If the last Ringbrothers car we featured – the Aston Martin DBS V8 dubbed ‘Octavia’ (SM, Nov ’25) – was the James Bond hero car, then this ’69 Mach 1 Mustang is most definitely the villain.

First published in the January 2026 issue of Street Machine

When the owner, Jake Hodess, brought the car to the award-winning Wisconsin-based workshop, he had a pretty simple brief: black paint, no chrome, and an interior that looks like a tuxedo. The rest of the details were left to Ringbrothers’ Mike and Jim Ring and their team, along with Ragle Design (which also worked on Octavia), and the result, known as ‘Kingpin’, is an even more pumped-up version of one of the best-looking muscle cars to ever hit the road.

“The Mustang Mach 1 has always been an aggressive-looking car, and the client was adamant about creating a sinister aesthetic,” says Jim Ring. “We asked ourselves: ‘What would the final boss in a John Wick film drive?’ This was the result.”

While Ringbrothers is becoming renowned for making carbonfibre-bodied cars, this wide-body Mustang was created the old-fashioned way by splitting the quarters, pulling out the wheel opening, and then filling in the gaps. It’s wider than stock by just under four inches at the rear and two inches at the front. “I think it took me four quarters and four front fenders to do this car,” says Mike Ring. “If you look down a regular ’69, the front and rear fenders are a pretty straight line, whereas these hourglass out. I had a lot of help from Bryce Hilton at Moselle Panel & Paint in New Zealand. He came over for about a month; he’s a super-talented metal guy.”

As with all of their top-end builds, Jim and Mike went straight to the Roadster Shop to sort the car’s underpinnings, ticking the box for a Fast Track Stage III chassis with independent rear suspension and Fox RS SV single-adjustable coil-overs front and rear. Mike also asked that the wheelbase be stretched 1.5 inches by pushing the front wheels forward. This not only cleans up the proportions but also helps get the engine behind the front axle line.

Brembo brakes peek through the HRE Vintage Series 517 wheels, which measure up at 19×10 in the front and a massive 20×13 out back, wrapped in 295/35 and 345/30 Michelin Pilot Sport 4 S rubber, respectively. No wonder they needed to pump out those guards!

While it would be fairly straightforward to simply bolt the chassis to the body, Ringbrothers prefers to weld the chassis to the floor to return it to a unibody construction as per factory. Of course, it’s now much stiffer than anything Ford managed back in the day, thanks not only to the RS chassis but also to the extensive rollcage hidden behind the interior trim. A rigid platform was essential so that the fancy independent suspension could work as intended.

For the driveline, Ringbrothers once again turned to Wegner Motorsports for one of the company’s supercharged 5.0-litre Coyote engines, topped with a 3.0-litre Whipple blower and capable of more than 800hp. The transmission is a Bowler Carbon Edition T56 six-speed, backed up with an IRS nine-inch.

While the body is mostly steel, there are still quite a few carbonfibre parts, including the bonnet, grille surround, spoiler, rear diffuser and tail panel. And if you’re a follower of Ringbrothers’ builds, you might recognise that tail-light panel as being similar to the one used on their ‘Patriarc’ Mach 1 – but there’s a twist. “It’s a 360-degree light, and it’s ducted all the way through to the scoop at the front of the rear quarter [to allow air to exit through the tail-light housing],” Mike explains. “I matte-cleared the tail-light lenses; I’d never done that before, but it’s kind of a cool look. It makes everybody want to touch them, because they don’t know where it starts.”

In the cockpit, the interior fit-out is thoroughly modern yet still looks like it belongs in a ’69 Mustang – a case of taking the factory design and giving it some subtle tweaks. In keeping with the sinister theme of the car, the cabin is swathed entirely in black, which isn’t something Ringbrothers would usually do. “Black’s not really my interior colour, but the owner wanted it to look more like a tuxedo,” Mike says. “If you look at the seats, it’s black leather, but you’ll also see a shinier black leather, like on a tuxedo where you’ll have a glossier material on the lapels and the pants will have a black stripe that’s glossy. The cloth inserts in the seats actually look like little bowties. It’s hard to pick up, but there’s one line of stitching that’s kind of a bronze colour to match the dash.”

As for the exterior paint, there was never any discussion over colour – it was always going to be black, so the BASF Glasurit catalogue was consulted and Bootleg Black was chosen. To break it up a little, Charcoal Grey was used on the front spoiler, rear diffuser and wheel centres, and some matte silver stripes were added along the sides and bonnet in vinyl rather than paint. “Honestly, I think vinyl is cooler in the way that it pays homage to the way the cars were; it’s timeless. I think when you gloss over stripes it just kind of dates cars,” says Mike.

There are some splashes of colour, but you’d have to look pretty hard. “The owner wanted a little bit of Grabber Green; he loved that colour. He said he really wanted the brake calipers that colour, and then we added a little bit on the mirror and steering wheel,” Mike says. Of course, they had to tweak the colour a little bit, and the result has been dubbed Grab-Her Green, named by Mike’s wife Nancy.

Kingpin debuted at the 2025 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, where the car had a crowd around it all week, with people returning multiple times to pick out more of the subtle – and not so subtle – details that differentiate this Mach 1 from the factory version. In other words, Kingpin is typical of a Ringbrothers build: everything’s been changed, but it’s all done so well and looks so right that you’d swear it came like that from the factory.

RINGBROTHERS FOR JAKE HODESS
1969 FORD MUSTANG MACH 1

THANKS
BASF Glasurit Paint; Gentex Mirrors; HRE Wheels.