It’s a wrap, more or less, for one of this fall’s biggest car auctions in America. Over the weekend, Barrett-Jackson closed the doors to its event in Houston, Texas, one that saw the top twelve best-selling cars going for a total of over $7.6 million.
The stars of the sale were vehicles made by Ford, with five of these top twelve cars being GTs from various model years, which also accounted for almost half of the sum mentioned above. Three Mustangs and an F-100 take the total of valuable Blue Oval machines to nine, with the only intruders in this select list being two Chevrolet Corvettes and the Porsche 928 driven by Tom Cruise in the 1983 movie Risky Business.
Of interest to us here is one of the Mustangs, namely a 1966 Shelby GT350 that was once driven, quite extensively during vintage competitions, by one of the industry’s greats, Sir Stirling Moss.
The Shelby in question is the 89th of the 252 GT350s that were made that year, an R-Spec upgrade that rocks a 4.6-liter V8 engine paired to a 4-speed manual transmission.
Moss drove the car on nine different tracks in Europe between 1991 and 1997, and won the Targa Tasmania in Australia with it. The driver is said to have considered this particular vehicle his favorite for historic racing.
The car went under the hammer “exceptionally well-documented and ready to go.” It came with Moss’ autograph inside the trunk, photos from his personal archive, a film with Moss and his wife, Susie, talking about the model’s history, and a letter from “Shelby engineer Phil Remington confirms the car’s R-code details.”
That was enough to convince someone to pay $495,000 for it, landing the car the fourth position in the top of top-selling machines in Houston. It’s unclear who bought it, so we have no idea if we’ll see it racing or back on the auction block sometime soon.