Ford Mustang 1966

In 1966, Hertz rental counters quietly handed out one of the most track-capable Mustangs Ford ever built — the Shelby GT350H. Some customers brought them back with roll bars installed after unofficial weekend races. Here’s how a genuine SCCA-dominating race car ended up as a rent-a-car, and why the program remains one of the wildest experiments in muscle car history.

High Performance Shelby Racing!

In 1966, Ford let Hertz rent-a-car customers drive home in a genuine race car — and didn’t tell most of them what they actually had. Wearing black paint with gold stripes, the Shelby GT350H looked like any other performance Mustang on a rental lot. Underneath, it carried the same solid-lifter, high-revving V8 that dominated SCCA road racing that year. Some renters returned their cars a little rougher than they left, roll bars installed, after unofficial track days. How did a factory-backed race car end up as a weekend rental, and what did that reckless experiment do for Shelby‘s reputation?

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The Rent-A-Racer Program

Ford and Carroll Shelby‘s answer to a slow sales year was the Hertz Sports Car Club, which put roughly 1,000 GT350H models into Hertz rental fleets nationwide in 1966. Painted mostly in black with gold LeMans stripes, these were functionally the same 271-horsepower, solid-lifter K-code cars sold to the public, and the program helped push GT350 production from a few hundred units in 1965 to 2,378 in 1966 — a jump of more than 320%.

Built for the Track, Rented for the Weekend

The GT350’s underpinnings weren’t softened for rental use. Shelby American fitted a larger four-barrel Holley carburetor that pushed output to roughly 306 horsepower and 329 lb-ft of torque, alongside suspension and steering upgrades meant for competition. Of the 1966 production run, only 36 were purpose-built R-model racers, but every GT350 — rental or retail — shared enough of that DNA to dominate SCCA B-Production racing in 1965 and 1966.

A Reputation Built on Chaos

Stories of Hertz customers returning their GT350H with race numbers painted on the doors, or missing entirely, became part of Shelby lore — whether or not every tale is strictly true. What’s certain is that the Rent-A-Racer program put a genuine competition Mustang into the hands of ordinary drivers for a weekend rate, an experiment no manufacturer has seriously repeated since, and one that turned the GT350H into one of the most collectible variants of the entire GT350 line today.

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