Hello again digital friends, and welcome to 2020. “If I’d known I would live this long I’d taken better care of myself.” comes to mind. Those of us who’ve known each other a long time can nod in solemn agreement to that. “I spent the money on fast cars & fast women, and the rest I just wasted” kinda fits too, doesn’t it ?
The big news this month is ROAD & TRACK named the O.V.C. Mustang we built in Peter Brock’s shop one of the 10 favorite cars they’ve driven this DECADE ! How cool is that ?
They said:
Given that we’re the staff of Road & Track, you might expect that we’re only interested in the unattainable supercars that dot magazine covers at airports across the world. But the best cars do more for us than the latest supercars; they accompany us on adventures, mark important moments in our lives, or open up entirely new frames of reference by which all future cars will be judged.
That’s not to say there aren’t insane, unattainable cars on this list. It just means that they’re accompanied by cars that defined points in our lives, pins on the map of where the past 10 years took us. From priceless race cars to barely running beaters, these are the cars that’ll linger in our minds long into the next decade.
This job revolves around driving new cars, but it’s the classic stuff that always sticks with me long after I’ve handed back the keys. Take this ’65 Mustang fastback. It’s not merely a clone of a Shelby GT350R. It’s the car that Shelby and company could have built, if a few things had gone differently—with an independent rear suspension that Shelby’s crew experimented on, but ultimately shelved before they could ever race or build it.
This Mustang, built by “The Original Venice Crew,” guys who worked at Shelby American back in 1965, is one of just 36 that will be built with the newly-rediscovered independent rear suspension. It does everything you don’t want in a modern car. It’s shatteringly loud, straight exhaust clamoring in an interior made mostly of naked sheet metal. It’s rough to drive, unhappy below 2500 RPM. It’s demanding, with about four inches of slack in the manual steering, and brakes that yearn to lock up at the least forgiving moment. It smells like raw gasoline, hot metal, and gear oil.
In other words, it’s perfect. Old cars teach you things that new cars assume you never wanted to learn. My time in the OVC Mustang was short, but it revealed more about the inner workings of performance cars than a half-decade of reviewing modern machinery ever did. In other words, it was perfect.
Left to right: Ted, Peter, Clyde, Jim, and Duane