Yahoo Autos 2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 Final Drive | One tough goodbye
Once upon a time, I was a test driver working for Roush. I’d show up to a Ford building in Allen Park, Mich., at 6 a.m. five days a week, be given a set of keys, a drive route, a massive stack of paper and then be sent on my merry way for about seven hours. Every car I drove was a Ford or Lincoln in one of the various stages of pre-production builds. Nineteen-year-old me was in love with the gig. And c’mon, what teenage car nut wouldn’t love being paid to drive a brand-new car around?
But not all brand-new cars are created equal. Every brutally early morning, I'd stand in line, waiting. Eventually, names were called and the keys start flowing. "No cobra snake on that one, or those three. There’s still hope," I thought to myself. Finally, my name was called, and sitting on the table in front of me was exactly what I’d been wanting for the past couple of weeks: the key fob to a Ford Mustang Shelby GT350. I tried my best to not look too excited, but inside, I was positively giddy. The car gods graced me that fine, summer day, and somehow, I came away with an even higher opinion of the car than I had already built it up to be.
Fast forward five years, two months, a college education and countless cars later, and I’m back in the driver’s seat of the last new GT350 I’ll ever drive. Ford just finished telling me that neither the GT350 or GT350R would be around for the 2021 model year. No surprise there. After all, releasing a Heritage Edition for any model is a decent indicator that it's not long for this world. Still, it's hard not to be sad that a car that meant so much to me half a decade ago is going away. It's like losing an old friend, but at least I will get the lucky draw again, this time for Autoblog's final drive of the GT350. I have one more chance to hear that soon-to-be-classic 5.2-liter flat-plane-crank V8 scream its way to 8,250 rpm.
Ford didn’t change the standard GT350 for 2020, but noticeable improvements were made for 2019 — you can check out the details in our First Drive here. In short, though, the changes contributed to better handling while retaining the same lovely powertrain. Ford didn’t fix what wasn’t broken, and the car remained 100% true to what it was to begin with.
Our 2020 Heritage Edition tester adds special paint, stickers and badges, but nothing else. Ford used Ken Miles’ 1965 Mustang GT350 fastback racer as inspiration for the Wimbledon White and Guardsman Blue color scheme.
“To be able to duplicate with Wimbledon White and specifically the Guardsman Blue. To be able to tie it with a bow back to how it started was pretty cool,” said Jim Owens, Ford Mustang and Shelby marketing manager. “And from a marketing perspective and from somebody who knew Carroll and knew how happy he’d be with this car, it was cool to do.”
Fun fact: Ford still had Guardsman Blue paint from the 1960s in cold storage, and it used this paint to get a perfect color match for the stripes and Shelby badges on the new GT350. Both the stripes and side decals are stickers, not painted, but they appear just as they would have over 50 years ago.
I think the appearance package is a nostalgic success, and buyers seem to agree. Ford says the Heritage Edition is the most popular color scheme of 2020. The $1,965 package isn’t an egregious premium to pay over the $61,535 base car, and despite it clearly being popular (Ford isn’t limiting production numbers), it’ll still be rare enough considering it's a single model year option.
Ford wouldn’t tell us much more about the timing of this model’s disappearance beyond referencing the natural order of Mustang variants coming in and out of the lineup. Now that the GT500 has stepped in as King Mustang, there’s inherently less space for the GT350 and GT350R. If you don’t want to spend GT500 money, Ford is at least offering up the Mach 1 as a replacement for 2021, but that's more of a mash-up of the also-discontinued Bullitt and GT350. And that mash-up does not include the flat-plane-crank "Voodoo" 5.2-liter. It'll have the Bullitt's "Coyote" 5.0.
