The Shelby Mustang GT500 is considered by many to be one of the peaks of early muscle car development – from the golden age of the American V8. It was developed as the even-more-insane version of the already fast GT350 – using Ford’s 428 cubic inch (7.0 litre) Cobra Jet V8 in place of the GT350’s 289 cubic inch (4.7 litre) small-block V8.
Stylistically, the GT500 set a trend that automakers are still chasing almost 50 years later. Carroll Shelby produced the GT500 for only 3 years between 1967 and 1970 and in relatively limited numbers, so their values have been on a steady increase for decades, which in turn has attracted collectors.
Perhaps the most famous Shelby GT500 owner was Jim Morrison of The Doors, he was given a 1967 Night Mist Blue GT500 by Elektra Records for his work on the band’s debut album, then promptly crashed it on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
After wrecking the car, Jim dragged himself to the Whiskey-A-Go-Go club and returned several hours later to find that the GT500 had vanished. To this day, no one knows who took the car, or where it ended up.
The exceedingly well presented GT500 you see here was completed on the 20th of January 1967 and served as a Shelby company car, assigned to Don Cunningham before being dispatched to Johnny Bolton Ford Inc on 25th August that same year.
Only 59 of the GT500s built in 1967 were designated as “company cars”, and only 11 were specifically designated as “engineering cars” like the one you see here, chassis number 0425. The overwhelming majority of Shelby GT500s were produced off-site at the factory of A.O. Smith Company of Michigan, under direct Ford control. So the few that were built by Shelby’s team at their workshop in California are generally seen as more valuable – as they were built alongside the Cobra and GT40.
If you’d like to park this Bullitt-green Shelby Mustang in your garage you’ll need to attend The Goodwood Festival of Speed Sale due to be held on the 26th of June 2015 – and you’ll need to bring a cheque for somewhere in the £90,000 to £120,000 range.
Click here to see the full listing at Bonhams.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
