The original was the wildest. I saw it for the first time at Shelby’s old plant on West Imperial Highway—the converted North American Aviation factory that huddled alongside the main runway of the Los Angeles International Airport. It was sitting on the broad concrete apron in the bright coastal sunshine, nearly buried in the blast of intercontinental jet liners straining for lift, and somehow it looked tough enough so that all that deafening sound could have been belching from the twin exhaust pipes that jutted from beneath its rocker panels.
The first Shelby American GT 350 was some kind of a nasty car; loaded to the window sills with performance and a brand of visceral excitement that had been missing in American cars since the original Stutz Bearcat.
In those days all GT 350s were painted white, with a pair of blue stripes the width of stairway runners covering them from stem to stern. The exhaust was loud enough to scramble the driver’s brains and the ride harsh enough to congeal his kidneys in a single afternoon, but it would accelerate, brake and corner with a nimbleness that nothing on these shores besides a Corvette could match. My buddy Steve Smith described that first Shelby GT 350 as “a brand new, clapped-out racing car,” and he was right. It rattled and it growled and it wouldn’t idle below 1000rpm and steering the thing was like an expensive course in isometrics. When you cut around a tight corner at slow speeds the ratchet-type, limited-slip differential would lock up the inside rear wheel and the tire would yelp and screech like a wounded puppy. And once it was straightened out, the differential would unlock with a great metallic clank that sounded as if the entire rear end of the car had fallen onto the pavement. It was fitted with enormous traction arms that probed into the space where the rear seat was supposed to be (which had been removed anyway in favor of better torque control and additional space for a fat spare tire).
The first Shelby GT 350 carried probably the hairiest engine ever loaded into a street automobile from Ford. It was a modified version of the tough little solid lifter, 289 cu. in., 271-hp “High Performance” engine FoMoCo marketed in those days fitted with a high-riser intake manifold, tubular headers, a bigger sump, and a special 4-barrel carburetor. Right out the door, with its fiberglass hood and aluminum 4-speed transmission, the GT 350 weighed just over 3000 pounds, developed 306 horsepower at 6000 rpm and would crank up to 60 mph in 6.5 seconds and run the quarter-mile in 14.9 seconds at 95 mph. Curiously, that is about equal to today’s out-of-the-box Camaro Z/28 (more on that later).
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