Early in Mad Max, when the titular anti-hero is introduced to the supercharged Interceptor, he asks, “How the hell did you get all this together?” “It just happened… A piece from here and piece from there,” was the reply from the mad-scientist mechanic Barry; and the wasteland road trash would soon be sorry he put all those pieces together. Very sorry. “It just happened,” is also how Tom Brown describes the build of his own bad, black and blown Ford—a ’69 Mustang Mach 1 that he calls Instigator, which sort of sounds like Interceptor. “The car and parts just came together.”

“We were sitting at the Woodward Dream Cruise a couple of years ago and I had my ’61 Cadillac convertible,” Tom told us. “My friend Brian Thomson said he had an NOS Northstar supercharged engine sitting in the crate, suggesting it would be a good swap into the Cadillac. I agreed and made a deal with him for it. Then Brian said, ‘Great, now all I have to do is get rid of that Mustang.’ I asked what Mustang he was talking about, and after that, it all came together.”

The next day, Brian pushed the Mach 1 onto the lift in his shop for Tom’s inspection. Brian had purchased it in 1979 and restored it in the years after, where it ultimately hit the ISCA circuit and won its class at the Detroit Autorama. The engine and transmission were removed in 1993, and, as one thing led to another, it became the ultimate man-cave accessory in his walk-out basement, where it sat for almost 20 years