Ah, Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction, where historic American muscle comes to be revived and sold for too much money. Invariably, manufacturers get into the act, selling the first examples of cars they hope will be known as future classics. This year, Shelby American is showing up to the party with its reconstituted Terlingua Racing Team Mustang.
You might remember Shelby’s last stab at a Terlingua-themed car, featuring a boosted V-6 making up to 375 horsepower. But that was a decade ago, and stodgy old Cadillac is pushing 464 horses out of a V-6 now. Predictably, Shelby got radical, built on its Super Snake package, and is offering the Terlingua model with a wholly sensible, Hellcat-stomping “750-plus” horsepower from a supercharged version of the Mustang GT’s Coyote 5.0.
For those not hip to the whole Terlingua thing: If you want a real sense of the place, drive out to Alpine, Texas. It’s the home of Sul Ross State University, friendly folks, and whole houses that have inventively grown out of trailers. Then take State Route 118 south until you’re nearly in Mexico. There’s not a whole lot to Terlingua. It’s a gift shop and a graveyard set up against the mountainous terrain of the Big Bend. But it’s near here that Carroll Shelby owned a ranch, and it’s here that he helped establish a renowned chili cook-off in 1967. Stop into the gift shop and buy a “Ski Terlingua” coffee mug, featuring a skeleton bombing down a mountain. State Route 118, by the way, is a great road in a fast car. Just don’t go blowing through the Border Patrol checkpoint.
In the mid-1960s, Shelby, Bill Neale, and a few other miscreants banded together and founded the Terlingua Racing Team. In 1967, Jerry Titus, known as “Mr. Trans-Am,” won the SCCA’s prestigious ponycar series behind the wheel of a Terlingua-liveried Mustang.
And now you, the aged guy with the cash for a new GT, plus 66 large to hand over to Shelby American, can pootle around the streets in a car making significantly more power than Titus’ car ever did. To handle the grunt power, the new Terlinguas will get Ford Performance half-shafts. To help them exhale, they’ll get Borla exhausts. Brembo is on board to provide stopping power, and manual-equipped cars get short-throw shifters.
If you’re feeling especially racy, Sparco seats with four-point harnesses are optional, as is a roll cage. That, of course, is optional, on top of Shelby’s $65,999 fee for making the performance upgrades, adding the carbon body bits, and installing a plaque bearing the signatures of Shelby, Titus, and Neale. Shelby American’s only building 75 of the cars—50 for the U.S. market and 25 for the rest of the world—so if you’re a well-heeled fan of that period of Shelby history, we’d suggest getting your order in. For those with fewer ducats to dispose of, might we interest you in an Omni GLHS?
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