By: MICHAEL J. AGOVINO on October 1996
Original Article: ESQUIRE, VOL. 126 ISSUE 4

Steve Saleen takes garden-variety Ford Mustangs and turns I them into street rods. But not very many of them. His motto is unabashed: “Power in the hands of a few.” Not long ago, we decided to join those few behind the wheel.

Since 1984, the former race-car driver has produced only thirty-five hundred of these babies. Saleen’s current offerings begin at a remarkably low $28,000 for a six. cylinder and range up to $50,000 for a supercharged eight. The supercharger of the new Speedster convertible boosts the output of the 351-cubic-inch Saleen engine to 480 horses.

Saleen takes most of the Mustangs’ innards out, along with significant weight. He adds superchargers, specially rebuilt engines, and new suspensions and transmissions; reshapes the bodies; and adds instrument panels with speedometers that reach two hundred miles per hour.

Limited-edition manufacturers, such as Saleen on the West Coast and Reeves Callaway on the East, are reclaiming a piece of American auto turf once thought long gone: that of the street-legal race car. Callaway’s demurely titled “SuperNatural” Corvettes and gussied-up Impala SS’s are rare and impressive beasts.

That there is little that’s socially redeeming about these vehicles is argued by the stiff gas-guzzler tax they carry; that there is much that’s personally redeeming is suggested by time in a Saleen’s Recaro driver’s seat, as we discovered when we drove it.

The g forces induced during the five brief seconds it took me to reach sixty miles per hour were only the most obvious of the sensations the car produced. On the quiet back road where we drove the Saleen, we learned that muscle today in cars, as in the NFL, means not just speed but quickness and moves. These the Saleen provided aplenty, thanks to suspension built around race-car struts, which let you dip and doodle, juke and jag happily. On the country blacktop, curve succeeded curve, and the Saleen settled into a rhythm at once aggressive and controlled.

Saleen’s cars look different, too, with blacked-out taillights and headlights that lend the vehicles a face like the Charlotte Hornet mascot’s. And they have the refinement of racers, not muscle cars: The brakes behind the body-colored eighteen-inch wheels are fully a match for the engine–sure in their grip, steady in their modulation.

The only danger is of ostentation: Saleens have become so well-known that six were offered as prizes in a recent McDonald’s sweepstakes.

Pop’s Hops
It sounds apocryphal. Jasper Johns heard what Willem de Kooning said about art dealer Leo Castelli: “You can give that son of a bitch two beer cans and he could sell them.” Ah, Johns thought, and with that sculptured Painted Bronze (left)–two years before Warhol’s soup cans. When you visit the Johns retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art this fall-his first in nearly twenty years–put the headset down and savor his immortalization of the prosaic. Notice, too, John’s paradoxes: how one can is open, the other closed, and, look closely, is one a hair taller? De Kooning, of course, was right. Castelli did sell the cans–for $1,000.