SAAC Forum

It is repairable with an experienced welder and can be made to be undetectable.  It is going to cost $$ but it is doable.  I have welded cast iron parts with great success and there are shops that do this.

For a complete telling of the ’66 Hertz story, I would urge anyone interested to read the appropriate chapter in the 2011 ’65-‘66’67 Registry. But I can offer a definitive explanation of just the red cars here. One must remember that despite the fact that Shelby American pitched the program to Hertz as 1000 black and gold cars, when Hertz finally awarded a contract to Shelby in December of 1965, it was for 1000 cars equally divided in all five of the colors in which the ’66 GT350-black, red, white, blue and green. By then, Hertz had already changed their minds several times as to the color mix and the transmission types. Even after the contract had been finalized, Hertz continued, almost on a weekly basis, to change the requirements, and these changes have all been captured in Shelby American’s Staff Meeting Minutes.


Thanks for the update and glad that you have refreshed the story about the Red Hertz.  BTW I have #988 which was born without stripes.  Cheers,

Another factor must be understood to being the red cars question into focus was the means by which San Jose shipped cars to Shelby American for conversion into GT350s: they would run a batch of one color, ship Shelby’s allotment of that color, run another color, ship Shelby’s allotment of THAT color…and so on. The result was that Shelby received cars for GT350 conversion (for both Hertz and non-Hertz) in batches of like-colored cars. What happened in the case of the red Hertz cars was that two unrelated events occurred simultaneously: first, Hertz again flip-flopped on the subject of top stripes (please don’t call them “LeMans stripes”, Shelby American referred to them as “rally stripes” back in the day) and requested that rally stripes NOT be applied. Then, very shortly thereafter, Shelby American received a batch of red cars and began converting them into GT350Hs. Just as the red group as completed, guess what? Hertz again changed their mind and decided that all cars thereafter would have rally stripes. Thus, factory paperwork proves pretty conclusively that NONE of the red GT350Hs had top stripes. Hertz didn’t make a conscious decision to have their red cars lacking top stripes; it just turned out that way. Sometime afterwards, Hertz again flip-flopped and decided that the remainder of their fleet would be black with gold stripes, so the 50 or so red GT350Hs without top stripes were the only ones there would ever be.

I hope this clarifies this subject for the 99% percent…

Greg