Autoart - Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R

A worthy successor to the track-bred legend

- Matt Boyd

Let’s be blunt: Calling a modern Mustang— any modern Mustang—a “Shelby GT350” takes some balls. In creating the original in 1965, Carroll Shelby was instrumental in establishing Mustang’s credibility as a performance car. I would argue that his transformation of Ford’s reskinned Falcon boulevardier into a legitimate sports car was the most important factor in setting the tone for not just the Mustang but the entire pony-car genre.

But as influential as the GT350 was in terms of marketing, that’s not why he built them. His true motive is epitomized by the 36 (34 production, two prototype) cars that carried the “R” designation. Those bare-bones racing models were built specifically to wrest the SCCA B Production National Championship away from Chevrolet’s Corvette, which had won it every year from 1957 to 1964. The GT350R did so handily—and it added the ’66 and ’67 championships too, just for good measure. That a sedan (which the Mustang technically was) bested “America’s Sports Car” must have been especially galling to Chevy, but Shelby knew what he was doing. 289-powered Cobras had won the A Production class in 1963–64. He used that same “Cobrafied” 289 engine in the GT350, but the real secret was the suspension tuning and a strict weight-loss regimen that had R models tipping the scales at just 2,550 pounds—roughly 200 less than a standard GT350 and a whopping 500 less than a stock ’65 Mustang fastback.