For years, the story circulated through Metro Detroit the way good automotive folklore does: somebody had seen it, somebody had a photo, somebody knew one of the engineers. A V10 Mustang coupe, built in secret, one of one. The kind of rumor you wanted to be true. It was. And now it runs again.
Ford Heritage Fleet manager Matt Korczyk, who grew up hearing the story as a kid, recently completed a revival of the car alongside members of the original build team. The work took months. New electronics, a fresh examination of systems that hadn’t been touched in decades, and enough careful attention to bring a quarter-century-old secret back to running condition. The goal, as Korczyk describes it, wasn’t to make the car faster. It was to make sure future generations could experience it the way its creators intended.
The dyno told them whether they’d succeeded. When the V10 fired up and rolled into the pull, everyone in the room went quiet. That’s how Korczyk remembers it. The engine has a character that doesn’t translate to description: raw, mechanical, nothing like anything Ford produces today. Then the number appeared on the screen. More than 510 horsepower at the wheels.
For a machine built in secret, on nights and weekends, by a handful of engineers who decided to do something unreasonable because they could, that figure is not modest.
Standing in the room when it happened were the people who made it: Greg Coleman, Jim O’Neill, Paul Vella, Don Masch, Mike Shelby, and their supervisor, John Brune. Twenty-five years after they machined custom parts, improvised solutions, and proved a V10-powered Mustang was mechanically viable, they watched their work come back to life. Korczyk notes that what stuck with him wasn’t the horsepower readout. It was their faces.
The car’s survival isn’t something that happened automatically. Over the years it sat, moved around, and came close to disappearing more than once. That it exists today reflects a recurring dynamic in automotive preservation: objects don’t survive on their own merit. They survive because specific people decide they’re worth keeping. Korczyk frames the Heritage Fleet’s mission in those terms explicitly. The car is the vessel. What’s actually being preserved are the people, the decisions, and the late-night conversations that produced it.
After the dyno session, no one talked much about horsepower. The original team spent the afternoon trading stories from the original build, revisiting engineering arguments from two decades ago, and generally behaving like people who had just found something they thought they might have lost. Korczyk describes it as one of those stretches where it felt like no time had passed.
That quality, the ability to collapse two and a half decades into an afternoon, is what separates a machine like this from a museum display. It isn’t static. It runs. The V10 still sounds unreasonable. The dyno number still holds. The engineers who built it are still around to be surprised by it.
Ford’s Heritage Fleet currently cares for more than 150 historically significant vehicles. Most of them represent production decisions, design pivots, or market strategies that are documented somewhere. This one is different. It was never announced. It was never supposed to be anything other than proof that a small group of engineers could will an unusual idea into existence. Twenty-five years later, the proof still runs.
The wider preservation effort has help beyond the Heritage Fleet garage. REVan Evan’s YouTube channel featured the car last year, before this restoration began: enjoy a longer look at the coupe’s history and interviews with people close to the original build team.
Ford V10 Mustang prototype Photo Gallery
Source: Ford. Images courtesy of Ford.
