1968 Shelby Mustang GT350, GT500 and GT500KR. Greg Kolasa
speed and performance.
Slowly at first, then with the ever-in-creasing speed of a snowball down a mountain, the rest of Ford management began to grasp that they could use speed and performance to their advantage. Potential car buyers (even those not necessarily interested in speed and performance) concluded that because of Ford’s motorsports victories, its products must be superior to those of the other manufacturers.
In the spring of 1962, Ford officially withdrew from the 1958 Resolution on Speed and Advertising (the so-called, self-imposed “Performance Ban,” instituted by the automobile manufacturers themselves, ostensibly in the interest of safety). This stated that Ford (and not another organization, even one of which Ford was a member) should determine what course its company should follow in the context of automotive safety. When asked if withdrawal from the ban meant that Ford was once again going to dip its toe into the motorsports pool, new president Henry Ford II answered that they were not merely going to dip a toe, but that they were “going in with both feet.”
The summer of 1963 saw Ford launch the largest, most extensive, expansive (and likely expensive) motorsports program in the history of the American automobile.
The program was known as “Total Performance” and its scope was equaled only by its expenditures. Although the best-known aspect of Total Performance was the nearly decade-long motorsports program, Total Performance was actually an overarching marketing philosophy, in the context that car buyers, after examination of a Ford car’s total performance, decided that the Ford product was clearly superior. The objective of the motorsports program was elegantly (and also expensively) simple: to dominate all forms of motorsports, drag racing, stock car racing, sports car racing, IndyCar racing, or any other kind of racing. If it was racing, Ford wanted to dominate it, and cost didn’t matter.
The subtitle of Total Performance, “improving the breed through open competition,” was intended to thwart criticism that Ford’s reemergence into performance was anti-safety. Because of what it was intended to achieve and the way it was to do so, Total Performance became known as the “Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday” sales philosophy.
The overall objective of the Total Performance motorsports program is often misunderstood, however. Ford’s goal was to become the dominant force in motorsports, but that wasn’t the end. It was the means to the end. The real end, very much counterintuitively, was increased sales to American car buyers of beige sedans and wood-on-the-side station wagons.
Ford’s lack of a real sports car in its product lineup could be resolved very easily if the new Mustang were recognized as a true sports car. To achieve that goal, Ford approached the one organization with the credentials and credibility to make that proclamation: the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA), which served as the sanctioning body for all amateur road racing in the United States. However, the company’s plan of simply applying pressure to the SCCA to receive the all-important sports car declaration for Mustang was, amazingly to Ford, met with staunch refusal. The SCCA was fiercely independent and beholden to no one, not even a massive and powerful entity such as the Ford Motor Company. Instead of pressing the SCCA even harder, Ford realized that it would be easier to catch flies with Texas honey than with Dearborn vinegar. Ford turned to Carroll Shelby.
FROM “SECRETARY’S CAR” TO SPORTS CAR
When Lee Iacocca approached Carroll Shelby about making the Mustang a sports car, Shelby was somewhat reluctant to take on the project, feeling that the project would be a major distraction from his racing programs. Because of Ford’s advertising that proclaimed the car’s low price and fuel economy made it affordable, even for a secretary, he derided the Mustang as “a secretary’s car.” Shelby retold the story numerous times. He was far less than enthusiastic about Ford’s “request,” but he also saw the writing on the wall. In the beginning, the Cobra was the only race car in Ford’s stable, and Shelby American was the benefactor of Ford’s seemingly infinite corporate bank accounts.
However, with the advent of the GT40 and other in-house efforts, Ford put less and less emphasis on (and money into) Shelby’s Cobras in favor of those other programs. Ford funding of Shelby’s Cobras wasn’t infinite; it definitely had an end, and Shelby knew that the end was approaching. In part because of that, and also because the request had come from his now good friend Lee Iacocca (who, more than anyone else at Ford, was responsible for securing Ford funding for his Cobra project), Shelby agreed to take on the “secretary’s car” project.
When the Ford GT40 appeared on the scene, Carroll Shelby knew that Ford’s funding of his “powered by Ford” Cobras was no longer an infinite deal. He saw the Mustang GT350 project as additional revenue for a few more years, even if he didn’t personally care to undertake the project. It turned out to be a fiscally wise decision and it made his good (and very powerful) Ford friend, Lee Iacocca, happy.
Shelby used Ford’s steamrolling approach as a blueprint of what not to do when he called on John Bishop, who was both the director of the SCCA and a friend. Bishop laid out what Shelby needed to do to produce a Mustang sports car. It would have to be eligible for competition in one of SCCA’s production sports car classes. These were delineated by the cars’ performance potential to ensure relatively equal car-to-car competition. The car had to shed two seats because sports cars were two-seaters, and 100 examples needed to be produced by January of the year in which the car was to compete (in this case, 1965). Given that it was now already late summer of 1964, time was not an abundant community.
The production quantity minimum initially caused some consternation. Shelby American’s experience with sales of the competition Cobras indicated that the requirement of 100 racers was nearly twice as many cars as there were potential customers. Thankfully, there was also relief in the regulations: all production cars were allowed a series of general deviations from the production version of the vehicle for the sake of performance, as well as for safety. In addition to these general modifications, the SCCA allowed a specific set of modifications, more limited in scope and number that had to be submitted and accepted beforehand by the SCCA in a process known as “homologation.” Specific modifications for racing went further still and were made over and above the general spec.
You didn’t have to lay out big bucks for a turnkey GT350 competition version to go racing. The similarity of the street version to its full-race brethren meant that, with minimal modifications (and hence, cash outlay), any street GT350 could be made into a race car. This approach had been undertaken by several owners who campaigned their (former) street machines very successfully on the strip as well as the track.
Although it may sound confusing, in the simplest of terms, there could effectively be two versions of Shelby’s sports car version of the Mustang, the GT350: one for racing and one for street use. Both counted toward the 100-car production total.
Development of the Mustang into a race car was the primary emphasis of the new GT350 program, but there was