1965 Shelby GT350

It wasn’t the first. There were muscle-cars long before the Shelby GT350 put tire to tarmac. The Pontiac GTO beat it to market by a year, and the vicious 409-powered Chevy Bel Air arrived in 1961. Go back further, and you’ll see the Corvette had a fuel-injected V8 in 1957.

Likewise, Carroll’s modified Mustang never the lasting high-water mark for performance. There were bigger-engined and faster-accelerating Chevys, Pontiacs, Chryslers, AMCs, other Fords, and even Buicks and Oldmobiles built during the GT350’s production lifetime of 1965-1970.