This car, Lot 870, sold for $179,200, including buyer’s premium, at Broad Arrow Auctions’ Gloversville, NY, sale on October 14, 2022.
Like any veteran rock star, Ford loves to replay its top hits. Especially when it comes to the Mustang. It helps that the fans go wild every time those familiar notes hit the air. Ford is hardly alone in this habit. Chevy does the same thing with its Corvette and Camaro, and Dodge with its Charger and Challenger. That’s why we’ve been treated to a seemingly endless succession of Bullitts, Cobras, California Specials, GT350s and, of course, the periodic revival of the Hertz “rent-a-racer.”
The legend
The genesis of the Hertz cars took place in 1966, when Carroll Shelby struck a deal with the Hertz car rental company for it to buy about 1,000 GT350 coupes. Hertz had the cars painted in a striking black-and-gold variation of the standard livery and stuck an H on the end of the name. The story goes that you could rent one for the weekend and take it racing, and thereby hangs a whole mythology of tall tales. In fact, only 85 of those cars were equipped with the 4-speed manual transmission you would have wanted for track duty.
Forty years later in 2006, Ford rebooted the Hertz livery for a run of 500 cars, now called the Shelby GT-H. Once again, most were made available for rental through Hertz, but this time only four cars were made with a manual gearbox and a few other special touches. These cars were delivered to Hertz executives as part of the deal. Ford continued the production run in 2007 with 500 convertibles in the same livery, and just 17 of those were built with a manual transmission.
After that, the die was cast. In 2016 it was time to produce some more collectibles, so the GT-H came back again. Who could blame Ford for that? The black-over-gold combination looks absolutely wicked, and the Mustang has only gotten faster and more sophisticated over the years. The product mix was much the same as before, with a run of 140 automatic cars and 16 special “Executive Cars” equipped with the 6-speed manual. All the GT-H cars came with the Coyote V8 engine, plus the Mustang’s optional Racing Handling Pack and a cat-back exhaust, but the Executive Cars also got a supercharger from Ford tuner Roush that boosted output to 670 horses.
Pay to play
Of all the badass Mustangs in the world, the 2016 Shelby GT-H executive car may well be the baddest. With just 16 examples made, they don’t come up for sale often. On those rare occasions when they do, Mustang aficionados had best get out their checkbooks and a fresh pen.
“The 2016 Ford Shelby GT-H Coupe ‘Executive Car’ has all the elements of ultimate collectibility,” says Donnie Gould, Senior Car Specialist at Broad Arrow Group, which handled this sale. “Anyone who collects Hertz rent-a-racers gravitates toward manual-transmission cars, which bring two to three times what an automatic example would, just as we saw with this car.”
Indeed, this 3,132-mile example earned far more than the high-water mark in the SCM Platinum Auction Database for a 2016 GT-H automatic, a 100-mile car that sold for $99,000 in 2017. Mostly, these cars trade around $40,000, with the older 2006–07 models selling for about the same price or a bit lower. The original 1966 models command much more money, of course.
A stampede of unicorns
The savvy Hertz Mustang buyer could have bought the whole herd of four Hertz unicorns at the Broad Arrow sale. There was one each of the 1966, 2006, 2007 and 2016 models, and all of them with manual transmissions. The combined price for the quartet was $684,840 — $313,000 of that (roughly half) being paid for the 1966 car. The 2006 went for $103,040 and the 2007 convertible for $89,600.
With cars this rare, it’s hard to argue with any sale prices. As the saying goes, they ain’t making any more — at least not in those model years. Quite possibly, a new manual-equipped Shelby will never even be built. So it’s safe to say that all these Mustangs were well bought and will be good investments for the foreseeable future.
However, it’s also a near-certainty that we’ll see another new Shelby GT-H of some kind every 10 years on the sixes, though the next one may be the last with a gasoline engine before it all goes electric. We’ll find out in about three years. ♦
(Introductory description courtesy of Broad Arrow Auctions.)
