(Photos: Craig Jackson) Until hours ago, this car officially had met the business end of a car crusher after it’s work as a prototype was over and done with. It was a myth, a legend, a phantom. Much like the Bullitt Mustang that recently came back out into the light, the red 1967 Shelby GT500 hardtop coupe has been the source of a maddening hunt by fans, collectors, and enthusiasts for years. It is the only notchback that Shelby American ever built, the only 1967 GT coupe Mustang ordered up not only as a 428 but a dual-quad 428, and alongside the other Shelby-associated coupe, the “Green Hornet” (the California Special Ford prototype that Shelby took on for other experimental work), are the rarest Shelby Mustangs known…and up until March 2018, only the Green Hornet (a.k.a. EXP 500) was known to still exist. The little red coupe that had been rumored to have sported a Paxton blower, and possibly even a twin-charging setup at one point in time, had more or less vaporized into thin air. So how, exactly, did a factory prototype manage to stay hidden for so many years?

Leave it two two individuals: a specialist named Jason Billups and Craig Jackson of Barrett-Jackson, who owns the Green Hornet. While doing research on some Ford documents, the pair came to a revelation: anyone who had tried to hunt down Little Red was using a Shelby American-issued serial number. But the car was a very early works machine, the second Shelby Mustang for 1967 and known to be a prototype from the get-go. What about a Ford VIN? That line of thinking saw the pair find the car in Texas, where it wound up after one hell of a life. Once the car was done with prototype work, it managed to get sold at a Colorado dealership to a Vietnam veteran who drove it for a few years. The Shelby was then sold to the current owner, who bought the car in Wyoming and held onto it. It got put into a storage container at one point, which got broken into. The thief took parts and left, and eventually the Shelby was dumped in a yard with a motley collection of other old cars, left to sit in the Texas sun.

Little Red has been verified as the real deal by Kevin Marti and has been sold to Jackson, who is kicking off a restoration of the car. The problem is, nobody is real sure what “original condition” means for Little Red, due to the secrecy surrounding the car’s prototype work. He’s already launched a site that will document the restoration work and is hoping to learn information about the car via crowdsourcing. “If your dad worked for Ford or Shelby, talk to them. Or look in your closet and see if you have any old pictures of it. Anything might help,” he says on the site.