New Barn Find!! 1970 AWD Ford Mustang Convertible

A barn-find 1970 Ford Mustang convertible sitting in the Netherlands hides a genuinely strange secret: factory all-wheel drive, engineered by the same British company that later built the world’s first production AWD car, the Jensen FF. Missing its engine and front drive unit after decades of neglect, it may be the only convertible Mustang ever converted this way. Read on for how a tractor company ended up building AWD Mustangs for Ford.

There’s no such thing as a factory all-wheel-drive Mustang — except there is, and one just turned up rotting in a Dutch barn. This droptop ’70 doesn’t look like much after decades of neglect, missing its front drive unit and sporting a suspiciously high ride height. But the story behind how a British tractor company ended up building all-wheel-drive Mustangs for Ford, six years before this car existed, is stranger than the barn it came out of.

A Tractor Company’s Side Project

Ferguson Research had spun off from tractor manufacturer Massey Ferguson roughly a decade before this Mustang was built, chasing a genuinely ambitious goal: the first full-time all-wheel-drive system engineered for road and race cars, not farm equipment. In December 1964, only months after the Mustang’s launch, Ford shipped a pair of notchback Mustangs to England specifically to test whether Ferguson’s system could work in Detroit’s hottest new nameplate.

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The Ferguson Formula, Explained

The system used a planetary center differential paired with a chain-driven front shaft, splitting torque 37:63 front-to-rear — crude by modern electronic AWD standards, but genuinely novel for 1964. Ford’s prototype Mustangs also picked up Ferguson’s experimental Maxaret anti-skid braking system, a mechanical predecessor to today’s ABS, decades ahead of when anti-lock brakes became common equipment.

Better Than an Audi Quattro, According to One Review

When Classic Cars magazine got hold of one of the surviving prototypes for a 2000 driving review, they compared its cornering sure-footedness to an Audi Quattro — genuinely high praise for a system engineered before most of Quattro’s own underlying technology existed. Performance and handling gains were real, but the modifications needed to fit the hardware proved too expensive to justify, and Ford ultimately walked away from developing the system further in-house.

From Mustang Test Mule to Jensen FF Production

Ferguson didn’t give up on the technology. The company kept testing it across a range of vehicles, including additional Mustangs, and eventually placed it into the Jensen FF — the first production car ever sold with all-wheel drive, beating the far more famous Audi Quattro to market by well over a decade.

How Many AWD Mustangs Actually Exist?

The official count is murky. Beyond the original two prototypes, there are a couple of 1969 fastbacks known to exist, including one built for a Ferguson executive with a 428-cubic-inch V8, reportedly still in showroom condition today. This 1970 convertible appears to be a separate, privately converted example — the only known droptop AWD Mustang — built for a private customer outside Ford’s own partnership with Ferguson.

A Barn Find That’s Missing Its Most Important Parts

Decades in a Dutch barn have left the car in rough shape, and the listing, translated imperfectly online, suggests both the engine and the AWD front drive unit are missing entirely. Sourcing replacements would mean tracking down a wrecked Jensen FF or original Ferguson hardware — parts that were rare when new and are exponentially rarer more than fifty years later.

Why It’s Worth Saving Anyway

A rough, incomplete car built around one-of-a-kind engineering is still a piece of automotive history that doesn’t exist anywhere else in convertible form. Whoever takes this project on isn’t just restoring a Mustang; they’re preserving a genuinely obscure chapter of Ford and Ferguson’s joint engineering history that most Mustang owners have never even heard of.

What This Discovery Means for Mustang Historians

Documented AWD Mustang conversions are rare enough that each newly surfaced example tends to prompt genuine debate among marque historians about production numbers and build records that were never fully documented by Ford or Ferguson at the time, since the program never moved beyond limited testing and small private conversions rather than becoming an official factory option.

The Restoration Math Doesn’t Favor a Quick Flip

Given the missing driveline components and the labor involved in even a standard ’70 Mustang convertible restoration, whoever takes this car on is looking at a project measured in years rather than months, and one where the AWD hardware alone could cost more to source and fit than a comparable standard Mustang would cost to buy outright.

How Barn Finds Get Discovered and Sold in Europe

European barn finds like this one typically surface through estate sales, farm liquidations, or word of mouth among specialist classic car dealers who maintain networks specifically for tracking down forgotten American iron scattered across the continent since the postwar decades, when a surprising number of U.S. servicemen and enthusiasts brought Mustangs and other American cars to Europe and never took them home.

Why European-Market Mustangs Sometimes Hide Surprises

American cars that ended up in Europe decades ago occasionally carry factory or dealer-installed modifications never offered domestically, since importers and specialty shops sometimes fitted regional equipment or performed conversions to suit local roads and regulations — context that makes an unusual find like a private AWD conversion somewhat more plausible than it might first appear.

What Verifying Authenticity Would Actually Require

Confirming this car’s AWD conversion as a genuine period modification, rather than a later addition, would require close inspection of the drivetrain mounting points, chassis modifications, and any surviving paperwork from the original conversion shop, since visual inspection alone of a car in this condition can’t fully settle the question. For now, the car remains more of a fascinating puzzle than a fully verified piece of Ford history, and that lingering uncertainty is arguably part of what makes it so compelling to Mustang collectors who enjoy chasing down genuinely obscure, hard-to-document automotive stories rather than cars with a clean, uncomplicated paper trail. Cars like this also serve as a reminder that not every significant piece of automotive engineering history was ever properly documented at the time it happened, and that the historical record for niche factory experiments like Ferguson’s AWD Mustangs often depends entirely on scattered surviving examples rather than complete company archives. Each one that surfaces, however rough, adds a small but genuine piece to a story that would otherwise be almost entirely lost, which makes even a rusted, incomplete barn find like this one worth documenting carefully before any restoration work begins.

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