1968 Shelby Mustang GT350, GT500 and GT500KR. Greg Kolasa
detuned and only minimally more refined to satisfy production quantity minimums. The car took a somewhat convoluted route to become a sports car that was a bit different from that of other sports cars participating in SCCA competition.
Objective achieved, with honors; the acceptance of the Mustang GT350 for competition in SCCA’s B-Production racing class earned the Mustang the title of “sports car.” Grabbing the national title three years in a row was the icing on that cake.
Normally, production sports cars were developed to satisfy a consumer demand for such a vehicle; in other words, to sell cars to the public for use on the street. After the cars had landed on the showroom floors, the nationwide performance craze of 1960s America almost demanded that there be a performance and ultimately a competition version of those cars. Therefore, efforts were undertaken to turn the street cars into race cars. The process for the Mustang GT350 was somewhat different.
When it was decided that a sports car version of the Mustang was needed, work began on a model that could be used on the track, which allowed the Mustang to legitimately lay claim to the title of “sports car.” This was followed by the creation of a street brother. The unique GT350 process entailed a three-step process: street car (Ford Mustang) to race car (Shelby Ford Mustang GT350 competition model), then into another street car (Shelby Ford Mustang GT350 street version).
When Bishop and the SCCA visited Shelby American early in 1965 for their inspection, they found that the 100-car-production requirement was a bit short of fulfillment: only two race cars and a dozen or so street cars were complete. But the back lot behind Shelby’s facility was filled to overflowing with more than 100 white Mustang fastbacks in various stages of transformation into GT350s. That indicated that Shelby was serious about meeting his production commitment.
Seeing Shelby’s efforts, the Mustang GT350 was accepted for competition in SCCA’s B-Production racing class for 1965. Ford’s Mustang, or at least, one version of it, was now officially a sports car.
The newly minted race car showed what kind of sports car it was less than a month later when the GT350 won its first B-Production competition event. That winning trend continued for the remainder of the year. It culminated with Shelby American’s Mustang GT350 being crowned as the 1965 SCCA B-Production National Champion sports car, a feat that it repeated in 1966 and 1967.
Shelby’s people were not the first to put a Mustang on a racetrack. As soon as the Mustang was available for sale (in fact, even a little before), the little notchbacks hit all kinds of tracks in all levels of amateur and professional preparation where they quickly established themselves as worthy competitors. But they did so as sedan racers, not sports cars.
Mustangs hit the racetracks in the United States, Europe, and Australia almost as soon as the car was available for sale. The little notchbacks quickly established themselves as worthy adversaries. Although they were winners, they won as sedans and that didn’t allow Ford to lay claim to the Mustang as a sports car.
Shelby American changed that in a development process that began in late summer of 1964, when Ken Miles and Phil Remington began testing a pair of notchback Mustangs supplied by Ford. The fastback version of the Mustang, on which the GT350 was ultimately based, was still a couple of months away. They determined the exact modifications needed to improve the newborn pony’s performance, based on testing and development performed by Ford engineers well before the cars arrived at Shelby American.
From these tests, plus what was learned from earlier Mustang race cars, came features that have become synonymous with the GT350: the lowered front suspension upper A-arms, the cross-engine-compartment Monte Carlo Bar, the Fairlane station wagon’s large rear brake drums, and the aluminum high-rise intake topped with a Holley 715 cfm carburetor, to name a few. Simultaneously, Ford and Shelby American, along with the San Jose assembly plant, began discussing what could be added to and left off the Mustangs as they made their way down the assembly line, bound for Shelby American, and transformation into sports cars.
In October 1964, Charles “Chuck” Cantwell left General Motors when he heard of a small automobile manufacturer in Los Angeles who was building race cars. Cantwell’s first assignment with Shelby American was as the GT350’s new project engineer and his first order of business was to learn the new pony car inside and out. For two weeks, he worked with (and at) Ford in Dearborn. He laid out long, detailed, hand-written spreadsheets of components and their functions, planning ways to improve the Mustang’s performance.
Cantwell then toured the San Jose assembly line, picking out parts from the Ford production parts lineup to fulfill the Miles-Remington-Ford objectives. These items could be added relatively easily to, and deleted just as easily from, the Mustangs as they made their way down the San Jose line. That planning ensured that the Mustangs bound for Shelby American were built in the closest configuration as possible to the final product.
There was no “default” configuration to which Ford built Mustangs in the absence of a special order. Every pony (and in fact, every Ford product) was specifically designed in the configuration in which it was built. From a basic, no-option 6-cylinder coupe to a fully optioned HiPo GT convertible (and everything in between), every Mustang was a special order. Cars of similar characteristics, within a given sales district, formed a District Sales Order (DSO) that could be for a single car or several hundred identically equipped cars.
It has been a long-held belief that Ford churned out Mustangs by the train-carload, and every so often, one of them that met Shelby American’s requirements for transformation into a GT350 was hastily spirited away by Shelby’s fabricators. However, Shelby’s Mustangs were actually carefully and precisely built for just that purpose based on a very specific set of predetermined requirements.
There was nothing random about the configuration of the Mustangs shipped to Shelby American for conversion to GT350s. And Ford did not randomly churn out regular production Mustangs by the thousands to be shipped to its dealers. Every Mustang and, in fact, every automobile that rolled out of a Ford assembly plant, was specially ordered the way it was eventually built.
The term “special order” almost always brings to mind exotic combinations of wild, high-performance options. In reality, every car was a special order, whether it was a four-door bench-seat sedan or one of the Blue Oval’s latest and hottest Total Performance offerings. Every car scheduled for production was ordered by someone (an individual or a dealer) and no car was built unless there was a predetermined customer who specified how that car should be built. Likewise, there was no default configuration to which cars were built in the absence of a firm order; every car was a special order.
To keep track of its vehicle production, Ford divided the country into a series of about 40 areas, called districts. As each individual order for a car was placed by a dealer within a given district, the cars were grouped for production, by characteristics, in a District Special Order (DSO). The number of cars built within a single DSO was determined by the mechanical commonality