Ford Mustang road trip: Route 66 in the original pony car

By Charlie Calderwood

| 4 Oct 2026

Classic & Sports Car – Ford Mustang at 60: Route 66 in the original pony car

I’ve left the Ford Mustang’s fuel cap at the gas station.

We haven’t even reached Route 66, as I pull over for the first photo of the trip in the emptiness of the Colorado Desert.

The boot can only be opened by the key, so I turn off the 289cu in V8 engine and walk around the back.

The fuel-filler pipe’s exposed opening is staring back at me. Damn.

Two years on the job and, in 2024, I was given the green light to do something special for the 60th anniversary of the fastest-selling car of all time, the Ford Mustang. And now this.

It is the sort of trip we all dream of: driving across California on Route 66 in a proper American classic car.

Wonder Valley’s ‘The End of the World’ sign marks the beginning of this Ford Mustang’s Californian road trip

We’re already a day behind schedule, having arrived in California at the tail end of the heaviest rain in 90 years.

Six months’ worth of rainfall in three days has caused flash flooding, mudslides and a state of emergency.

A lost fuel cap isn’t a problem on most cars: you’d just buy a plastic replacement at the next fuel station and carry on.

But not a Ford Mustang. We have to go back.

Photographer Max takes the shot – without a petrol cap – and, with miles of visibility in each direction, I do a U-turn.

I didn’t push the car hard on the way out, but, with some making up to do, it’s time to see why the original owner of this Mustang had dismissed the standard 3.3-litre straight-six and ticked the ‘289cu in V8’ box on the famously extensive options list.

Route 66 in a classic Ford Mustang. Could this be driving nirvana?

The floor-change, three-speed, automatic gearbox takes a second or so to wake the Mustang, then the rear squats down and the engine snarls with a charismatic burble as it winds itself up.

This Ford’s front end was designed for style, not aerodynamics, and the nose lifts above 50mph as a result.

It lightens the steering, but not disconcertingly so, putting the driver in mind of a speedboat up on a plane.

That feeling, along with the distant thrum of the V8 engine, gives an addictive impression of speed.

The sensation is that you’re going faster than you really are, making you feel like the hero of your own movie.

Behind the wheel of the Ford Mustang on one of the more scenic sections of America’s Route 66

A few miles later I’m smiling again – and that’s the power of the Ford Mustang, right there.

Frustratingly, the misplaced fuel cap is nowhere to be seen back at the gas station in Twentynine Palms, but the friendliness of strangers out here is as charming as it is alarming to us Brits.

A car washer is desperate to help my search and directs me to a parts shop just a few hundred metres away.

“No problem,” says the baseball-capped cashier: a $16 brushed-chrome petrol cap is just behind him on the shelf. Sorted.

I suggest you wouldn’t get that with a Ferrari.

There’s still time to make up, though, so I take an impromptu shortcut, a small road north, past Sheephole Valley.

The Amboy post office serves a population of just four

Inadvertently, I’ve found ‘The End of the World’.

The giant sign, like the world-famous, iconic Hollywood lettering that overlooks Los Angeles, but here at ground level, is one of the art pieces of Wonder Valley, but it’s pretty accurate – as you can see from the photograph a little further up this page.

The only thing to be found by the side of the road from here to the Route 66 ghost town of Amboy is an industrial operation scraping salt from the lowest point of the valley.

The scale of the emptiness is unfathomable – 30 miles of nothing in each direction, before the desert rises sharply into sand-coloured mountains.

Sunrise in Yermo and another fill-up for the Ford Mustang

Amboy first became the halfway point of the hottest, most isolated stretch of the journey across southern California when the railway arrived in 1883, and then again with Route 66 in 1926.

Driven by the country’s post-war success and the coming of age of the Baby Boomers, Amboy’s golden era was the ’60s.

Americans had the cash for road-trip holidays and the cars they needed for them. And how.

Ford opened the decade with the new Falcon, which beat the Chevrolet Corvair so thoroughly that it not only set a new record as the world’s fastest-selling new car – 417,000 in a year – but also propelled former Blue Oval president Robert McNamara to the office of Secretary of Defense.

The Ford Mustang poses for a photo outside Roy’s Motel & Cafe, whose neon sign adds shine to a once-thriving Route 66 stop

His successor, the much younger Lee Iacocca, knew there was potential in injecting some excitement into the Ford Falcon.

The car was always intended to be smaller than the existing Thunderbird, but the automobile manufacturer experimented with two seats, four seats, notchbacks, fastbacks and even a mid-engined configuration.

By 1963, the Mustang II concept had the formula settled, and a year later, on 17 April 1964, the car was launched.

In the first 12 months, Ford sold 418,000 of the things. That record, narrowly beating the Falcon, still stands as the best a new model has achieved in its first year on sale.

‘The Ford Mustang’s engine snarls with a charismatic burble as it winds itself up’

Just think about that for a minute: a car hardly offered beyond North America, at a time when the population of the USA was just over half of today’s, still hasn’t been more popular on its release in this globalised world of more than seven billion people.

It is definitely not hyperbole to say that the Ford Mustang captured America’s imagination like no other car – before or since.

And while it’s never equalled the stellar sales of those first two years, its subsequent success over now 60-plus years has ensured it remains the best-selling coupe of all time.

Amboy’s success, meanwhile, didn’t enjoy such longevity.

The Ford Mustang explores the vast wilderness that Route 66 slices through

The railroad still goes through here, but the four-lane interstate bypassed it on the other side of the Bristol Mountains in 1973.

Roy’s Motel & Cafe is the main structure left in the town, and although it operates only as a service station now, its Modernist reception building has recently been restored, as have five of its overnight cabins and the town post office.

It’s a tourist trap today, but with minutes between each passing car and the only noise the hum of the diesel locomotives loading up with salt, it still feels pretty authentic.

Route 66 doesn’t actually go much further west from Amboy now.

Semi trucks tower over the Ford Mustang on Route 66

Most of the section to Needles has been closed following storm damage last year, so instead you have to take a turn north up to I40.

The only other traffic we see here is a slow truck, but, as I overtake, I spot a small but unmistakable trail of white smoke behind our Ford.

I’m convinced I’m seeing shades of blue in it, too, but it’s gone by the time I pull over to watch the car idling.

It’s the start of a nervous one-hour interstate drive to Needles.

We don’t have time to stop and admire the spectacular sunset over the mountains, and I soon discover the Mustang’s dashboard lighting would be bettered by a glow worm in an opaque jar.

Needles enjoyed Route 66’s heyday and has many murals celebrating the town’s past status as the gateway to California

From near-deserted roads, the Mustang is now mixing it on one of the beating arteries of the US economy, with chrome-stacked ‘semi’ trucks forming a near-constant barrier on the inside lane.

Truckers appear to be the only drivers on US highways with any sense of lane discipline, so we keep up as good a speed as we dare, fearful of seeing that smoke trail again.

By the time we get to Needles it’s a whistle-stop tour to get the photo we want in front of the most famous of the town’s murals, then a blast back to Amboy in time to grab a shot of the car under Roy’s neon sign before it’s turned off for the night.

We then drive the last 70 miles of the day in darkness. “Amazing night sky,” says Max, head out of the window like a happy labrador.

The Ford Mustang’s open roof, ready for the open road

Nothing tells you you’re in a trucker’s hotel like a black cloth next to the sink that comes with instructions to use it rather than stain the white flannel. I hope it is intended for greasy hands.

The early-morning sunrise makes this brief stay in Yermo – little more than a collection of gas stations – worth it, though.

At a point where Route 66 and the interstate run parallel, there’s a cluster of what the guidebooks call the ‘weird and wonderful’.

Calico, a silver-mining town abandoned in the early 20th century and restored in the 1950s, is a sort of Wild West theme park a few miles out of town.

What you might not expect is a huge effigy of President Xi Jinping’s head, half stripped of skin and covered in the spikes of a virus cell.

‘The Ford Mustang captured America’s imagination like no other car, and it remains the best-selling coupe of all time’

The Liberty Sculpture Park, just the other side of the highway, is where Chinese exiles come from across California to express their anger at the Communist Party of China.

It’s a bit early for politics, so Max and I head down the road for breakfast at Peggy Sue’s 50’s Diner.

The waitress, a lady in her 70s, wears a 1950s uniform and passes orders through to the kitchen via a steel carousel that hangs in the pass-through behind the bar.

I assume our accents might start a conversation as we enter, but all anyone wants to talk about is the Mustang.

It’s the same at fuel stops: always a ‘Hey, nice car!’ or a ‘My dad has one of those’ kind of comment.

Peggy Sue’s keeps the ’50s alive

There’s plenty of opportunity for them, too, with the Mustang emptying its 60-litre tank every 250 miles or so.

The road is noticeably busier after reaching Barstow.

Whether you’re going to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Arizona or central California, you come through here.

Thankfully, most of the traffic stays on the interstate through the desert, while Route 66 follows the Mojave river – until you get to Victorville, that is.

From there until the mountains that separate greater LA from the rest of the state, I15 has been built right over the top of the old route.

Head on to a busy freeway in the Ford Mustang and you’re reacquainted with the wandering steering that wasn’t an issue on slower roads.

On the road to Calico, a former mining town which was restored in the 1950s

This far from LA the highway is modest by American standards, at four lanes per side, but those lanes are narrow and the Mustang is dwarfed by all but the odd hatchback.

The steering needs constant corrections to keep us straight, even if over-the-shoulder checks are a breeze.

With the roof down you can look back straight over the boot, thanks to the car’s low waistline and lack of head restraints.

This exposure reminds you of the Mustang’s age. That and the buffeting from the wind and the sawing at the wheel.

But, in fairness to the Ford, one thing it can do is speed.

What would have excited the buyer of this 289 in 1965 is that you’ve got what we would today call modern cruising ability.

The Ford Mustang takes a break outside a Route 66 motel

You’re not relegated to mixing it with the lorries, like you would be in many mainstream classic cars, and the Mustang feels quite comfortable at 70mph.

Top gear is relaxed and the suspension is soft enough to be supple.

Terrifying though it is threading the Ford between the pantechnicons, doing so bounces back the sound of the V8 to create a delicious, deep drumroll, and you soon come to revel in the experience.

Once again, the Mustang has a way of turning frowns into smiles.

Route 66 reappears halfway through the Cajon Pass and swings south-east into San Bernardino before a sharp turn west towards LA.

‘The distant thrum of the Mustang’s V8 gives an addictive impression of speed. The sensation is that you’re going faster than you really are, making you feel like the hero of your own movie’

Still short for time, we’re forced to cut the corner here, staying on I15 to pick up Route 66 at Rancho Cucamonga.

There’s time for a quick lunch and Angelenos are fanatical about the In-N-Out Burger chain, so it seems rude not to try it.

The queue for the drive-thru stretches up the road, so we do the un-American thing of parking and walking into the restaurant.

It’s leaving In-N-Out that proves a struggle.

‘Our’ Ford Mustang has suffered from an annoying tendency to cut out at junctions, and it is becoming more noticeable: it will roll up to a stop sign with little or no throttle, sit happily at idle, then choke as you put your foot down.

The railway still goes through Amboy, but a four-lane interstate has since diverted Route 66 traffic away from the town

In a succession of low-speed turns after lunch, we conk out in the middle of each crossroad, putting it into neutral and restarting before creeping away with as little throttle as possible.

The European caricature of American drivers is that they are quick to enrage, but I’m not beeped or sworn at: the Mustang effect again.

The stretch across the northern edge of LA’s huge sprawl isn’t exactly charismatic, but the nickname ‘America’s Main Street’ proves true here, going straight down what us Brits would call a high street into Old Pasadena.

It’s a fancy part of Southern California, particularly pretty where it dips down to the banks of the Arroyo Seco river, where it’s cooler and greener.

The Ford Mustang looks at home

Above it all loom two great bridges spanning the valley.

The older Colorado Street Bridge is an infamous suicide spot, particularly so during the Great Depression.

Now it’s lined by three-metre-high chain-link fencing.

The irony of this rich area building fences to stop the desperate dropping on to its lawns, rather than tackling the homelessness and deprivation that’s shockingly prevalent in LA, seems lost.

Route 66 changed direction in 1940, however, turning south just before the valley, so that is the route we take to Elysian Park.

An entire mountain in the middle of the city, with a small road system winding its way up, the park is astonishingly quiet on what we would consider a pleasant afternoon.

The Colorado Street Bridge has a tragic backstory

From here, it’s straight on to two of the most famous roads in the USA: Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard.

Route 66 officially ends two blocks north of Santa Monica Pier, but it’s the jetty that has nonetheless become the famous end point, and as we approach I have no idea if it’s going to be possible to get the Mustang on to it or not.

Vehicular access varies, so it isn’t until we get to the intersection in front of it that we see it’s open.

Max jumps out, Dukes of Hazzard-style, and he has until I turn around and come back to get in position for a photo of the car driving off the pier – and there’s nowhere for me to slow down or pull over after that.

The Ford Mustang on the highway

Anyone who has been to an American city knows that crossing the road takes a long time.

The car is king and jaywalking is a punishable offence.

The lights themselves take a long time to turn, and if you need to get to the opposite side of a crossroad with two crossings, you’ll be waiting minutes.

As I sit in the queue to get off the pier at a red light, I can see Max still stuck trying to do his second crossing.

His light changes just before mine, and he runs into position for our big finish-line shot.

After that, we just have the small matter of getting from one side of LA to the other in the evening rush-hour.

The end of the road: Route 66 stops just short of Santa Monica’s famed pier, but the beachfront attraction still serves as a fitting full stop to this epic Ford Mustang adventure

We manage to avoid some of the traffic by snaking through the million-dollar neighbourhoods of Ocean Park and Venice, but it is only delaying the inevitable: for the next two hours we crawl along the 405.

Our journey has made it clear just how broad the Ford Mustang’s ability is, but it had to be in order to have sold so well and enjoyed such enduring success.

It’s a capable GT with sporting appeal, but also a reasonably economical commuter in straight-six form; or with more powerful engines it becomes a storming muscle car.

All while seating four in comfort and costing about the same as a typical family car.

‘The scale of the emptiness is unfathomable – 30 miles of nothing in each direction’

The term ‘pony car’ was created for it, but for me that only describes the six-cylinder models and ignores all those other hats the famous Ford has worn.

The magic of the Ford Mustang is how it ticks the ‘ordinary car’ boxes – affordability, reliability, practicality – yet makes you feel just as special as that millionaire in a Ferrari.

Which makes it an exceptional long-distance companion.

There have been challenging moments, but the Mustang soldiers on and always put smiles on our faces.

An epic road trip is never what you first imagine it will be – things do go wrong and adventures happen – but a brilliant car such as this makes it a dream nonetheless.

Images: Max Edleston

Thanks to: Ford Motor Company and Sunland Ford

Factfile

Ford Mustang 289

Sold/number built 1964-’65/680,989
Construction steel monocoque
Engine all-iron, ohv 4727cc V8, single Autolite four-barrel carburettor
Max power 210bhp @ 4400rpm
Max torque 300lb ft @ 2400rpm
Transmission three-speed automatic, RWD
Suspension: front independent, by unequal-length wishbones, coil springs, anti-roll bar rear live axle, semi-elliptic leaf springs; telescopic dampers f/r
Steering recirculating ball
Brakes drums, with servo
Length 15ft 2in (4597mm)
Width 5ft 8in (1732mm)
Height 4ft 3in (1295mm)
Wheelbase 9ft (2743mm)
Weight 2861lb (1297kg)
Mpg 17
0-60mph 9.5 secs
Top speed 110mph
Price new $2662 (1965)