How This Ford Mustang Became The Most Successful Road Racing Car Of All Time

I assume that whatever race car is your favorite at the age of 13 is what you consider the greatest race car of all time. Nostalgia is a helluva drug, as they say. It just so happens that my most cherished steed of all time–the mid-90s All Sport Roush Racing Trans-Am Mustang–is also the must successful professional road racing car ever built.

Sponsored by a hydration beverage company you’ve never heard of and built by a team that doesn’t race sports cars anymore, it’s easy to forget that what Tommy Kendall achieved in 1997. When I say it’s the must successful road racing car of all time, I’m specifically talking about the 11 races in a row it won in a professional series, which beat Mark Donohue’s 1968 run.

The car was sold at Mecum’s Nashville auction this weekend for a big dollar amount, though I think it was a bit of a steal considering what this car did. It also gave me an excuse to dive into the Mustang and its amazing year.

An Unfathomably Good Year

Trans-Am is one of those racing series that’s reinvented itself so many times throughout the years, with so many names and so many formats, it probably deserves its own post. The series still exists, and credit to them for putting together a good quick history.

Here’s the quick version: What started as the SCCA Trans American Sedan Championship in 1966 was quickly shortened to just the Trans-Am series. Because it was the late ’60s, this meant a showdown between American pony cars. The original golden era of this series saw Mark Donohue in his Penske-prepped Camaro facing off against Parnelli Jones in his Mustang.

Trans-Am would go through a few format changes, and though the 1987 series would feature a successful run from the Merkur brand, I didn’t start paying attention until the mid 1990s, when the sport again became a showdown mostly between Chevy Camaros and Ford Mustangs. I was a big fan of the SN95 Mustang, so seeing them race the dastardly Camaros was a thrill, even if I knew that the purpse-built race car had little in common with the road car other than a vague silhouette and a set of taillights.

Jack Roush’s legendary racing outfit managed to lure Tommy Kendall away from Chevy and in 1994 the team ended up in third place behind Scott Pruett and Ron Fellows. The next year, Kendall would eek out a Driver’s Championship only winning one race. In 1996, Kendall won four races, edging out the very competitive Camaros.

The next year, Kendall and Roush took their Mustang out for what would become a record run that may never be repeated. What’s amusing, in retrospect, is that it almost didn’t happen at all. Someone put the whole 1997 St. Petersburg season opener on YouTube and you can see how unlikely this all is.

As the screenshot above indicates, Kendall, who started in fourth, had a nasty spin deep into the race and fell back to the middle of the pack. A heroic drive put him at the top of the podium, which is where he’d land for the next ten races in a row. I remember watching along as a kid (IIRC on Speedvision on a bit of a delay) and I was amazed at Kendall’s ability to always come back.

It’s as close to a perfect season as anyone has had in professional road racing, and it was only a another spin at Pikes Peak International Raceway at the end of the season that saw him lose his chance. Given how many things have to go right mechanically or otherwise in motorsports, it’s an incredible feat. By comparison, Red Bull managed to win 22 out of 23 races in 2023 with the same car, but spread cross two different drivers.

Seeing the car cross the block at Mecum, I reached out to the only person I know who loves these cars more than I do for some details on how they did it.

The Most Important Drink Cooler You’ll Ever See

Colin Comer is one of the foremost experts on all things Shelby, Ford, and Roush. He owns the two Mountain Dew-branded sister cars to the All Sports Mustang–chassis #030 is the one he races and chassis #029 is identical to the Kendall car that was auctioned off this weekend.

What makes these cars so special? By 1997, Chevy had dropped its support for the series and Roush was only running the two-car team of the All Sport and Mountain Dew cars. As Comer tells it, “They knew it was the last year for them, so they threw every trick they had at the cars.”

Some of these changes are the kind that you normally see between two years, including the addition of full data systems. The front suspension of the 1997 cars were entirely redone to a zero scrub design and effective track width was widened.

While I had some sense that the cars were tweaked, I wasn’t aware of just how full-on Smoky Yunick the Roush team went when building this car. For example, below is the 1995 Daytona 24 Hours GTS-1 Class Winner built by Roush and driven by Paul Newman. It was also auctioned off at Mecum and took in $935,000.

While there are a couple of differences in the cars, the one you might not notice is what’s missing between the two.

“See how the Newman car has no drink cooler in the back, and the All Sport car does? Well, the 1997 cars were changed to a three-link rear suspension, and disguised under that drink cooler was a spring-loaded ‘pogo stick’ that mounted to the top of the differential and kept the rear of the car down under braking,” says Comer.

That’s right. What looks like a drink bottle is really just the motorsports equivalent of a merkin. When you see how it sits outside of the cabin, it becomes obvious how bizarre it is to be there.

That’s not all the team did in between seasons. In order to get weight down as low as possible, the brake and clutch master cylinders, as well as the ignition boxes, were all moved from on top of the dashboard to the floors or rear bulkhead.

It gets even more minute than that. The rulebook said that the inner panels of the car had to be constructed “with” aluminum (the exterior body panels are carbon fiber). An obvious interpretation of this rule is to make those panels out of aluminum. The two Roush cars that year had interior panels made of lighter magnesium with just a touch of aluminum blended in, or as Comer explains “.0001% aluminum is still aluminum!”

“For the last two years I’ve been racing in the Trans Am series, and it’s still competitive 30 years later, which says a lot about the Roush cars,” says Comer.

A nice perk of this job is that I bump into Kendall every now and then, and either I play it very cool or he is kind enough to notice how truly geeked I am every time. Probably the second thing. While not racing professionally anymore, he’s still getting behind the wheel with our mutual buds Matt and Zack.

Why Everyone Wanted This Car

Chassis #033 is the car that won it all, which makes it so important. Unlike other cars that were sold by Roush to privateers, this one remained in Roush’s hands and has been kept in its original condition with all of the magic “pixie dust” that the company sprinkled on it. The only other 1997 untouched car is the one Comer has on a shelf.

Does one human need two museum pieces? Probably not, which didn’t stop Comer from teaming up with Tommy Kendall himself to try and win the car at auction.

“Even after combining our TA car piggy banks, and then my getting caught in the red mist and exceeding the agreed-upon bid price by a factor of two, we ended up in second place when the gavel fell,” recalls Comer. “But old chassis #033 ended up with a mutual friend of ours, so all’s well that ends well, as the saying goes. And, TK and I got to witness his old car make history once again, which was pretty damn cool.”

Top photo: Mecum