The Martini Mustang is Loud & Fast Art

Builder Steve Strope calls it his cancer, only half joking, and the Mustang fastback he built to answer one strange question proves the obsession was worth it: what if Ford and Martini Racing had actually partnered up? Powered by a motor descended from Ford’s 1960s Lotus Indy Car program and wrapped in one of motorsport’s most iconic liveries, this build rewards close inspection. Watch to see the details fans are still finding.

Steve Strope doesn’t call himself a car enthusiast. On camera, he describes it as cancer — a joke that isn’t really a joke, and the kind of line that only makes sense once you’ve seen what he’s capable of building. His Mustang fastback started as a “what if” question nobody had seriously asked before: what would it look like if Ford and Martini Racing had actually teamed up to build a European rally weapon? The answer involves a Lotus-derived Indy Car engine, a livery normally reserved for Porsches and Lancias, and enough hidden detail work that even hardcore fans keep finding new things to notice, months after the car first appeared in public.

The Question Behind the Build

Every Pure Vision build reportedly starts with a specific “what if” question, and for this Mustang, Strope’s question was whether Ford and Martini Racing could plausibly have crossed paths in period, teaming up to dominate European rally stages the way Martini’s actual partners, Porsche and Lancia, did for decades. Nothing like that ever happened in real automotive history, which is exactly what made it an interesting starting point for a build rather than a restoration.

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Martini Racing on a Mustang Fastback

Martini’s light blue, dark blue, and red striping is one of the most recognized liveries in motorsport, tied historically to European manufacturers rather than anything from Dearborn. Wrapping that scheme around an American fastback Mustang creates a visual mashup that shouldn’t work on paper but reads as coherent once you see the finished car, largely because the proportions and detailing were built specifically to support it rather than slapped on as an afterthought paint job. Martini Racing’s actual partnerships ran through Porsche’s 917 and 935 programs and Lancia’s rally-dominant Delta Integrale, cars built for closed-course and stage-rally competition respectively, which makes seeing the same livery on a fastback built for the street feel like a deliberate provocation rather than a simple homage.

A 1966 Ford/Lotus Indy Car Motor, Reimagined

Under the hood sits a motor descended from the Ford-powered Lotus Indy cars of the mid-1960s, the same era that produced Jim Clark’s historic 1965 Indianapolis 500 win in a rear-engined, Ford-powered Lotus. Using that lineage as the mechanical foundation for a street-driven fastback ties the car’s fictional backstory to a very real chapter of Ford’s racing history, even if the two programs never actually crossed paths on track. Clark’s win marked a genuine turning point at Indianapolis, proving that a lightweight, rear-engined chassis paired with a Ford V8 could outrun the traditional front-engined roadsters that had dominated the race for decades, and building a street car around an engine tied to that specific breakthrough gives Strope’s Mustang a mechanical pedigree most custom builds simply can’t claim.

Steve Strope and the Pure Vision Approach

Strope’s shop has built a reputation over decades for exactly this kind of concept-driven build, where the story behind a car matters as much as the fabrication work itself. Rather than restoring a Mustang to factory specification or building a straightforward pro-touring car, Pure Vision treats each project as a chance to answer a specific “what if,” with the mechanical and cosmetic choices flowing from that premise from the very first sketch. That approach has produced a body of work spanning multiple manufacturers and eras rather than a single specialty, which is part of why enthusiasts who follow custom builders closely tend to recognize a Pure Vision project on sight, regardless of what donor car it started life as underneath the finished bodywork.

Details Built Like a Watchmaker’s Signature

The comparison drawn directly in the video’s own framing is to a watchmaker who knows and respects the purpose of every single moving part, and viewers who’ve spent time with the car in person back that up, describing new details surfacing well after their first look. That kind of layered design work, where a panel gap or a fastener choice carries intentional meaning, is part of what separates a builder like Strope from a standard body shop, and it’s the reason a car like this rewards repeated viewing rather than a single walk-around glance in a parking lot.

“I Don’t Have a Car Phase, This Is My Cancer”

The line that opens the video, and the one commenters keep coming back to, captures something builders in this space rarely say out loud: that a project like this isn’t a hobby with a natural stopping point, it’s closer to a compulsion. That framing resonates because anyone who has spent years and real money chasing a single build recognizes the sentiment immediately, and viewers reacting to the car describe still noticing new details on repeat views, long after the novelty of the concept itself should reasonably have worn off for a more casual viewer.

What Fans Keep Finding Months Later

That reaction speaks to how densely the build was thought through rather than executed as a single dramatic gesture. Whether or not Ford and Martini Racing ever should have partnered up, Strope’s Mustang makes the strongest possible case that they could have. It’s a build defined less by raw horsepower numbers than by the coherence of its concept, executed with enough craftsmanship that even people who know nothing about its backstory can tell something unusual is going on.

Loud and Fast Art, By Design

The car’s documentation on Petrolicious, a publication built specifically around long-form storytelling for cars like this rather than quick spec-sheet reviews, gave the Martini Mustang the kind of platform its concept deserved. Petrolicious readers and members tend to be exactly the audience willing to sit with a car’s backstory rather than skim past it, which matters for a build whose entire appeal rests on understanding the fictional premise behind it. Pairing a car this conceptually dense with an outlet built around patient, detail-oriented storytelling is part of why the Martini Mustang found the audience it did, rather than getting reduced to a handful of quick specs and a horsepower figure the way a shorter format inevitably would have.

Catch the full video above and leave your thoughts below.

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