Even if you don’t consider yourself much of a motorsports fan, chances are you’ve heard the name Stirling Moss before. The plucky British racer won more than 40 percent of the over 500 races he entered, including 16 Formula One Grand Prixs, and he drove an estimated 84 different vehicles in the 529 races he entered.
Among those vehicles was a 1965 Shelby GT350, which Moss owned and raced across Europe during the 1990s. While it may not be from the pinnacle of Moss’s racing career, it’s still a Shelby GT350 with one of the biggest names in racing attached to it. So when it crosses the auction block at Mecum’s Monterey event in August, you can bet it’ll bring big bucks.
Moss purchased the Shelby in 1993, after it had been race prepped by Chris Liebenberg, a former owner. From 1993 to 1999 Sir Stirling Moss (yes, he was knighted, being British is cool sometimes) raced the Shelby in nine European vintage racing events, and down under in the Targa Tasmania, which Moss took first place in.
While not an original Shelby GT350R, it has been fully built to R specifications by Liebenberg and is ready to go racing whenever. That does bring up an interesting question though; does Stirling’s former ownership make it more valuable, even though it is no longer a numbers-matching Shelby?