1991 SAAC Mk 1 Ford Mustang Prototype Is Today's Bring a Trailer Find

• The SAAC Mustang is the Fox-body Shelby that Ford never built.

• The SAAC Mustang was the product of the Shelby American Automobile Club, not Carroll Shelby himself.

• Just over 60 were made; this prototype was a promotional car.

In the early 1990s, if you wanted a muscle car with a sprinkling of Shelby magic on it, you bought a front-wheel-drive Dodge Daytona. If you wanted a Shelby-infused Ford, then too bad—unless you were a member of the Shelby American Automobile Club (SAAC). In that case, you could get your hands on one of these, a Mk 1 SAAC Mustang GT, which was envisioned as the Fox-body equivalent of the original Shelby GT350.

Perhaps that's a little overzealous a comparison, especially to SAAC members, who can be extremely particular about their Shelby facts. Even so, this prototype Mustang is something extremely special, and it's up for sale on Bring a Trailer, which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos.

Being a prototype, this Mustang says "Shelby" on it in a few places; the production models were labeled as SAAC only so Chrysler's lawyers wouldn't come a-calling. The car was the brainchild of club executives Richard Kopec and Ken Eber, who figured the SAAC could do what Ford at the time couldn't. They tapped a member named David Wagner, who conveniently happened to be Ford's Power Products Operation Group manager.

The cars were only offered to members, and the project officially had Carroll Shelby's blessing. Modifications were pretty stout, including an aluminum GT40 intake and GT40 cylinder heads with a slight bump in compression. Underdrive pulleys, ceramic-coated headers, and a 2.5-inch exhaust cut down on parasitic losses. Altogether, the V-8 now made 295 horsepower on the dyno, about 70 hp better than a stock 5-point-oh.