Super Swap 1967 & 2012 Shelby Mustang GT500

Dan Burback bought a brand-new 2012 Shelby Mustang GT500 — then told his wife Laura he was going to take it apart. Four years of weekends later, “SuperSwap” emerged: a custom-built 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 body wrapped around modern GT500 underpinnings. Lou Costabile caught the finished reveal at Supercar Saturdays. Watch to see how four years of garage time paid off.

Most people who buy a brand-new supercar keep it exactly the way it left the factory floor, without changing so much as a wheel. Dan Burback bought a brand-new 2012 Shelby Mustang GT500, drove it home, and then told his wife Laura he was going to take it apart completely. Not to fix anything — to rebuild it, piece by piece, into a custom-designed 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 he’d eventually call “SuperSwap,” a name that stuck the moment people saw it finished. What followed was four years of weekends spent chasing a very specific vision: the underpinnings of a modern supercar wrapped in the unmistakable look of the car that started the whole legacy. Lou Costabile caught up with the finished result at the Arboretum of South Barrington’s Supercar Saturdays, and the payoff is worth every bit of the four-year wait it took to get there.

Four Years, Every Weekend, One Very Specific Vision

Dan Burback didn’t set out to build a generic resto-mod off a parts-catalog template — he had a precise goal in mind from the very day he bought the 2012 GT500, before a single bolt had been loosened. Take the newest, most capable car Ford was building at the time, and reshape it entirely into the exact silhouette of the original 1967 Shelby Mustang that started it all decades earlier. That kind of project only comes together through relentless consistency, and Burback put in the work every single weekend for four straight years to get there, a commitment that separates “SuperSwap” from a rushed one-off show build thrown together for a single weekend event and never touched again.

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Best of the New, With an Old-School Look

The entire philosophy behind SuperSwap comes down to one simple idea: keep everything modern that makes the 2012 GT500 genuinely fast and drivable on today’s roads, and wrap all of it in a body that looks like it rolled straight off the line in 1967. That means the finished car benefits from decades of supercharged V8 engineering, modern brakes, and modern suspension geometry, all of it hidden underneath sheet metal deliberately designed to trick the eye into thinking it’s looking at a half-century-old Shelby sitting in the sun at a cruise night, decades untouched.

A Supportive Wife and a Four-Year Garage Project

Lou Costabile makes a point of thanking Laura, Dan’s wife, directly on camera in the video — for trusting Dan with the project and supporting four full years of weekends spent taking apart a brand-new car that most owners would never dream of touching, let alone disassembling. It’s a small detail in the larger story, but it underscores something genuinely true about builds at this level: a project this ambitious simply doesn’t happen without real support at home, and Costabile’s channel consistently highlights that human side of car culture right alongside the mechanical details most build videos focus on exclusively.

Supercar Saturdays and the Reveal

The Arboretum of South Barrington’s Supercar Saturdays gives builds like SuperSwap exactly the kind of audience they’re built for — enthusiasts who show up specifically hoping to see cars they won’t find parked anywhere else in the region. Lou Costabile’s “My Car Story” series has built its entire following around exactly these kinds of owner-and-builder conversations, catching finished projects at the precise moment they’re finally shown to the public rather than staged for a studio backdrop under artificial lighting.

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