How A Prize From An Abandoned 7-Up Contest Became One Of The Best Anniversary Edition Mustangs Ever

You want to know how much of a car-obsessed freak of nature I am? I couldn’t name one team that was in contention for the “Final Four” in this year’s NCAA championship. March Madness is never on my radar, and a “bracket” to me is something that holds my wobbling side-view mirror.

Despite this lack of basketball interest, I can still think of a Mustang that was going to be a prize in a college-tournament-based promotion that failed in the eleventh hour. The car still lived on for a different purpose and remains one of the more desirable Fox-body ‘Stangs ever.

The Seven-Up Five-Point-Oh

Planning a contest has to be a nightmare. Look at any promotional spot for a car giveaway and try to read through all of the disclaimers in tiny type at the bottom.

Obviously, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for mountains of paperwork some lawyers made up.

For 1990, the soft drink 7-Up (or Seven Up or 7 Up) decided to do a sweepstakes promotion that would involve that year’s NCAA Championship. One of the reported “20 million dollars in prizes” was going to be a car: a brand-new 1990 Mustang LX 5.0 convertible. Actually, they were going to give away thirty of them.

To many Mustang connoisseurs, the LX 5.0 is the ultimate Foxstang since it offered the 225 horsepower V8 and suspension mods of the GT but in a less expensive (and possibly even lighter weight) format. The bigger advantage, at least to me, was that the LX of this era lacked the appearance modifications of the GT that were, well, a bit late eighties and almost Pontiac-like (gasp!). “Color keyed” ground effects skirts were paired with a deep front air dam, and a contrasting stripe inset into the bumpers wrapped around the car. In back, the GT added what some call “cheese grater” taillights that looked a bit like self-adhesive plastic covers you might buy at Pep Boys.

The LX 5.0 received none of those, but still had the same mechanical bits as the GT, with the exception of bigger 225 tires mounted on older-style “ten slot” mags, as seen on the cop-car LX below.

For the contest, 7-Up reportedly ordered thirty special LX 5.0 drop-tops in a striking shade of Deep Emerald Green Metallic with a very-1990 white top and white leather interior. Another great-looking enhancement was the substitution of the ten-slot mags with a set of “turbine” style wheels, about the only aspect of the Mustang GT package that I liked.

These cars are kind of like the blue-collar equivalent of a “Prince of Wales” specification Aston Martin Vantage that had all of the go-faster bits in a down-spec Volante body.

The question that remained, and that nobody seems to have an exact answer to, is “How was 7-Up going to give these thirty cars away?”

The Un-Cola’s Un-Contest

Trying to find details of the abandoned 7-Up contest is difficult, but it seems to have involved the often-used under-the-bottle-cap reveal to say if you won. The bulk of the prizes appear to have been basketballs and rather pointless stuffies of the 7-Up mascot (“Spot”) that absolutely nobody even knew of or cared about back then. It looks like a recycled California Raisin or the trick where you just put Wayfarers on anything.

The car giveaway is more obscure. This one ad I recovered claims that if the score on the inside of a 7-Up bottle cap matched the score of the College Basketball Championship Game on April 2, 1990 you could win “1 of 30 limited edition Ford Mustangs or a 2-liter bottle of 7-Up.”

That’s sort of an odd contest, since unless the game was fixed (shhh), there’s no way they could have had exactly 30 matching bottle caps, and how did they determine if you won a brand-new Pony Car or just a plastic bottle of soda pop?

Other accounts I’ve read claim that contestants possibly at the NCCA event (half time?) try to sink a ball from center court. That sounds even sketchier, since how many people would you need to have attempt this to get thirty of them to make the shot and win a car? With either of these possible scenarios, I see a lot of questions unanswered, and it seems they never were. The whole Mustang part of the contest scheme was abandoned early on, but only after two cars had been built. How Ford determined what to do with them resulted in one of the more collectible late Foxstangs.

You Had Me At Emerald Green

A twenty-fifth anniversary is a big deal for anything, but surprisingly, Ford reportedly had nothing planned to celebrate that milestone for the Mustang in 1990. Nobody quite knows why, but it might be the fact that a few years before, the Fox Mustang was supposed to die at the hands of the Mazda-based Ford Probe – a situation that the public made sure would not happen. Possibly, Ford never expected the old Pony Car to even still be around, so why bother with an anniversary edition? Somehow, looking at this gorgeous green convertible, the powers that be declared that this dead-on-arrival 7-Up car would be an ideal anniversary edition for the Mustang.

Inside, the white leather isn’t as intense as you’d expect. There’s that stupid stuffed toy in the back seat.

The cars all appear to have been fully equipped with A/C, cruise, and stereo, plus power windows, mirrors, and locks.

The gauges and switchgear of this last-series Foxstang were pretty simple and modern without being too jarring set against the nearly ten-year-old design of the rest of the car.

Ford planned to make 5,000 Mustang LX 5.0 in this specification, but ultimately ended up building only 4,103. Of that number, 1,360 were spec’d with the five-speed stick.

“Galloping horse” badges were placed on the dash of all Mustangs between certain dates in 1989 through 1990, and though the 7-Up Edition-spec cars were not technically “anniversary editions” in the traditional sense, they are recognized as such by many fans and collectors.

Despite the rarity, the values of the 7-Up Edition are not sky-high. While a rare few examples have sold in the $30,000 to $50,000 range, the average selling price is around $20,000 for a great driver-quality car. For a fun, affordable, and easy-to-fix streetable classic which will likely appreciate with the current Fox Fever, that’s a hard-to-beat deal.

One Anniversary Edition That Didn’t Fizzle Out

Let’s face it. If Ford had actually taken the task of making a 25^th anniversary car seriously, they likely would have given us something covered in rather lurid 25 YEARS graphics and gaudy color schemes that you’d be embarrassed to drive.

Instead, they ended up repurposing a special edition from a failed sugary soft drink promotion; a car that ironically was actually a dream-spec (at least to me!) Fox body LX 5.0 convertible and a perfect tribute to a quarter century of Mustangs. Who could have seen that coming?

Top graphic image: Bring A Trailer