[Don]

As published by the New York Times on Sunday Nov 25th:



" A Cloud Over Reborn Shelby Mustangs "

By ROB SASS

"FIVE years ago, amid a sharp rise in prices of vintage muscle cars, Carroll Shelby licensed his name to a Texas company to construct replicas of the 1967 Shelby GT500E used in the 2000 remake of the drive-in classic “Gone in 60 Seconds.”

Mr. Shelby, the racing legend who had built Shelby Mustangs and the Cobra sports car in the 1960s, correctly perceived an eager market for the movie car, known as Eleanor. The cars were to be built by Unique Performance in Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb.

But this month, after a public dispute between Mr. Shelby and Unique Peformance, and following lawsuits against Unique from customers who say they put down large deposits but never received their cars, the story took a new twist. Farmers Branch police and Texas state officials raided Unique and seized 61 cars in varying states of completion at five sites.

Restored and modernized cars like the Eleanor replicas have become known in the collector car industry as resto-mods, and they are intended to combine the best of old and new.

Original ’60s-era muscle cars, while fierce in a straight line, were often not pleasant to drive. Most had slippery and uncomfortable vinyl seats, vague steering and dubious handling, their tires squealing at the first suggestion of a kink in the road. And, oddly for cars with such performance, they usually came with ineffective brakes that faded away after hard use.

Resto-mods generally combine original frames and body shells with modern brakes, suspensions and tires, along with upgraded powertrains and better interiors to address the shortcomings of the original cars.

But when old cars become so heavily altered in the process of becoming resto-mods, issues involving titles and serial numbers can become cloudy.

In a telephone interview, Cpl. Chad Taylor of the Farmers Branch police department said Unique’s cars were seized because authorities had learned that the company might have altered the V.I.N., or vehicle identification numbers. He said the matter had been referred to the Dallas County prosecutor, but as of Wednesday no charges had been filed.

Authorities had also suggested that Unique engaged in a practice known as “title washing,” in which salvage titles are cleansed of salvage status by

retitling the cars in another state. Customers might be unaware that the donor car for their GT500 Eleanor had been declared a total loss previously.

Both Mr. Shelby and Chip Foose, the prominent custom car designer who had also licensed Unique to build cars from his designs, have severed their ties with Unique Performance.

Attempts to reach Unique Performance executives for comment were unsuccessful last week. The company’s phone number has been disconnected and its Web site is no longer operating.

Fans of unaltered original muscle cars like Colin Comer, a Milwaukee dealer and collector who wrote “Million Dollar Muscle Cars” (Motorbooks, 2007) said he thought that those who paid $200,000 and more for resto-mods like the Shelby GT500E would probably never recoup their investments, especially with a cloud over Unique.

Unlike original muscle cars, most resto-mods have no pedigree or provenance. Indeed, they may have started out as a run-of-the-mill 6-cylinder car before being altered to look like a rare high-performance model. So resto-mods may share more with today’s cars than just modern mechanicals. They may depreciate like them as well. "