Ford Mustang 1966

In 1966, Ford and Carroll Shelby handed roughly a thousand genuine Shelby GT350s to Hertz and let anyone with a license and a credit card rent one by the weekend. The Rent-A-Racer program moved GT350 production from a few hundred cars to 2,378, generated decades of lore about roll bars and race numbers, and produced one of the most collectible Mustang variants ever built. Here is how it actually happened.

Somewhere in a Hertz lot in 1966, a business traveler in a rumpled suit handed over a driver’s license, took a set of keys, and drove away in a car that had no business sitting in a rental fleet. Black paint, gold stripes, and a solid-lifter V8 that idled like it resented being asked. Most renters never worked out what they had. A few figured it out in the first mile, and those are the ones every story since has been about, from the roll bars that appeared over a weekend to the race numbers still faintly visible on the doors at return. How a factory-blessed competition Mustang ended up available by the day is stranger than the legend it produced.

The Slow Year That Made It Necessary

The 1965 GT350 was a competition success and a commercial disappointment. Shelby American built a stripped, loud, uncompromising car with no rear seat and a locked rear axle that fought the driver at parking speeds, and buyers responded accordingly. Only a few hundred left dealer lots. Ford had a performance halo it could not sell in volume, and Shelby had a shop geared up for more cars than the market wanted. The obvious fix was to soften the car for 1966, which happened, but softening alone would not put GT350s in front of enough people. The less obvious fix was to find a customer who bought cars a thousand at a time.

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One Thousand Cars and a Rental Counter

That customer turned out to be Hertz, which had operated a Sports Car Club since the 1950s renting interesting machinery to members. The 1966 arrangement put roughly a thousand GT350H models into Hertz fleets across the country, available to club members at daily and weekly rates. For Ford it was a marketing exercise disguised as a fleet sale, putting the Shelby badge in front of thousands of drivers who would never have walked into a performance dealership. For Hertz it was a differentiator no competitor could match. For Shelby American it was, more practically, the largest single order the company had ever received.

What Was Actually Bolted Under the Hood

The GT350H was not a decontented rental special. It carried the same 289 cubic inch K-code V8 as the retail car, which Shelby American upgraded with a high-rise aluminum intake manifold, a larger Holley four-barrel carburetor, and tubular exhaust headers to lift output from the factory 271 horsepower to roughly 306 horsepower alongside 329 lb-ft of torque. Suspension and steering revisions carried over as well. A renter who paid the weekend rate genuinely received the same mechanical package a retail Shelby buyer received, which is precisely why the program generated the stories it did rather than quietly passing into obscurity.

The Automatic Transmission Nobody Mentions

The detail that surprises people is how many of these cars were automatics. Hertz needed vehicles that any club member could drive competently, and Shelby’s four-speed manual paired with the car’s aggressive clutch was not a rental-counter proposition. The large majority of GT350H cars therefore left with the three-speed automatic, which required its own carburetor and calibration work to run properly with the modified engine. Manual-transmission Hertz cars exist and are correspondingly desirable today, but anyone picturing a fleet of thousand-strong four-speed race cars is picturing something that never existed. The automatics are the authentic story.

Black and Gold, Mostly

The image everyone carries is black paint with gold LeMans stripes and gold rocker striping, and for the early cars that is accurate. Later in the run Hertz took delivery of GT350H models in other colors, including white, red, blue, and green, all still wearing gold stripes. Those non-black cars are considerably scarcer and are frequently mistaken for repaints by people who only know the standard livery. The gold-on-black combination endured in memory because it appeared in the advertising and because it looked unlike anything else parked at an airport in 1966, which was the entire point of the exercise.

The Production Numbers the Program Moved

The commercial result was unambiguous. GT350 output climbed from a few hundred units in 1965 to 2,378 cars for 1966, with the Hertz order accounting for a substantial share of that jump. That is more than a threefold increase driven largely by a single fleet contract and the publicity that followed it. Whatever else the Rent-A-Racer program was, it was the thing that turned the GT350 from a low-volume homologation exercise into a real production car with real dealer presence. The retail buyers who came afterward arrived in part because a rental fleet had made the badge visible.

The Weekend Racing Hertz Never Authorized

Then there is the folklore. Cars returned with roll bars fitted, with race numbers taped or painted on the doors, with brake pads worn through in a weekend, and in the most repeated version of the story, with engines swapped out for standard Mustang units. Shelby historians have spent decades separating the documented incidents from the embellishments, and the honest answer is that some of it happened and much of it grew in the telling. What is not in dispute is that Hertz ended the program after the 1966 model year, which suggests the arithmetic of renting competition cars to strangers eventually spoke for itself.

What Shelby Was Really Building That Year

It is worth being precise about what Shelby was building alongside the rental cars, because the two get conflated. The purpose-built competition GT350R was a 1965 program, with a very small run of roughly three dozen cars, and Shelby did not produce an R-model for 1966. The street GT350, rental or retail, shared the engine philosophy and much of the suspension thinking with those racers but was a different animal. That competition lineage is real and it is why GT350s dominated SCCA B-Production in the mid-1960s, but a GT350H is a road car with racing parentage, not a detuned race car.

How the 1966 Car Differed From the 1965

The 1966 GT350 was deliberately more civilized than the 1965. The locked rear axle came out in favor of a conventional limited-slip differential, rear quarter windows replaced the earlier extraction vents, functional brake cooling scoops appeared on the lower body sides, a rear seat became available, and colors beyond Wimbledon White finally reached the order sheet. Purists have argued ever since about whether this diluted the car. Commercially the answer is not close, because the 1966 changes and the Hertz contract together are what made the GT350 viable at all. Without them the model line likely ends in 1965.

Why the Hertz Cars Command a Premium Now

Today the GT350H sits in an unusual position: a Shelby with genuine performance credentials, a documented and finite production run, and a story that non-enthusiasts immediately understand. That combination supports values well above a comparable retail 1966 GT350 in many cases, particularly for cars with Hertz documentation and original drivetrains. The manual-transmission examples and the non-black colors sit higher still. It is a rare instance of a car being worth more because of how ordinary its original customers were, and no manufacturer has been willing to repeat the experiment in the sixty years since.

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