The Only New 1968 Mustang Fastback Ford Ever Approved Has 710 Horsepower — And Jay Leno Had to Drive It

A Florida company called Revology is the only manufacturer Ford has ever licensed to build a brand-new 1968 Mustang GT 2+2 Fastback from a fresh steel unibody. Its Cobra Jet version swaps the factory 335-horsepower 428 for a supercharged, 710-horsepower Coyote V8, and Jay Leno wanted to see if it held up to the name. The verdict involves a six-figure price tag, a six-speed manual, and a shape almost nobody can drive hard in original form anymore.

Ford stopped building the 1968 Mustang GT 2+2 Fastback more than half a century ago, but one company in Orlando, Florida just built a brand new one anyway — with Ford’s blessing. Revology Cars is the only manufacturer licensed by Ford Motor Company to construct all-new first-generation Mustangs from a fresh steel unibody, and the Cobra Jet-spec 1968 fastback doesn’t just look the part. Underneath the correct sheet metal sits a brand-new chassis, double-wishbone suspension, rack-and-pinion steering, and — in the car Jay Leno drove — a supercharged Ford/ROUSH 5.0-liter Coyote V8 rated at 710 horsepower. This isn’t a restoration and it isn’t a kit car built on a donor shell. It’s a genuinely new 1968 Mustang, built decades after the original line shut down, to a standard Dearborn never hit the first time around. Jay Leno wanted to know if it was worth the six-figure check.

The Only Company Ford Trusts to Build a New 1968 Mustang

In the episode, Leno walks the length of Revology’s Orlando build floor and puts the finished Cobra Jet fastback through its paces on camera, from cold start to full-throttle pull. The car wears every visual cue of a factory ’68 GT 2+2 — the C-stripe, the fastback roofline, the correct chrome trim and running-pony fuel cap — but the details Leno lingers on are the ones no 1968 buyer ever got: LED-lit gauges set into a real walnut dash panel, leather-wrapped door panels and dash pad where original cars got vinyl, three-point seatbelts, a dual-circuit braking system, and an inertia-triggered fuel shutoff switch. It’s a car engineered to look untouched by time while driving nothing like its era.

That contrast is the whole point, and it’s backed by real numbers, not just styling. Revology builds each fastback around Ford’s naturally aspirated 5.0-liter Coyote V8 as the standard engine, rated at 460 horsepower, but the Cobra Jet package steps up to a supercharged version tuned by Ford Performance and ROUSH to 710 horsepower, paired with a six-speed manual transmission. Combined with modern double-wishbone front suspension, rack-and-pinion steering, and four-wheel disc brakes, the car rides and stops nothing like the leaf-sprung, drum-braked Mustangs that rolled out of Dearborn in 1968 — even though from ten feet away, almost nobody could tell the difference.

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Revology isn’t a garage operation cashing in on nostalgia. It was founded in 2014 by Tom Scarpello, a former Ford executive who ran the company’s Special Vehicle Team from 1998 to 2004 before a run of senior roles at Nissan. Under federal low-volume manufacturer rules, Revology became the first — and is still the only — company authorized to build brand-new, turnkey 1960s Mustangs and Shelby GTs that meet current safety and emissions law. It took the company eight years to complete its first 100 cars and roughly two more to build the next 100, a pace that says more about demand than most car reviews ever could. Every car still moves through a 26-station assembly line, with the unibody jig-welded in-house and reinforced with modern structural adhesives, before a single exterior panel goes on — the same disciplined process used to build the company’s continuation Shelby GT500s.

Revology also sells the Cobra Jet fastback with a lower-key naturally aspirated option for buyers who want the shape and the modern engineering without chasing 710 horsepower, and the company builds several other first-generation Mustang variants alongside it, including convertibles and its own Shelby GT500 continuation. But the Cobra Jet fastback is the halo piece for a reason: it pairs the single most recognizable Mustang silhouette from the era with the engine option that originally turned that silhouette into a drag-strip weapon, then adds enough modern hardware that an owner can actually use all of it on a Sunday drive without an engine rebuild waiting at the end of it.

A Shape Everyone Recognizes, an Engine Almost Nobody Got

The car Revology is reproducing has a real, well-documented history of its own, and it’s bigger than one engine option. Ford sold 317,404 Mustangs for the 1968 model year, but only 42,325 of them were fastbacks — the rest were hardtops and convertibles — which already made the 2+2 body style a minority build before any engine choice entered the picture. The 1968 car carried over the redesigned 1967 body with modest running changes: new side scoops, revised taillights, a running-pony gas cap. It’s the same basic GT 2+2 Fastback shape Steve McQueen made famous that same year in Bullitt, where two Dark Highland Green 1968 GT 390 Fastbacks, built with 390-cubic-inch big-block V8s and four-speed manuals, did the driving and the jumping through San Francisco. That car ran a 390, not the Cobra Jet — a separate, later option that turned the same shape into something else entirely.

Mid-year, Ford dropped in the engine that changed what a 1968 Mustang could do on a drag strip. The 428 Cobra Jet, developed at the suggestion of Rhode Island Ford dealer Bob Tasca and Hot Rod magazine’s Eric Dahlquist, went on sale April 1, 1968, built largely from durable, already-proven components pulled from Ford’s own parts bin: a nodular-iron crankshaft, heavy-duty connecting rods, and a 735-cfm Holley four-barrel carburetor. Factory-rated at 335 horsepower and 440 lb-ft of torque — figures most enthusiasts of the era considered deliberately conservative — a 428 CJ Mustang ran 0-60 mph in roughly 5.1 seconds and the quarter-mile in about 14.3 seconds at 100 mph, numbers that embarrassed cars costing far more.

Ford proved the point almost immediately. At the 1968 NHRA Winternationals, factory-backed Cobra Jet Mustangs entered NHRA’s Super Stock ranks and posted 11.5-second quarter-mile times at 120 mph in the engine’s competitive debut, dominating the class. Ford built only 1,299 Mustangs with the 428 Cobra Jet that year, and just 1,044 of those were fastbacks — a fraction of a fraction of that year’s total production — which is exactly why the shape and engine combination Revology is recreating carries the weight it does. Original, numbers-matching ’68 CJ fastbacks are scarce, expensive, and increasingly too valuable for most owners to actually drive hard, let alone take back to a drag strip the way Ford’s own factory team once did.

What 710 Horsepower Does to a 58-Year-Old Shape

What separates Revology’s approach from a typical restomod build is what’s underneath. Rather than modifying a donor 1968 Mustang or bolting a reproduction shell onto an off-the-shelf frame, Revology builds each car around an entirely new steel unibody before the first exterior panel goes on. Ford licenses Revology to do exactly this — the same authorization the company uses to build continuation Shelby GT500s — which means every fastback leaving Orlando carries genuine manufacturer sign-off, not just a strong resemblance. That distinction matters more than it sounds: plenty of shops sell 1968 Mustang-shaped restomods, but Revology is the only one building them as new, federally compliant vehicles rather than modified used cars.

None of this happens in a vacuum. Revology’s approach mirrors a wider shift in the collector-car world, where a handful of specialist builders — Singer Vehicle Design reengineering air-cooled Porsche 911s, Superformance building continuation Shelby Cobras — have found real demand for out-of-production icons rebuilt with modern engineering rather than merely restored to original spec. What makes Revology different is the paperwork: it isn’t reverse-engineering a shape from scratch or building on a donor chassis, it’s doing it with Ford’s own license, which is a harder thing to obtain than horsepower.

The result, as Leno found out, is a car that drives like nothing built in 1968 while still sounding, and largely looking, exactly like one. That combination — real Ford licensing, an all-new chassis, and a supercharged Coyote V8 pushing well past 700 horsepower — puts a car like this well into six-figure territory, in the same neighborhood as Revology’s continuation GT500, which starts at $219,000. For a shape this scarce in original, drivable, numbers-matching condition, that’s the price of getting to actually use a 1968 Cobra Jet fastback instead of trailering it to shows and hoping nothing goes wrong.

It also explains why a car built this year, not in 1968, was worth Jay Leno’s time and a spot on his show. The original Cobra Jet Mustang mattered because Ford proved a factory car could out-run machines that cost far more, on a drag strip, against the odds, on its very first outing. Revology’s version makes almost the same argument to a different generation of buyers: that the shape itself was worth saving, that saving it properly meant starting over rather than patching up what little original stock is left, and that a company with real Ford backing was the only one with the standing to try.

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