If you wanna talk rice, take a good hard look at the 1978 Mustang King Cobra. What a joke!

The car was never designed as a high performance car per se. Until the early 60s high performance vehicles were full size cars. While the 1964 GTO is often credited as the first less than full size car geared specifically at the high horsepower crowd, the early Mustangs were designed to be all things to all people because of the long list of available options. When Ford needed to improve the race image of the Mustang they called on Carroll Shelby who gave us the GT 350 and later the GT 500 series Mustangs. The high performance market was changing rapidly as GM's answer to the Mustang, the Camaro and Firebird, were capable of housing larger engines than the Mustang's 289.It was the general public's desire for high performance options that caused Ford to send out memos to it's dealers in 1966 saying Sell the six. The public was demanding that the Mustang improve it's performance as indicated by options that were most frequently purchased. Unlike cars such as the GTO where the high performance options list could make it essentially a race car with wipers and signals, the early Mustang only went so far and if you wanted more, you ordered a GT 350 or an AC / Shelby Cobra. Shelby proved that the potential was there for the Mustang to be more performance oriented and the second generation would reflect some of those ideas.