Lost Muscle: Help Us Trace the History of the Job 1 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 429
On Wednesday, January 15, 1969, employees at Kar-Kraft’s Brighton, Michigan, facility declared it would be a champagne-popping kind of day, and rightly so. Job 1, the name given to the first factory production Boss Mustang to traverse the assembly line at one of Ford’s skunkworks facilities, had finally made the physical transformation from Mustang SportsRoof to homologation requirement.
With Chrysler and FoMoCo punching and counterpunching on the high ovals, Ford took another stab at aero war supremacy in NASCAR with the introduction of the 429 semi-hemi powerplant. Kar-Kraft owner Nick Hartman had submitted a bid to Ford Motor Company to produce the Boss 429 Mustangs, a necessary tool in order to reach the homologation requirements set by NASCAR. Hartman had known Chuck Mountain and Ed Hull (who were instrumental in the GT40 project) from his years of sports car road racing and had a foot in the door for submitting the bid. Through these contacts and the right bid, he secured the right to produce the Boss Mustangs. In total, 859 1969 Boss 429 Mustangs would travel down the lines at Kar-Kraft, meeting (and exceeding) the 500-unit threshold NASCAR had implemented.
