The Brilliant Marketing and Design Behind the 1965 Shelby GT350

I had dinner with Carroll Shelby in 1997. Among the dozens of things I remember him telling me, the most poignant was when he talked about making great chili. “The secret,” he said, leaning in as though he was about to share the nuclear launch codes, “Don’t mix in too many ingredients. It gets all crowded in there. Make the right ones work.”

Depending how you count them, only 40 parts separate a 1965 GT 350 from a HiPo Mustang fastback. An average vintage car contains as many as 20,000 parts. So when you consider that Carroll Shelby transformed the Mustang with well under one percent of the total parts used to make the car, it is even more phenomenal. The Shelby team truly made the right parts work. But it wasn’t just the parts, nor was it the sum total of the collected impact of those parts. It was the aura, the brand—the Shelby marketing juggernaut—that elevated those 40 parts to legendary status. Today, even if you install identical Shelby parts on a Mustang, it still falls short of “The Real Deal.”