 | Flick01 (71)
04/01/2006 |  By the time the Mustang was introduced in April 1964 former race car driver turned car builder Carroll Shelby was building and selling the 289 and 427 Ford Powered Cobra Roadsters and was beating the pants off the competition. Although the Cobras were sold and serviced through selected Ford dealers, Ford Motor Company itself had a problem with the car. Unlike Chevrolet Impalas and Plymouth Belvederes the Cobra did not give Ford something that they very much wanted when entering the winner's cicle, and that was product identification. The Cobra, originally based on the British AC Ace body, did not look like anything Ford was producing. The saying "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" was proving true because no matter how many victories the Cobra achieved, it did little to bring potential customers into the showrooms. When the Mustang fastback was introduced Ford saw an opportunity to gain some prestige and also product identification if they could make the car a winner. The early production Mustangs could not house an engine larger than the 289 and that limited its drag strip potential so Ford turned their sights on SCCA's class "B" which was road racing. SCCA said that "to road race you had to be a sports car. Mustangs have 4 seats and sports cars have 2 seats." If anyone thought that kind of thinking was going to keep the Mustang out of competition they had not counted on the likes of Carroll Shelby, who was given the task of making the Mustang fastback a winner on the class B road race circuit. Shelby built his "sports car" starting with a Mustang fastback equipped with the 289 High Performance engine. He beefed up the suspension with Koni shocks, rear trailing arms, welded on traction bars, lowered the front A frames by one inch, added front tower supports, then changed the steering ratio with different pitman and idler arms. He put on bigger brakes, a shortened Fairlane station wagon 9 inch rear end and equipped it with a "Detroit Locker" no spin differential. For performance improvements he installed a Holley 715 CFM carburetor mounted on top of a high rise aluminum intake manifold, he installed a finned aluminum oil pan and tubular headers pushing dual exhaust into glass pack mufflers that exited at the side of the car just ahead of the rear tires. The power was fed through an aluminum case Borg Warner T-10 four speed transmission. The rear seat was replaced by a fiberglass package shelf which housed the spare tire and for additional weight balance the battery was relocated into the trunk. The package shelf left only the front seats intact and thus Shelby had his "sports car." He topped off the package by adding a tachometer, oil pressure guage, and a wood steering wheel. In order to qualify as a production car, 100 street models would be needed before Shelby could build his full race version of the GT 350. When the time came for inspection he was supposed to have 100 cars ready but had only 12 completed. In true snake charmer fashion he put all of the finished cars at the front of the line with the painted but mechanically incomplete cars lined up behind them. The inspectors showed up and saw 12 lines of cars with hoods open for inspection on each of the lead cars. Thinking that all of the cars were completed, Shelby was given approval and both the street and racing version of the GT 350 went into production. Jerry Titus, Bob Johnson and Mark Donohue drove GT-350s to national titles in 1965, and the GT-350 went on to win SCCA B-Production national championships for three straight years.
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