The First Trans-Am Champion 1966 Shelby Mustang That Ken Miles Never Drove Is for Sale

This automobile is a monument of history for Ford: purposed to be raced by Ken Miles – the driver behind the GT40 LeMans win of 1966 – the car never met its designated pilot. Miles would perish in August without ever putting the Mustang on the track.

In 1966, Ford built 16 Mustangs to participate in the Trans-Am series of SCCA races – the newly-developed competition for modified stock cars (sedans and coupes). Ford turned to Shelby once more to produce a winning vehicle.

Backed by its racing heritage, passion, and motoring skills, Shelby delivered the 1966 Group 2 Mustang in 16 examples. The car we are talking about here is car no. 12. In 1966, it had racing number 41A on it – as it does today, after a nut-and-bolt restoration. The number is not random: 4 is the divisional number of the Midwest amateur motor racing series. And the 1 is the driver’s position in the respective division.

The pilot was John McComb – a man who avidly wanted to buy one of those 16 Mustangs from Shelby after driving one in the Saint Louis Trans-Am race. Since all the Trans-Am-ready Shelby-built Mustangs were accounted for, McComb couldn’t get his dream Ford.

But destiny made it such that John McComb would make history for Ford in a 1966 Mustang. After Miles’ demise, McComb got the chance to purchase the Brit’s car, and he bought it on the spot. You can check the first video to hear John McComb recalling the moment in an interview from a couple of months ago.

The rest went down in history – some three weeks after getting the car, McComb and his Mustang won a crucial first place in Texas in the Green Valley 6 Hours Pan-American Endurance Race. Not only did it prevail, but it also put six laps between his trusted Mustang and the runner-up Plymouth Barracuda.

It proved a pivotal point in the championship, putting Ford and Chrysler neck-and-neck in the manufacturers’ overall standings. (Remember that McComb had minimal experience with his no 41 Mustang.) One week later, another Mustang won the season’s last race and made Ford the first Trans-Am champion.

Over the next six years, this Shelby Mustang ran in 30 more races with several drivers, finishing on the podium on 22 occasions. Interestingly, in the first half of 1967, McComb kept racing this Mustang in the A/Sedan amateur division. When the 1967 model became available in early June, the pilot sold his beloved ’66 Shelby-prepped car to a fellow racer.

This man would race it for the rest of the season, finishing in second place. The only one to beat him was none other than John McComb himself in the 1967 Mustang. One 1966 Mustang put two different drivers in the top two spots of the 1967 championship – this is a performance that no other car can claim. But back in the day, race cars were simply that – fast machines intended for the track.

After ending its sporting career in 1973, this race pony changed several hands and fell to anonymity for over a decade. But luck favored the Trans-Am champion: in 1985, a new owner decided to find the automobile’s past. After identifying it as the glory that it was, a restoration to factory specs soon followed.

So, the car now has period-correct mechanical parts, decals, livery, and solid documentation (you can check some of them on the current owner’s website). Restored to its prime-day glory, the car runs like a proper Shelby thoroughbred (listen to it in the second video, when John McComb himself revs up the engine once more, 56 years after first getting his hands on it).

An identical mechanical twin to the Shelby 350 R, this 1966 Mustang has a 289 CID (4.2-liter) V8. In Ford-stock form, it produced 271 hp, but after Shelby worked its motoring magic on the mill, the dyno score topped 393. The engine features Hi-Po heads, an aluminum high-rise intake, and a Holley 715-cfm carburetor.

To put up with that much power, a close ratio Borg-Warner four-speed manual sends the power to a 9” Detroit Locker rear end. The car will go under the hammer in as close to its original form as possible, with the all-black interior, race seat belts, the six Shelby gauges, and bare-metal roof.

Although rebuilt from the ground up, the famous Mustang has some distinct particularities that set it apart from how it left the Shelby workshops. It now features hand signatures from Caroll Shelby himself on the glove box and John McComb’s autograph inside the driver door and hood.

Contemplating this car in 1995, Caroll Shelby had this to say about the 1966 piece of magnificence: “1966 was the last year I was really interested in racing. (…) After ’66, we were concentrating on volume. Unfortunately, the racing program didn’t have much priority after this.”