This ‘1967 Shelby GT500’ Was Never Built in 1967 — And the Company That Made It Nearly Died Last Year

The Shelby GT500CR wears a 1967 body but hides a modern secret: a Shelby-licensed continuation car that can top 900 horsepower, more than double what Carroll Shelby’s original ever officially made. It also almost didn’t survive 2025 — here’s the shop’s real story.

The Mustang rolling through a recent CJ Pony Parts clip looks exactly like the 1967 Shelby GT500 that built Carroll Shelby’s reputation — the shaker hood, the twin racing stripes, that unmistakable snake-nosed stance. Nobody drove this particular car off a Ford assembly line in 1967, though. The small-block roar that had commenters calling it “sweet” and saying it “purrs beautifully” comes from hardware Carroll Shelby himself never touched. This is a Shelby GT500CR, a modern continuation car built under an official Shelby American license by a company most muscle car fans have never heard of. Depending on the build, it can carry more than double the horsepower Ford ever officially rated in a real 1967 GT500 — and the shop that builds it barely exists today because of a bankruptcy filing that happened less than a year before this clip was posted.

The clip itself is brief: just the GT500CR rolling and then accelerating down a public road, with the exhaust note doing most of the talking. CJ Pony Parts, a Pennsylvania-based Mustang parts retailer that also produces vehicle content for its channel, posted it as part of an ongoing series following shop and customer builds. The car is tagged alongside the more traditional GT500 and GT350 hashtags Shelby fans search for, but there’s no dyno pull, no walkaround, and no spec sheet on screen — just the car doing what it was built to do.

That was apparently enough. In the comments, viewers reacted almost entirely to how the car sounded and looked rather than what was actually under the hood — “finally, a car that roars, instead of screeching,” one wrote, while another said it “purrs beautifully,” and several simply called it the best-looking car ever built. Nobody in the thread seemed to know, or particularly care, that the car isn’t a genuine numbers-matching 1967 Shelby. That gap between what a GT500CR appears to be and what it actually is turns out to be the more interesting story.

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The Oklahoma Shop That Earned Shelby’s Signature

The company behind it, Classic Recreations, was founded in 2002 in Yukon, Oklahoma, by Jason Engel, a lifelong Mustang collector who has personally owned more than 100 of them over the years. That obsession eventually turned into a formal licensing agreement directly with Carroll Shelby and Shelby American, giving the small shop legal rights that almost no other builder in the country has: the ability to construct and sell brand-new Ford Mustangs wearing genuine Shelby GT350 and GT500 badges, decades after Ford stopped building the originals.

That’s the part most casual fans miss. A real 1967 Shelby GT500 is a finite, aging thing — Ford and Shelby American built only 2,048 of them that year, and every surviving example is now a serious collector car. Classic Recreations doesn’t touch those. Instead, the company starts fresh, building a new car around a 1967-style Mustang body or shell — steel on most builds, full carbon fiber on its flagship — and then fits it with modern running gear, wiring, brakes, and suspension underneath the period-correct sheet metal. Buyers get the look and the Shelby name on a car that’s mechanically closer to a modern performance Mustang than to anything that actually rolled through a Ford plant in 1967.

It Nearly Died in 2025 — Then Came Back Under New Owners

Here’s the part that makes this clip more than a pretty exhaust note: Classic Recreations filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 9, 2025, and abruptly closed its doors, leaving customers with unfinished builds and no shop to call. Restomod outfits fold more often than buyers like to think about, and for a few months it looked like the GT500CR line might be finished for good. Instead, Velocity Restorations, a rival classic-vehicle modernization company, acquired the key assets — intellectual property, inventory, and equipment — in a deal a bankruptcy court approved on August 8, 2025, and secured its own licensing agreement with Carroll Shelby Licensing to keep building both Shelby GT500 and Shelby Cobra continuation cars.

Production has since resumed out of Velocity’s factory in Pensacola, Florida, under a refreshed model lineup: the 1967-68 GT500 in steel, the 1967-68 GT500CR in carbon fiber, the 1969 Boss 429, the 1969 “Hitman,” and the Shelby Cobra. The GT500CR in the CJ Pony Parts clip is a survivor of that whole ordeal — built by a company that, on paper, didn’t exist for part of the past year. As of this year, Classic Recreations says its build slots are already full for 2026, with reservations now being taken for 2027.

Up to 900 Horsepower in a Body Ford Never Built That Powerful

The real 1967 GT500 ran a 428-cubic-inch “Police Interceptor” V8 that Ford officially rated at 355 horsepower — a number period insiders acknowledge was deliberately underrated to dodge insurance surcharges, with real-world output closer to 400. The current GT500CR lineup starts well beyond that and climbs much higher: buyers choose from three Ford Coyote 5.0-liter V8 packages, a naturally aspirated 500-horsepower version, a supercharged 700-horsepower version, and a supercharged 900-horsepower version at the top. Even the mildest modern GT500CR beats the original by well over 100 horsepower, and the top-spec version puts up nearly two and a half times what Shelby ever advertised in 1967.

That performance isn’t cheap. A base Shelby GT500CR starts at $549,900, and the 900-horsepower version starts at $724,900 before options — genuinely new cars, built to order, that happen to look exactly like they rolled out of a Shelby American shop decades ago. For comparison, a real, numbers-matching 1967 GT500 in excellent condition is valued by Hagerty at roughly $238,000, with clean surviving examples generally trading between $250,000 and $500,000 depending on originality and documented history; a uniquely documented Super Snake once built for a Goodyear promotional tour sold for $2.2 million in 2019, the most any Mustang has ever brought at auction. A GT500CR buyer is trading that kind of historical rarity for a car that starts around similar money to a nice original, but arrives brand new, backed by a builder’s warranty, and capable of daily-driver reliability an actual 59-year-old muscle car simply can’t match.

Why the Sound Still Wins

None of that corporate turbulence made it into the comment section, and that might be the point. Viewers weren’t reacting to a bankruptcy filing or a horsepower spec sheet; they were reacting to the exhaust note and the shape of the car, the same two things that made the original GT500 a legend in the first place. Classic Recreations’ entire business, even after nearly disappearing, is built on that reaction — on the idea that the feeling of a 1967 Shelby matters more to most buyers than whether the VIN plate says 1967 or 2026, or which company happens to be building it this year.

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