Trans-Am made straight-line monsters into road course heroes. This Mustang was one of the all-time greats.
Everything is heavy. The door closes with an authoritative thunk. The shifter feels like it needs two hands to operate. The triple-plate clutch could make a calf muscle explode. The unassisted steering will crush biceps. And that’s all before the thing even moves.
This story originally appeared in Volume 9 of Road & Track.
This Ford Mustang Boss 302 was Parnelli Jones and George Follmer’s Trans-Am car in 1969. Built by Bud Moore, it’s one of the greatest road-racing Mustangs of all time. Under the long hood lurks a 302-cubic-inch V-8 that’s happiest between 5000 and 8000 rpm, producing the sort of sound that could start a war.
In my first low-speed moments with it at California’s Thunderhill Raceway, though, it felt like a bus. The steering is lethargic and the engine truckish. But push through the heft and the Mustang comes alive.
Remember, this is a late-Sixties pony car. Even if it once competed in Trans-Am, it has a solid rear axle and could absolutely use more brakes. None of that matters when the V-8 is happily screaming its heart out: The steering awakens, and a transmission that felt so lethargic and weighty puttering around the paddock becomes an ally in the quest for quicker lap times.
Jones managed four pole positions and two wins in the 1969 Trans-Am season. It was just a hint of his coming dominance.
Larry Chen
The Mustang will bounce under braking, the rears locking up before they get warm. It pounds out of corners with unrelenting power, the rev limit seemingly set just because someone said a rev limit was needed. This is one of the great race-engine formulas, Trans-Am’s 302-cid limit giving cars from Detroit a chance to sing.
It’s the moment when I realized that all that bus-like behavior at low speed was obstinacy. This car isn’t made to trundle along. It’s built to win. If you drive it slowly, it’ll be pissed. The intimidation that comes with that aggressive lope and those weighty controls goes away as the speeds pick up. The machine responds in kind, a peach to drive quickly. It could run all day, and it has.
Yet all I can think about is the sheer strength and will needed to run fast laps in this car for more than 20 minutes. It’s exhausting, a combination of heat and weight wearing on the driver. But endurance and a firm hand on the reins are qualities the Parnelli legend is built on.
His entire career was spent in cars that needed an aggressive touch. No power steering, no ABS, no automatic gearboxes, and basically no aero-dynamic assistance. It was just driver and machine. Jones’s career straddled some of the most dangerous periods in racing history. Cars were getting faster at an unbelievable clip, technological advances and huge public interest spurring design developments that safety equipment couldn’t keep up with. Jones found success by mastering the bleeding edge of the envelope despite the risk.
The thing with Jones’s career is that he never chose the easy way. He eked out one of the last wins for front-engine Indy cars at the 500, with a looming mid-engine revolution declaring his roadster obsolete. His Trans-Am runs from 1967 to 1971 were legendary. He won in a series that was at its peak, with fields full of factory entries and drivers who appear in every record book. But that was his M.O.; he went flat out in whatever he was driving. When he ran off-road, his pace even proved too much for many of the vehicles he drove.
This Mustang is the perfect analogue for Jones’s entire career. It demands a combative approach. The rewards are there, but not accessible to the fainthearted. And even though it didn’t win the 1969 championship, this car laid the groundwork for one of the most revered Trans-Am seasons ever. Some of that weight is metal, some of it history.
Keyword: Parnelli Jones's Trans-Am Mustang Is the Muscle Car of Your Dreams