In the car world, sometimes money just isn’t enough. Certain supercar manufacturers put you through a vetting process before you’re approved to buy one of their creations. Other companies, such as Ford, make you wait a long time for the return of certain beloved models, such as the Mustang Mach 1 or Bronco. It’s been two decades since Ford produced the 2004 SVT Mustang Cobra with the Mystichrome paint job. And guess what? It’s still not bringing it back to its list of available colors. The good news is that RTR Vehicles has started offering the distinctive, color-shifting finish.
The blue oval offered a similar paint job on the 1996 Mustang SVT Cobra. Back then, it was called “Mystic” and changed from black to purple to root-beer brown depending on which angle it was viewed from.
For the 2004 “Terminator” Cobra, Ford’s Special Vehicle Team worked with Alan Eggly, Ford’s color and trim director for North America, DuPont, and a California company called Flex Products, Inc. to develop an updated formulation. The result was a paint filled with a combination of sparkling aluminum flakes and Flex’s ChromaFlair light interference pigments, tiny particles comprised of five layers of colorless film. Each particle acts as a prism. According to a press release about the Mystichrome Cobra, “White light is reflected off the core layer, and then split by outer layers into visible colors. As the viewing angle changes, so does the visible color. The color produced is controlled by precise variances—measured in atoms—in the prismatic layers: The thinnest ChromaFlair pigment shifts from gold through silver and into light blue; the thickest pigment shifts from silver through green, and into purplish blue.”
DuPont started with Green/Purple ChromaFlair pigments that transitioned from bright green through shades of blue and into purple. They blended those with black and green to make the final colors deep, rich, and balanced. To their eyes, Mystichrome appeared to be a bright, metallic topaz that turns into cobalt blue, then changes to royal purple, and ends up as a deep onyx black. Eggly coined the name Mystichrome because the iridescent colors reminded him of the way high heat leaves a blue finish on chrome exhaust headers.
Officially, Ford only made 1,000 Mystichrome Cobra coupes and convertibles for the 2004 model year (although at least two enthusiast sites show they produced 10 more than that). Now, RTR (Ready to Rock) Vehicles is offering Mystichrome once again through its Extended Color Palette.
Before you get excited about having them paint your S550 GT, just know that the colors in that range are only available on 2024+ Mustang RTR models. Standard Extended Color Palette paint options cost $8,995; Mystichrome is part of the Premium Paint line and comes with a $14,995 price tag.
Why bring Mystichrome back now? RTR Vehicles founder and Ultra4 racing and World Drift Series champion Vaughn Gittin Jr summed it up perfectly: “It’s been too long, and someone had to do it!”
Source: www.classiccars.com