IN THE SUMMER OF 1964, Ford handed Carroll Shelby a simple brief: make the Mustang a race car. Incomplete K-code fastbacks were pulled off the line at Ford’s San Jose plant and trucked south to Shelby American, where they were stripped, stiffened, and reborn as the GT350. Just 504 street examples were built in that first year — and the competition version, the fabled R model, would go on to claim three consecutive SCCA B Production national championships. The GT350 didn’t just go racing; it went winning.
THIS CAR, chassis SFM5S250, passed through Shelby American’s Los Angeles works in a single week of May 1965 — work begun May 13, finished May 17 — and was shipped on June 7 to Warren-Anderson Ford in Riverside, California. What happened next is one of the odder footnotes in the Shelby registry: rather than sell it, the dealer apparently kept the car as its own demonstrator for the better part of two years, dressing it along the way in the following year’s equipment — 1966-style quarter windows, fender scoops, gas cap, and steering wheel. Per the SAAC Registry, only four 1965 cars could possibly have received this treatment at Warren-Anderson, and this is the only one reported with the ‘66 windows and scoops. It finally reached its first private owner, Jan Rankin of Riverside, in January 1967.
FROM THERE the GT350 wandered — to El Paso, to Atlanta, and eventually home to California, where in the 1990s owner Lenny Shabes rebuilt it to full R-model specification: fiberglass front apron with integrated brake-cooling intakes, vented plexiglass rear window, pull-up side windows, a gutted and caged cockpit, and Le Mans stripes over Wimbledon White. What Shelby had built as a fast road car became, three decades on, the racer its siblings were born as.
AND RACE IT DID. Campaigned in vintage competition from 1995 to 2005 — a decade of events recorded in its logbook, much of it in the hands of Mark and Linda Mountanos — the car wears race number 54 and is built to work for a living: a TOE Performance-built 289 with high-rise intake and MSD ignition, a Tex Racing four-speed with aluminum case, cockpit-adjustable brake bias, Koni dampers, an oil cooler and fuel cell, and Goodyear Blue Streaks on five-spoke alloys. Stewart-Warner gauges and an 8,000-rpm tachometer face the driver; there is no odometer, because this car has never been about counting miles. Its original Hi-Po 289 remains with the car to this day.
TODAY the old warrior is getting ready for its next fight. Acquired by its current owner in 2022, SFM5S250 has come to OTTO WERKS’ Vintage Motorsport Division in Scottsdale, Arizona for a complete recommissioning — every system gone through, every detail prepared — with one purpose: to go racing.