The Long Road Home: A Teenager's Gas-Station Sighting Became a Decades-Long Shelby GT350 Restoration
Dave first saw the 1967 Shelby GT350 roll past as a kid, driven by the Vietnam veteran who'd bought it new. He tore the car apart in 1976. It took thirty more years to put it back together.
Dave was a teenager working at a gas station when a dark 1967 Shelby GT350 first rolled through — driven by a Vietnam veteran who'd bought the car new. As Petrolicious tells it in a short documentary on the restoration, the encounter stuck with him: to Dave, the car wasn't just transportation, it was a rolling symbol of freedom and individuality.
"It's not a concours car, but it's a hell of a machine because I built it the way I want it."
By 1973, after the GT350 had changed hands more than once, Dave finally owned it. Three years later, in 1976, he tore it apart — the start of what became one of the longer restoration timelines in the genre. The project sat disassembled for three decades before Dave, with his family's support, picked it back up around 2006 and spent roughly two years on bodywork, engine rebuilds, and reassembly.
What makes the build notable isn't a concours trophy — Dave says outright that it isn't period-correct and was never meant to be. "It's not a concours car, but it's a hell of a machine because I built it the way I want it," he told Petrolicious. Along the way, he archived every bolt and part he touched, documenting the process in a level of detail most restorers only aspire to.
The GT350's three-decade pause is an extreme case, but the shape of the story is a familiar one in car culture: a machine that means something to exactly one person, kept alive on that person's own timeline rather than anyone else's. The full build, in Dave's own words, is in Petrolicious's original documentary short.