The Martini Mustang is Loud & Fast Art

This fastback Mustang hides a small-block engine that started life chasing wins at Indianapolis, not stoplight bragging rights — the all-aluminum, DOHC Ford Indy V8 that powered three straight Indy 500 victories in the mid-1960s, starting with Jim Clark’s Lotus-Ford in 1965. Builders reworked the motor with milder cams and modern fuel injection to make it survive daily street use. What’s left is closer to a race car wearing a Mustang body than a modified pony car.

Powered by a 1966 Ford/Lotus Indy Car motor, this fastback Mustang is serious business when it comes to performance. Nothing has been left untouched and everything on this Mustang is meant to set your imagination on fire.

Under the hood of this fastback sits an engine that has no business being anywhere near a street Mustang: a small, screaming V8 originally built to chase wins at Indianapolis, not stoplight-to-stoplight bragging rights. That engine spent the mid-1960s turning laps at serious speed in a rear-engine racer built by a British constructor most muscle car fans have never heard of, backed by Ford’s factory racing budget. Getting one to survive daily street use meant reworking almost everything about how it breathes and fires, since nothing about an Indy-bred motor was designed with a stoplight commute in mind. What’s left after that transformation is less a modified Mustang and more a race car wearing a fastback body as disguise.

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An Engine Built to Beat Offenhauser at Indy

The engine traces back to a partnership between Ford, British constructor Colin Chapman’s Lotus team, and driver Dan Gurney, who convinced Chapman to build an Indianapolis-specific chassis around a Ford-supplied motor. The result was an all-aluminum, 256 cubic inch, dual-overhead-cam small block derived from the Fairlane V8, breathing through four Weber carburetors and producing an estimated 425 to 500 naturally-aspirated horsepower on gasoline depending on the year and state of tune. Jim Clark drove that rear-engine Lotus-Ford combination to victory at Indy in 1965, and Ford power kept the win streak alive in 1966 and 1967 behind the wheel of a Lola-Ford and a Coyote-Ford, before turbocharged Offenhauser engines took the win back in 1968.

From Rear-Engine Racer to Street-Legal Fastback

Turning that race-only motor into something a Mustang could run on the street took real engineering. Documented builds have bored the Indy V8 out to roughly 300 cubic inches, added milder camshafts to smooth out the idle and low-end response, and replaced the original mechanical fuel injection with a more streetable Holley EFI setup — the same formula behind builds like the Ford Indy V8-powered 1966 Mustang finished to Shelby R-model spec. The end result keeps the pedigree of a three-time Indy 500-winning engine while making it tame enough to actually drive to a cars-and-coffee meet.

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