than a dilution.

It also marked the last stand for a certain kind of Mustang. The 289 Hi-Po’s retirement after 1967 closed out the small-block, high-revving performance formula that built the car’s reputation, while the 428 Cobra Jet’s arrival for 1968 pointed toward the raw-torque muscle car era that would define the next several years. Buyers shopping this generation today are effectively choosing between the last of one Mustang philosophy and the first taste of the next, wrapped in a body that both camps agree is one of the best-looking Fords ever built.

For anyone shopping this generation today, the body style matters as much as the engine. Ford offered the ’67-’68 Mustang as a hardtop, a convertible, and the fastback that gets most of the attention now, and all three shared the same wider, big-block-ready platform. Fastbacks command the strongest collector interest thanks to that reworked roofline, but hardtops and convertibles from these two years are more affordable ways into the same redesign story. Whatever body style, the shock towers and floor pans are the areas worth inspecting closely on any unibody Mustang this age, since rust in those load-bearing areas is the difference between a straightforward restoration and a much more expensive one.

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