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The Candy apple red pony car that brought a Vancouver lawyer to university gets coyote power

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Jack Frank had just finished his first year at the University of British Columbia in 1969 when he parked his poor English-built Vauxhall in front of Vancouver’s Fred Deeley Motors intending to trade in a sportscar. There he saw a three-year-old candy apple red Mustang.
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“The salesman gave me the keys and invited me to pick it up,” the Vancouver lawyer recalled. “The car has a 225-horsepower engine with a four-speed transmission and really goes.”
After a tour of the UBC campus, a deal was struck for $1,945 and the Vauxhall. “I had to stand up because that was my only money,” he recalled.
Jack is 19 years old and loves to drive cars. He has been driving it ever since. That’s 53 years. But the car was a lot different than when he drove it off the dealer’s lot. It now has double the horsepower, a five-speed manual transmission and competition suspension.
Jack’s journey with the Mustang over five decades has taken him to Canada four times in all kinds of weather. It was his transportation to and from UBC during his undergraduate years and while getting his MBA. He then packed the car with his belongings and headed 5,000 kilometers east to attend law school at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.
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“The cruise speed is 85 miles per hour. The car is very reliable,” he said. Once in Fredericton, a severe winter tested the Mustang. “When the temperature reaches -25 to 30 below, many cars won’t start, even with block heaters,” he said. “There is a solid group of individuals who love to ride up the hill to campus. Everyone knows, no matter how cold it is, this car will start. It hasn’t let me down once in three years.”
On the first trip home to Vancouver from Fredericton, Jack, a championship golfer who has won novice titles in New Brunswick and BC, is scheduled for a tournament in the southern BC community of Oliver. He gave a ride to some fellow students in Montreal and stopped partying for a few days.
“I woke up on the third morning in Montreal and realized it was exactly 48 hours until I teed off at Oliver,” he recalled. “I thought, 3,000 miles in 48 hours – I can do it.”
Near Thunder Bay, he was lucky enough to pick up two female hitchhikers from Grenoble, France. “I asked the woman sitting next to me, can you drive a standard shift? His answer was: Like a Volvo?”
His passenger took over driving while Jack fell asleep in the back seat. He drove through the Prairie provinces. “I don’t know how he did that. When I woke up, I was refreshed and we reached Oliver in less than 40 hours.
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By 1981, when Jack was an articling student at a Vancouver law firm, the Mustang was worn out and the rust worm burrowed into the car’s body and structure. He met Richmond high school auto mechanics teacher Doug Philip who had his own shop in the backyard. They tore the car apart and fixed it up with improvements designed to make it less prone to rust.
The engine has been rebuilt with higher compression so the Mustang will be more energetic than before. “The car is like new again and it will be my only car,” he said.
Once called to the bar, Jack returned to Fredericton to work at a law firm and then spent seven years as in-house counsel for the Irving Oil conglomerate. He bought a winter car and used the Mustang only for fair weather driving. While driving at night in 1991, he swerved to miss a moose and left the road into a wooded area. “The car was scraped and bumped a bit,” he recalled. “There was $5,000 in damage.”
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A friend said he could turn it into a show car for that money and did so with Jack working alongside him. The body and paint job lasted until 2014 when the rust worm was dying again and the Mustang needed another facelift.
Jack took it to a shop that had just finished working on a similar Mustang which included swapping in a modern high horsepower Ford coyote engine used to power the new Mustangs.
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Now his Mustang sports a contemporary look after a total rebuild with modern suspension and air conditioning, special wheels and, with high-performance improvements to the coyote engine, 475 ponies under the hood running through a five-speed manual transmission.
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“We’ve worked all the kinks out of it now and it’s all dialed in, so I’m really enjoying driving it,” said Jack.
He plans to drive the venerable Mustang that has traveled more than 350,000 miles in the future. “I have several nieces and nephews who have known the car for over 40 years and are adamant that this car should never leave the family.”
Jack’s nine-year-old son Herb is also in line for the Mustang. “He can get it if he decides this is the car he wants. What I can say is, he wants it now.”
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and partner in a public relations firm based in Vancouver. aedwards@peakco.com
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