Nice-looking during the day, sure, but at night, “It’s a light show,” Sandoval says. With about 500,000 LED lights on a programmer that tells them what color to light and whether to run front to back, chase one another or blink to pace of the RPMs, he continues, “When you take it out at night, it’s a completely different car.”
Sandoval thought a lot about having to sell the car while he worked on it, sanding it endlessly. “I think if it was for me I could have lived without this and lived without that, but since I was going to use this to put a cornerstone in this town, I knew that it had to be something really nice,” he recalls. “So that might’ve helped push the envelope a little more.”
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
Sandoval had built other cars and fixed plenty at Autoright Collision Repair in Santa Fe, where he’s worked for four years. But the Mustang took him out of his comfort zone. Fixing the body wasn’t the problem; it was the look of the coupe, less desirable than the fastback model debuting the same year. But Sandoval had plenty of people around him with opinions they weren’t afraid to share.
“I’m in a very unique neighborhood,” he says, describing Autoright Collision as the area’s corner shop with an open-door policy. “I’ve got everybody around me. The part store’s across the street; the transmission store’s down the way; the engine builder’s about a block from here; guys that helped me do the mechanical and wiring are about a block and a half from me. So this car’s kind of taken on its own reputation and prestige.”