This is the only ’67 GT500 notchback coupe ever built by Shelby; a ’68 version also was built. In the late 1960s, the red-painted Ford Mustang notchback coupe stuffed with experimental engine technology disappeared. Its usefulness as a prototype for testing and developing go-fast Mustang parts was over the car was taken out of Shelby’s testing rotation.
Collectors assumed the car had been sent to be destroyed, as many prototypes are. It turns out that the Mustang was sold as a used car, cycling through a few owners until settling onto its rear suspension in a Texas field.
In 2018 Craig Jackson, CEO of the Barrett-Jackson Auction House, was lucky enough to set the discovery in motion. With the assistance of Jason Billups, a car restorer, he uncovered the original Ford VIN code for Little Red (other searchers had long based their efforts on the Shelby-assigned serial number) which led Jackson to its most recent owner via registration records. With the help of Mustang guru Kevin Marti, the experimental Shelby Mustang was positively identified, and Jackson bought it.
Craig Jackson and his team have taken three years to fully restore the Unicorn Mustang. Today, the renewed GT500 sports a lovely shade of candy apple red paint and a black vinyl roof. Little Red was originally powered by a supercharged, big-block V-8, and though there's no official word on the restored car's motor and gear box, we're going to assume whatever is under the bonnet is closely related to the original spec.
Jeff Peek : Craig Jackson (right) and Walter Nelson, who originally worked on Little Red, pose with an original photo of the car from the 1960s.
Automotive history was made in Arizona last week. Or, more accurately, corrected. A pair of Shelby Mustang experimental prototypes, long thought to have been destroyed, were reunited in front of a standing-room-only crowd outside Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale venue.
Jeff Peek : Aaron Shelby, grandson of Carroll Shelby, speaks to the crowd at Thursday’s unveiling of the restored Little Red.
Chairman and CEO Craig Jackson unveiled his fully restored 1968 Shelby EXP-500 “Green Hornet” prototype, he then pulled the cover off the Hornet’s more significant older sibling, the freshly restored 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 EXP prototype known as “Little Red.”
“Both cars were thought to be urban legends, but they’re real,” said Jackson, a long time collector and Shelby aficionado. “We’ve never been able to find a photograph of the two of them together, but they’re together today.”
Among the attendees at Thursday’s unveiling was Aaron Shelby, Carroll Shelby’s grandson, and 79-year-old Walter Nelson, who worked for Shelby American and was responsible for Little Red’s engine components. Nelson also worked on the car’s interior.
After starting up the four cars on stage—the two prototypes and their modern iterations—Jackson posed for photographs with all those involved and encouraged anyone with additional information about the cars to reach out at www.shelbyprototypecoupes.com.