Three famous ‘Lost and Found’ Ford Mustangs | McLarty Daniel Ford

You probably know what it’s like to lose your car keys, but chances are you’ve never lost a car. That said, it does happen from time to time, even when we’re talking about very, very famous automobiles.

There have been plenty of famous Mustangs over the years, and even a few that went missing. Read on for the stories of three “lost and found” Ford Mustangs that have been rediscovered in recent years and returned to their rightful place as priceless examples of the breed.

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1) The ‘hero’ car from ‘Bullitt’
In the history of great “Car Movies,” there are few that come close to the stature and influence of 1968’s “Bullitt.” Starring the late Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt, a San Francisco police detective who runs afoul of the mob, the film includes one of the greatest car chases ever put to celluloid, with McQueen (doing his own stunt driving) pursuing a ’68 Dodge Charger through the streets of San Francisco in a Highland Green ’68 Mustang 390 GT Fastback at speeds topping 110 miles per hour. After the film was completed, the “hero car” used in close ups was repainted and sold to a Warner Brothers employee, who later sold it to an actual police detective in New Jersey. In 1974, an insurance salesman named Robert Kiernan, also of New Jersey, bought the car from a classified ad in the back of Road & Track Magazine for around $6,000. Though McQueen himself reached out to Kiernan about purchasing the car a few years prior to his untimely death, the Mustang remained in the Kiernan family for the next four decades, soon attaining legendary status among Mustang fans as a famous “lost” movie car. Many assumed it and the visually-similar “jump car” used in the movie had been scrapped or crushed. Kiernan and his wife used the Bullitt Mustang as a daily driver until 1981, when it was parked. The family later moved to a farm near Nashville, Tennessee, where the Mustang remained hidden for years, even as Ford released the “Bullitt” tribute edition Ford Mustang in 2001. Sadly, Robert Kiernan passed away in 2014. In 2016, his son, Sean, approached Ford Motor Company and revealed the existence of the car. After Mustang experts confirmed that the car was, in fact, the “hero” car from “Bullitt,” the priceless ‘Stang was reintroduced to the world at a gala event at the 2018 Detroit Motor Show, alongside the all-new 2019 Bullitt Mustang. Since then, the car has been one of 20 significant automobiles fully documented by the Historic Vehicles Association, with records archived in the Library of Congress, and has even been displayed in a glass case on the National Mall in Washington D.C. along with other significant automobiles

2) The ‘Bullitt’ stunt car
Like the “hero” car from “Bullitt,” the externally-identical “jump car” from the film was sold off soon after filming was completed. While the car had its interior stripped and its suspension and body reinforced for stunt work, it was heavily damaged while doing jumps over the hills in San Francisco, including a nose-down hit that folded the front fenders and hood. Because of this significant damage, many Mustang experts assumed the car had been sent to the scrapyard after filming and had long since been crushed. That was the general consensus until 2016, when a Baja, Mexico body-shop owner named Ralph Garcia, Jr. purchased the forlorn shell of a 1968 Mustang fastback from a local backyard, with the goal of turning it into a replica of the “Eleanor” Mustang from the 2000 remake of “Gone in 60 Seconds.” Though the white-spraypainted Mustang didn’t look like much, after typing the Vehicle Identification Number into a online database, however, Garcia soon realised that he had found the four-wheeled equivalent of the Holy Grail: the long-lost “Bullitt” stunt car, potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to people Garcia talked to, the stripped car had been abandoned in Baja for over 30 years. To this day, no one knows exactly how it wound up being saved from the scrapheap and wound up sitting in a backyard south of the border. The good news is, once the car was confirmed by Ford Mustang experts to be the second “Bullitt” Mustang, it went on to be fully restored and has since toured the U.S. in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the film.

3) Carroll Shelby’s ’67 GT500 Prototype ‘Lil Red’
When it comes to big names associated with Ford Performance, they don’t get any bigger than Carroll Shelby, whose original, iconic Shelby Cobras and Mustangs are now legendary machines commanding prices topping a million dollars. Even among Shelby Mustangs, however, they don’t get rarer than Shelby’s GT500 Experimental Prototype, which Shelby himself nicknamed “Lil Red” while using the car as an experimental test bed in cooperation with Ford. The car featured a number of firsts and near-firsts, including being one of only two “notchback” Mustang coupes to ever wear the Shelby logo (the other being Lil Red’s prototype stablemate, nicknamed “Green Hornet”), the first Mustang coupe equipped with a 428 big block, the second Mustang built with a 428 among all body styles, the only Mustang coupe factory-equipped with a 428 big block in the 1967 model year, and several other distinctions. While in Shelby’s possession, the car was used to develop many of the now-iconic styling, engine and suspension upgrades later used on Shelby Mustangs throughout the 1960s, including the distinctive Shelby front hood, grille, emblems, rear spoiler and tail lights. Once the car had outlived its usefulness as a test bed, Lil’ Red was returned to Ford Motor Company around 1969. Many assumed Ford had the car crushed, as is the fate of many concept, prototype and experimental cars. Though Mustang fanatics looked for Lil Red in vain for decades, it wasn’t until the spring of 2018 that a team led by Craig Jackson, CEO of Barrett-Jackson Automobile Auctions, had the idea to run a search for the car not using its unique Shelby American Vehicle Identification Number, but the VIN the car bore when it was originally delivered to Shelby by Ford. Lo and behold, running that VIN delivered a hit in Texas, and on March 3, 2018, Jackson announced that the shell of Lil’ Red had been located on a rural ranch in North Texas, where it had sat in a private junkyard for over two decades. Efforts to figure out just how the car got there are ongoing, though it is known that the car was sold on a used car lot at least once in its mysterious, missing years. Though Lil Red had been stripped of its engine, transmission, interior and front sheetmetal during its nearly 40 years out of the spotlight, the national treasure has since been purchased from its Texas owner and will be meticulously restored with funding by Barrett-Jackson, Pennzoil and Shell. You can follow along with the restoration of Lil Red online at: shelbyprototypecoupes.com

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