A Frenchman Rebuilt the Same 1968 Mustang From Bullitt With His Son — Then Drove It to His Own Wedding

A father and son in Strasbourg spent two years restoring a 1968 Mustang GT Fastback built to the same spec as Bullitt’s most famous chase car. Days after finishing it, the groom drove it to his own wedding. Here’s the story behind the build — and why the ’68 GT Fastback remains one of the rarest, most requested Mustang body styles ever made.

Jacques Jenn grew up in France dreaming about an American car that almost nobody around him actually owned. Not a bloated luxury barge, and not some forgettable economy compact — a Mustang, and specifically the low-roofed, long-hooded 1968 GT Fastback that Steve McQueen threw through the hills of San Francisco in Bullitt. Actually finding one meant importing a 58-year-old American icon into a country that never officially sold it new, then spending two years tearing it apart in a home garage with his own son. What came out the other side turned a restoration project into something closer to a family vow: weeks after the final bolt went back in, Jacques drove the finished Mustang to marry the woman who had backed the build from day one.

The Car Steve McQueen Made Famous

The reason a 1968 Mustang GT Fastback carries instant recognition — in France or anywhere else — traces back to a single film. Bullitt, released in 1968, built its most famous sequence around a Highland Green Mustang GT fastback driven by Steve McQueen through the streets of San Francisco, a roughly ten-minute chase still cited as one of the most influential in movie history. Jacques’ car shares that same model year, the same fastback roofline, and the same big-block-friendly platform that made the Bullitt car possible. It isn’t a replica of the actual movie car, and nothing about the story claims that — it’s simply built to the same era and spirit, which is exactly what made it instantly recognizable the moment Petrolicious pointed a camera at it.

Ford leaned into that legacy for decades afterward rather than letting it fade. The company has released three separate Mustang Bullitt special editions built specifically to honor the film — roughly 12,000 in 2001, about 8,000 across 2008 and 2009, and roughly 3,500 for the 50th-anniversary 2019 model — each one dressed in the same dark green paint and stripped-down badging as the original. That an entire lineage of modern Mustangs still trades on a single 1968 movie car says something about how deeply that specific shape is wired into the model’s identity, more than 55 years later.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

A Restoration That Doubled as Father-Son Time

The story comes from Petrolicious, the car-culture outlet known for treating restorations less like inventory listings and more like biography. Their film follows Jacques Jenn, a father living in Strasbourg, who grew up captivated by 1960s American muscle despite having almost no access to it growing up in France. Rather than settle for a modern import or a tamer alternative, he set his sights on the exact car body that made the Mustang a global icon: the fastback silhouette that had become the model’s signature shape by the late 1960s.

A friend eventually tracked down a restoration candidate, and Jacques and his son spent roughly two years bringing it back — the kind of slow, hands-on rebuild that doubles as time together rather than just labor. Restoring a car that was never sold new in France meant sourcing parts, know-how, and reference material from an ocean away, with no local dealer network or parts counter to lean on. The finished car, now a lightly modified but faithfully correct GT Fastback, became the backdrop for one more milestone: days after the restoration wrapped, Jacques drove it to his own wedding, with the woman who’d supported the project throughout now riding alongside him as his wife.

How the Fastback Became the Mustang’s Signature Shape

The fastback body style wasn’t part of the Mustang’s original spring 1964 launch — it arrived a few months later as the “2+2,” and its early version kept a stubby, almost hunchbacked trunk line that never fully committed to the fastback look. Everything changed with the 1967 redesign, when Ford stretched the body roughly 2.7 inches, widened it by about 2.5 inches, and reworked the front end specifically to make room for big-block V8s that wouldn’t fit under the original 1965 sheet metal. The fastback roofline was redrawn to sweep uninterrupted all the way to the rear of the car, creating the smooth, ducktail profile that carried into 1968 largely unchanged and became the silhouette most people picture when they hear the word “Mustang” today — the same one Bullitt would make immortal that same year.

How Rare a 1968 GT Fastback Really Was

Ford built 317,404 Mustangs across all body styles for the 1968 model year, and the fastback — the shape most associated with Bullitt and with the Mustang’s performance image — accounted for only 42,581 of them, about 13 percent of total production. Narrow that further to cars ordered with the GT Equipment Group, which added the badging, dual exhaust, and handling package buyers wanted alongside the big-block engines, and the number drops to just 12,087 for the entire model year. The 390-cubic-inch S-code V8, rated at 325 horsepower, sat at the top of the non-Shelby engine lineup and is the specific combination most associated with the Bullitt car. A fastback built to that spec was never common when new, and more than five decades of rust, resale, and neglect have thinned the surviving population considerably — which is part of why finding a real restoration candidate, in France or anywhere else, takes real effort.

Documentation matters as much as rarity for cars like this. Ford production-record services can confirm a given VIN’s original engine, color, and options directly from the factory build sheet, which is how serious collectors separate a genuine S-code GT from a car that’s simply been dressed to look like one. That distinction is part of why the GT Fastback commands so much attention at shows and auctions today — the badge alone was never a guarantee of what sat under the hood.

Why This Restoration Still Resonates With Mustang Fans

What separates Jacques’ build from a typical resto-mod isn’t the parts list — it’s the context. Owning a piece of American muscle car culture in Europe means importing the car, importing the knowledge to fix it, and often importing the parts too, all for a machine that was never sold new in the country. Comments on the original video repeatedly point to the same thing: the sight of a Highland Green fastback rumbling down a rural French road doesn’t look out of place so much as it looks like the car finally found the kind of open road McQueen made it famous for.

The father-son angle only deepens it. A two-year restoration is as much about transferred knowledge as it is about sheet metal and torque specs, and finishing a project like that with a wedding — the exact kind of life milestone a muscle car is supposed to be part of, not separate from it — is the sort of story that explains why the 1968 GT Fastback still gets discussed with more reverence than nearly any other Mustang body style, more than half a century after Ford stopped building it. It also explains why Ford keeps returning to this exact car, generation after generation, whenever it wants to remind buyers what the Mustang name is supposed to mean.

That reverence also shows up in how differently these cars get discussed compared to more common muscle car siblings. A base-model 1968 hardtop Mustang is an easy find at almost any classic car show; a documented, S-code GT Fastback in the right color draws a crowd and a very different kind of conversation. Jacques’ build sits at the intersection of both worlds — a car chasing an American legend, built by hand in a country that never got to buy one new, finished just in time to carry its owner into a new chapter of his own life.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.