The Muse

If in a few months you happen to be driving on a California highway and see a blur of red and silver and pure sex reeking of burnt rubber and snorting like an angry boar, and at a glance you happen to catch the above vanity plate even while it rapidly shrinks ahead of you, well, that'll be me. Its official: I am committed to this project, because this plate - which is now working its way through the California Department of Vehicles system, no doubt soon to be the pride of an industrious felon - will make no sense if I don't follow through with the project.

The Mustangs Of The 60s

In April 1964, on the heels of the end of WWII, Ford released the first production Mustang, which became an instant hit and established all kinds of sales records. The Mustang was the first so-called "pony car," an affordable, compact, sporty or performance-oriented auto usually characterized by a relatively long hood. The release of the Mustang ushered in the first era of the muscle car race, which saw the release over an 8-year period of such classics as the Pontiac GTO, Chevy Camaro, Dodge Challenger, and Plymouth Roadrunner, in addition to, of course, a variety of Mustangs.

Nearly fifty years later, it's a different world, and the relationships we have with our cars has changed. I'm a child of the 70s - almost the 80s - and so I can't pretend to know what it was like dreaming of buying, much less owning, a classic 60s muscle car. What I can do is appreciate what it might have been like to live at a time when there was "no replacement for displacement," horsepower was as American as apple pie, and no one was interested in impressing the anonymous masses with overpriced import luxury cars or ugly inefficient bubbles marketed as the answer to our modern environmental guilt.

To this end, I get a real kick out of Mustang advertisements of the '60s. They speak of a pure and innocent pride of ownership somehow devoid of the modern materiality inherent in today's high-end but utterly uninteresting "luxury" cars. I mean, does it get any better than "The Mustang Pledge"?:

I Will Not...

I will not sell tickets to all the people who want to ride in my '67 Mustang.

I will not keep the neighbors up all night by playing my Mustang's stereo tape player.

I will not yawn when people talk about the performance of other cars.

I Will...

I will tell the truth about my Mustang's low price and not let people think I payed extra for bucket seats, vinyl interior, plush carpeting and all those other no-cost extras.

I will love, honor and obey the Convenience Control Panel when the lights tell me to fasten seat belts and release the parking brake.

I will stick to my diet even though my Mustang's Tilt-Away steering wheel is so adjustable.

[And my personal favorite...]

I will keep the "helpless female" look by shifting manually only when I'm driving alone. All other times I will let the SelectShift work automatically.

The 1967 Shelby G.T. 350

Starting in 1965, racing and Mustang legend Caroll Shelby, working in conjunction with Ford, began modifying production Mustangs and selling them under the Shelby G.T. name. Starting in 1968, the word "Cobra" was added to the moniker, but the 1965-1967 Shelbys were simply known as "Shelby G.T." Most significantly, Shelbys received tweaked "Hi-Po" engines putting out significantly more power than their production-level counterparts.

After its release, the Mustang's design stayed the same for three years, until 1967, when Ford tweaked its look to create a beefier and more aggressive style. The Shelbys, too, got a makeover. Besides a different look, Caroll Shelby introduced for the first time the Shelby G.T. 500, to go alongside the G.T. 350 he had been producing the previous two years.

The G.T 500 had a monstrous 428 cid 4-valve V8 engine putting out a mind-blowing (especially for the time) 400 rear wheel horsepower (Ford conservatively rated the engine at 355, but dynometer tests show otherwise), and featured a padded roll bar and racing harness. It was truly a race-inspired car. The G.T. 350 was more gentile, rated at 271 horsepower made by a 289 cid 4V V8. The exterior of the two models was identical except for the substitution of "500" for "350" on the badges and rocker panel stripe.

Like with the production Mustangs, ads for the Shelbys highlighted the excitement of owning a high-performance vehicle.

(Click on any of these to see a larger version)

Why I'm Paying Tribute To The 350 Instead Of The 500

If the G.T. 500 was "the nuts" of '67 Mustangs, you might wonder why I'm choosing to pay tribute to the "lesser" 350 model. The answer is pretty simple: its a matter of respect. My 2005 Mustang GT is a 289 cid, 3-valve V8, so the engine is a lot closer to the 350 than it is to the 500's engine. And the 4.6L S197 engine is currently putting out 300 HP at the crank, about 265 at the rear wheels (after some light modifications, my Mustang actually makes about 300 HP at the rear wheels today), which is, again, a lot closer to the 350 than it is to the 500. Moreover, in 2007, Shelby built a new G.T. 500, which you may occasionally see on the road today (it shares the S197 body, albeit with some modifications).

Since my Mustang is not a Shelby at all, it may seem a little silly to draw this distinction, but to me it makes sense. In a way, the Shelby 350 is a more "direct" ancestor of my S197; if I were lucky enough to own a current-model GT 500 and were doing a tribute project, I would, of course, be paying tribute to the remarkable Shelby G.T. 500.

As a side note here, you'll probably notice a theme as I progress with this. I want to be very careful not to identify my car as something its not. My goal is to pay tribute to the G.T. 350, not to pretend that my car is one. People have different feelings about this, but I'm of the school that says you don't stick Cobra emblems on a GT, or GT emblems on a V6, or "Supercharged" stickers on a naturally-aspirated engine, etc. There's a joke performance-car guys make about those civics and such you see with a billion stickers all over them, like "NOS" (Nitrous Oxide) - "every sticker adds 5 horsepower!" Heh.

In sum, I want to avoid being a "poser" of any sort. I want to ensure that I'm giving a nod to a vehicle and era I admire, rather than pretending to have a modern version of the same thing. Thus, for example, I've made the decision not to use any of the Shelby emblems on my vehicle, instead using standard Mustang emblems that describe my car, but placing them in appropriate locations to evoke the Shelby's emblems, if that makes sense.

For example, the Shelbys had this kick-ass emblem on the front fenders. They had similar emblems on the front grille and faux gas cap on the rear of the car. As cool as these emblems are, I'm not going to use them because my car is not a Shelby G.T. 350.

Instead, I'm going to use this Running Horse Logo. The fenders will be the "4.6" version, which accurately describes my car's engine (since I will be removing the "GT" badges, except for on the faux gas cap on the rear, I want to be sure to make it easy to tell its a V8 GT, rather than the V6, 4.0 Liter version).

Anyway, you'll see this same theme in some other choices I'm making.

The 1967 Shelby G.T. 350: Photos

OK, so you've read enough, time to get to the pictures. For this entry, I'm just going to post some of my favorite pictures showing some of the various features of the G.T. 350. The next several entries will each focus on a single particular feature, giving information about the feature when appropriate or interesting, and demonstrating how I intend to mimic the feature on my Mustang. I will show you the choices I'm making and give you my thought process behind each choice. The first example of this, of course, I've already done, describing the Proglass Mystery 7 hood in "The Idea (Part 2)."

Enjoy!