S550 MUSTANG GETS A 1967 ELEANOR SHELBY GT500 BODY

When it comes to ranking the muscle cars in pop culture history, there are certainly a few that stand above the rest. Mopar fans may cheer for the General Lee, while the GM boys point their fingers towards the ever enjoyable KITT, or Burt Reynolds’s Bandit Trans Am. For Ford fans however, there is a bit of a dilemma when it comes to the Mustangs made famous on the silver screen. Sure there are plenty of people who adore the Bullitt Mustang, including Ford, but we all know that Eleanor is the coolest of them all. That is exactly why B is For Build have been working on, with this body-swapped S550 Mustang.

This is the team that brought you LS-swapped Lamborghini Huracan, as seen at the 2019 SEMA Show.

The Eleanor Mustang is of course the star car in the movie “Gone in 60 Seconds”, wheeled by Nicholas Cage’s character Randall “Memphis” Raines. The Dupont Pepper Grey 1967 Ford Mustang fastback with GT500 adornments designed by Steve Stanford is simply one of the coolest pro-touring builds ever, and it helped to further the trend in the automotive world. Eleanor is so idealized that one of the three driving movie cars was sold at Mecum’s Indianapolis auction in 2013 for $1,000,000. 

Since the movie’s debut in 2000, Eleanor Mustang builds have become a rather popular occurrence. However, the guys over at B is for Build haven’t gone the traditional route for their own take on the Eleanor Mustang. Instead of starting with a 1967 model, they opted to use a 2015 S550 Mustang GT as the base of the project. If the goal of a pro-touring build is to make an old car behave more like a modern one, why not use all of Ford’s R&D work to your advantage. In order to capture the classic styling of the original, the YouTubers opted to go the body swap route. 

While the build isn’t finished yet, there are a ton of videos up on the B is for Build YouTube channel detailing the whole project thus far. From what we can see, It isn’t an easy task to make a modern chassis mate up to the vintage metalwork of the 1960’s, especially when you’re trying to maintain as many modern amenities as possible. It does look totally worth the effort from this side of the screen though.