The Shelby American (Winter 2021)

was made into a street car by the fac- tory, given a street car serial number – 5S003 – and subsequently sold. Based on what we know now this was not only illogical but was patently false. However, a Shelby American memo dated 1/29/65 from Bruce Junor, who worked as Shelby American’s office manager, mistakenly listed SFM5001 (the number originally written on 003’s firewall) as a race unit. Armed with this “proof,” it wasn’t very hard for SAAC to convince Don Day that he owned a factory competition car. There were a couple of small hints to the con- trary, based on minor features of Day’s car, but he happily overlooked them amidst the excitement of discovering he actually owned a factory race car. After sharing our “evidence” of the car’s unique history with him, Day began enthusiastically restoring the car as a competition model. He vintage raced it at West Coast tracks like Sears Point, Riverside, Portland,West- wood and the Monterey Historics (six times). He also entered it in the Vir- ginia City Hillclimb several times and in numerous car shows and concours events, attracting some major league attention – including from Hot Rod magazine. They wrote an article on the car noting its history and the fact that as a former factory competition car, “ it may possibly be the most valuable Shelby ever made .” Enter Bill Moir. After seeing the Hot Rod article, he called SAAC HQ and enlightened us as to the true ori- gins of the car. He assumed Day was trying to pull a fast one on us, falsify- ing the car’s history in an attempt to pump up its value. A lengthy discus- sion with us convinced him otherwise. We knew Day well, we explained, and he was only responding to the infor- mation SAAC was feeding him. If any- one was wide of the mark regarding 003’s history it was SAAC – and it was certainly not on purpose. Prompted by Moir’s call, we went back to take another, closer look at the factory documents and paperwork we had. They revealed more questions than they answered. We spoke at length with Chuck Cantwell and then fabricator Jerry Schwarz and learned what they recalled. The bottom line was that the car was never a competi- tion car. Finally, it was time for the dreaded call to Don Day. “ Everyone who owns a GT350 com- petition car, take one step forward. Not so fast, Don. ” That wasn’t the way we broke the news, of course. We layed out every- thing we had learned to that point. There was a lot of silence on Day’s end of the line. There’s no denying that we felt absolutely terrible about pulling the rug out from under Don Day. For- tunately, he didn’t fall on anything hard – like the reality that his car was just another street car. His sudden de- scent was cushioned by the fact that we had clearly established his car was the first GT350 built. How did Day take the bitter pill? “ Well, ” he said, somewhat philosophi- cally, “ I’m not exactly happy about it, but what happened happened and you can’t manipulate history. I’m going to continue vintage racing it and at some point in the future, when it’s ready for restoration, I’ll probably put it back to the way it originally was. Right now I’m having too much fun racing it.” Following the “revelation” we noted that Day was somewhat cool towards SAAC and that was probably to be ex- pected. The price of Shelbys escalated through the 1980s and in 1990 Don Day put 5S003 in an auction in Mon- terey where it sold for $105K, so de- spite having to revise the car’s history, he didn’t do too badly. It was pur- chased by Sunder Van Der Velden of the Netherlands. He kept the car in California and raced it in the Mon- terey Historics from 1990 through 1992. In 1993 it was purchased from an ad in Hemmings by Doug Richmond of Newark, Delaware for $78,500. It was The SHELBY AMERICAN Day in 003 at the Monterey Historics at Laguna Seca. Why in the world would we assume this R-Model was #003? In actual fact, after receiv- ing the first three knockdown Mustangs, their firewalls were numbered 5001, 5002 and 5003. This car was 003, referring to the number given to it by Cantwell. As things turned out, that would not be the car’s serial number. It would be 5R002. Confusing to say the least. Winter 2021 32