Mike Bradford recalls riding around as a five-year-old boy in this 1969 Mustang, an original 390-equipped Mach I purchased new in 1970 by his father. He remembers being wedged between his two older brothers atop the hump in the middle of the back seat while Dad drove his family to breakfast at White Coffee Pot Jr. in nearby Ocean City, MD.
“Even back then I used to hand wash it on Saturdays with my dad,” says Bradford, now 40. “I always wanted that car. I couldn’t wait until I was 16 to drive it.”
At six years his senior, though, older brother Kenny had first dibs and he drove the car for several years before getting in an accident with it in 1981 and abandoning it in the driveway in favor of a newer ride. “So I started saving my money up and when I got to 16 my dad made me an offer,” Bradford says. “He said, ‘You can take this car and fix it up or I’ll help you get another car,’ so I said, ‘Nah, I want this car,’ and we basically got it restored to original. I was close to 17 by the time we got it out of the body shop and then I drove it all through my high school years.”
With nothing more than a pair of old Cragars on the rear to dress it up a little, Bradford went cruising with his friends and attended high school proms and graduations in the classic ‘Stang before deciding in his senior year to rebuild its engine himself. “Then I started hopping it up and got in a few street races here and there,” he says. “It did really well; I never really lost when I was in high school. So I started really getting into it and a buddy of mine back-halved the car when I was in my early-20s.”
In the meantime, Bradford was married and divorced by the mid-‘90s and the car ended up languishing in his garage for six or seven years. Then in 2000, he came across a display in a local shopping mall featuring the work of Steve Drummond of Drummond Race Cars in Delmar, DE. The two Ford fans got to talking and Bradford eventually decided to turn his pride and joy over to Drummond for a thorough Pro Street-type transformation.
“That was a big decision to go that way because it was an all-original car,” Bradford admits. “But my thought process was that I never plan on selling it, so I might as well make it the way I really want it. That’s part of why it sat so long. It took me a long time, but once I made up my mind I knew what I wanted. I always loved the Pro Street look, it just looks so tough.”
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The initial plan called only for rebuilding the back-half job and dropping in a bigger powerplant, but “we ended up putting a whole tube chassis in there,” Bradford says. It reemerged from Drummond’s shop with a new 514 cubic incher up front on Jan. 18, 2002, just a couple of days before the birth of Bradford’s youngest daughter. “It was one of the best days of my life,” the commercial tiling contractor declares. “I was ecstatic, almost as happy as the day she was born.”
Not long after the car was back on the street, however, Bradford decided to step up in the horsepower department, so Drummond swapped in a 622-c.i. motor with nitrous added to the mix. Early in 2004, Bradford started bracket racing with the new combination and says his biggest day at the track so far came the next year when he made it all the way to the Super Rod final in the 2005 IHRA President’s Cup Nationals at Budd’s Creek, MD. “That was a hard race because there were probably 150 cars in the class, so to get down to the last two was really something, I thought, for the number of rounds you have to go and as competitive as it is.”