A Winning Combination

THE LEGACY OF FUN FORD WEEKEND TROPHY STOCK CHAMPION BRUCE WINN’S 1993 MUSTANG COBRA LIVES ON

- Steve Baur

“It was supposed to be my car,” says Patty Winn, Bruce Winn’s widow and previous caretaker of the well-preserved 1993 Mustang Cobra you see here. That’s no doubt a common claim among car enthusiasts. As the story goes, Patty’s husband Bruce did eventually find himself taking ownership of the Vibrant Red machine.

Born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce was a military veteran with over 10 years of service under his belt. He met Patty when he was home between his two tours in Vietnam. His continued service after the war took them to El Paso and, later, Anchorage.

“He raced a Gremlin at a dragstrip in Anchorage,” Patty tells us. “The trans broke and my father had to ship him a T-10 four-speed from back home.”

The couple returned to Indiana in 1974, and both Bruce and Patty went to work and focused on raising their son, Bruce.

Much later, in 1993, the couple went car shopping, and found themselves at Allen County Motors in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Of the day that they brought home the first-year SVT Cobra, she recalls, “I wanted a Mustang 5.0 convertible, so we went to the showroom to look at one, and [the Cobra] was in the showroom. We both looked at each other and said that was the one we had to have.

“I drove it a little here and there—it was a real adrenaline rush.”

With the Cobra being the pinnacle of Ford ponycar performance at the time and Bruce having an interest in drag ​racing, it’s not surprising that the car would find itself at the dragstrip.

“We bought it as a lease and I made him wait until we paid it off because no one was going to insure it if we raced it,” Patty explains.