There is a version of the 1965 Shelby GT350 competition car that never made it out of Venice, California. The hood scoop that got shot down. The redesigned front fascia. The brake ducts fed off the side of the body. The independent rear suspension that Ford costed out and walked away from. All of it existed as sketches, clay, hacksawed metal and black-and-white photographs, and then the shop moved to the airport, budgets arrived, and that was the end of it.
Original Venice Crew is building that car now. Only 36 of them, each one starting life as a real 1965 Mustang fastback, each one assembled by people who were in the Venice shop when the first one was built.
That last part is the whole proposition. As Jim Marietta puts it, "Ted Sutton and I and Peter Bryant built the first car, and now Ted and I built the current car. There's no other manufacturer in the world that I'm aware of that's doing that."
(Since this interview, we are sad to announce that Ted Sutton has passed. We at duPont REGISTRY send our condolences to his family, friends and those at OVC.)
Jim Marrieta (left) and Ted Sutton (right) - Photo by Evan Kline
Marietta's way into Shelby American was not conventional. He had quit high school, was working a shop job during the day and a service station at night, and spent the money on getting himself to races in 1964. He was 17.
Al Dowd, the competition administrator, finally asked him what he was doing there all the time. Marietta told him he wanted to work for them. What he got was an arrangement: sign in on the roster instead of jumping the fence, and the team would find him a room and feed him.
"He sticks out his hand. He says, 'Deal?' And I shake his hand, and I said, 'Deal.' Oh, he says, 'By the way, we're not going to pay you.'"
He took it. "My pay was just being part of the crew and the experience and working with these guys." At the end of the season came the offer to come on full time, followed by a letter in December of 1964 telling him to show up on January 2, 1965, with his tools. His primary assignment was the GT350.
The three hands-on guys on that car were Ted Sutton as crew chief, Peter Bryant, and Marietta as the young one. Bryant is worth knowing about. He was a British-trained welder good enough that when Marietta asked where he had learned, the answer became a line Marietta has never forgotten: "My welding instructor taught me how I could weld bananas to glass. I can weld anything."
GALLERY-EMBED
Gallery Photos by Evan Kline
The Venice shop was small, loud, and permanently full. Cobras, a Sunbeam Tiger, coupes, a dyno, a lathe and a mill, and the two Mustangs parked in the entryway by the overhead door.
"We had no lifts in the shop. Everything we did was on jack stands."
Instructions were thin to nonexistent. The car needed a larger radiator, which meant cutting the core support down by an inch and a half on each side. Marietta did it with a hacksaw, which in a building that size sounded like a drum. Flaring the driver's side fender meant a muffler chisel, and another round of noise complaints from everyone trying to work around him.
The best illustration of how the place ran came from Dick Lins, the primary engineer for the original GT350 competition model, who handed him two bare aluminum window frames for the Mustang. Marietta asked what he thought.
"He looked at me with a smile and said, 'Yeah, you worked in shops, so I guess you'll be able to figure that out.' There were no blueprints, and there were no attachment pieces. It was two empty aluminum frames. Put it in, make it work."
Only two mechanics went to its first race so as not to make a scene with a giant team taking on locals. Ken Miles took it to Green Valley in Texas, found a bump on the front straight, and got all four wheels clear of the ground with daylight underneath. That is how the car became known as the Flying Mustang.
The engineering story at the center of these cars is the independent rear suspension. It was designed by Klaus Arning, the Ford engineer who also did the IRS for the 427 Cobra and originated what everyone now calls the Shelby drop. The geometry was complicated enough that, as the story was passed down, the only machine at Ford with the capacity to run the calculations was the payroll computer, so the work got done in the middle of the night on punch cards.
There were two brand-new Mustangs handed over by Ford that were destined to be equipped with the independent rear suspension, and the team was given a budget of $50,000 for each. The crew ended up spending the budget on one car, which was neither of the two the budget was meant for, but instead their GT350 competition model. So the whole $100,000 went into one Mustang.
It never reached production, and the reason was arithmetic. Marietta was told by Ford's Jim Owens that the IRS would add roughly $14.10 to the cost of building a Mustang. Ford was already selling every car it could make.
There was a second problem, and OVC only solved it 60 years later. Arning's geometry carried a little toe steer, which helps a road car turn and unsettles a racing driver.
"When you go around a corner with toe steer, the car kind of helps you turn left or right. And race car drivers apparently don't need the help." At the time, nobody knew that was the cause. "Instead of adjusting the rear end, we used to be up in Willow Springs during the 2:30 in the afternoon dust storms changing spring rates in the front of the car."
Working from a few original units and their own testing with John Morton and Rick Titus driving, OVC and Maeco Motorsport got the toe steer out. "Once we got it out, John went, 'Okay, we got it. I feel comfortable now.'"
They invited Arning's son Ralph to Willow Springs to ride in it. "Ralph was overjoyed that this was his father's independent rear suspension that we had developed, that we had tweaked to make it work just the way we're sure Klaus would have wanted it."
The other unfinished business is on the outside of the car. The reverse hood scoop was tested the old way with wool tufts taped to the bodywork. The front fascia Peter Brock redesigned so the brake cooling ducts run straight down the outside of the frame rail and dump onto the discs, providing more efficient aerodynamics, instead of the original 3-inch hole and two 90-degree bends that made the whole exercise pointless. Rear brake ducts fed from a small scoop in the body indent. Headlight covers to cut front-end drag, still in development, and traceable to Brock's clay mockup from 60 years ago. And, most importantly, it was Brock's idea to add in the iconic blue stripes running down the center of the car.
"Sixty years later, we're still doing development work that is meaningful. We're not just putting flames on the fender."
What separates this from a tribute build is that OVC can show its work. Marietta has the period photographs: the reverse hood scoop, the IRS installed in a brown test Mustang, an early side scoop that went nowhere, several attempts at the front fascia, Freedman's pictures.
"None of this is made up. I have pictures of all these things."
He also credits the people who are usually left out. Gale Halderman designed the Mustang, and Marietta is direct about what the crew did with it: "We took Gale Halderman's design and tweaked it and added things to make the car he designed the car it is today."
Authenticity extends to the fabrication. The plenums and the fuel tank splash guards on OVC cars are hand-welded in .030 aluminum with an oxyacetylene torch, done by Jere Kirkpatrick, another Shelby American alumnus, exactly the way it was done in the 1960s. "It's a lost art," Marietta says, and he includes himself in that. He could never do it either.
In 2016, OVC took its prototype to the Shelby Ford Nationals in Tulsa. Vince LaViolette drove after Rick Titus got tied up, and turned down the offer of new sticker tires on Sunday morning. He won the race ahead of a field of around 20 cars.
The pattern was not lost on anyone. LaViolette pointed it out afterward: qualified third on Saturday, won on Sunday, the same way Ken Miles did it at Green Valley.
OVC Competition Model Mustangs start with a genuine 1965 fastback. These are titled cars that get reconditioned and built up, not bodies off a shelf. The standard car starts at $329,000, and the K-Code fastback that the original competition car was based on is $359,000.
Every one gets a 331 cubic inch aluminum V8 making 465 horsepower, a Borg Warner T-10 style four-speed, Kelsey Hayes brakes, Torque Thrust wheels, aluminum window frames with Plexiglas, a five-point harness, and the Wimbledon White and blue livery. The independent rear suspension comes standard, but the 364 cubic inch Shelby aluminum engine is an option for anyone who wants the version Ford declined to build. A traditional 9-inch solid axle is there for the purists.
Thirty-six cars, and then the run is finished.
Marietta's case for them is not really about the spec sheet. "We have the pedigree and the history with the original guys." And on what the original car means to everything Ford has built since: "The Mustang that Peter and Ted and I built is the cornerstone for every Mustang that comes off the line today."
To order or to ask questions, OVC can be reached directly at ovcmustangs.com or by calling (714) 305-8578.
