There Was Almost a Ford Mustang Club in Antarctica. Yes, Really.
There are currently Mustang Clubs on 6 of 7 Continents.
The Ford Mustang continues to be one of America’s best exports. In 2020, it continued its trend of being the world’s best selling sports car. That being considered, it’s no surprise that the iconic pony car runs deep from Detroit, to Buenos Ares, to Munich, to Johannesburg, to Seoul. Just about everywhere, you’ll be able to find a Mustang Club. Six of the seven continents, in fact.
Turns out Ford wanted to make it seven-for-seven.
“We wanted to just drop (a Mustang) into Antarctica and do a club — we looked at it, but that actually wouldn’t have been authentic,” Ford Mustang Marketing Manager Jim Owens told MC&T.
Understandably, we had to double check to see if Owens was joking. He wasn’t. Ford Communications further confirmed that the company was indeed looking at putting a Mustang in Antarctica to start a club there. A club that would have been likely comprised mostly of penguins and half-frozen scientists.
Ford Mustang clubs are not exactly what you’d call tiny. The Mustang Owners Club of Great Britain, for example, is comprised of 2,000 paid members, over 6,000 Instagram followers and 8,000 forum members, per their website. The South African Mustang Owners Club has over 4,000 likes on Facebook. The Mustang Club of Argentina FB page is another 4,000. And of course the world’s biggest is unsurprisingly the Mustang Club of America, consisting of 12,000 “national” members, while there are around 170 regional and localized clubs with an estimated reach of over 40,000 members.
However, the largest single gathering of Ford Mustang muscle cars took place not in America, but in Belgium, where more Mustangs are sold in the country per capita than any other country in Europe. In 2019, approximately 1,326 Mustangs congregated to the Ford Lommel Proving Ground. This shattered a previous record set in Toluca, Mexico in 2017, which featured 960 Mustangs.
(photo credit: Ford)
