In 1966, anyone who was 25 or older could walk up to a Hertz counter and drive off in a Shelby Mustang. The Hertz GT350H was a real GT350 with a rental contract attached. Hertz put about 1,000 of them into its fleet that year, and most wore black paint with gold stripes.

The program also left behind a pile of stories. Some are true, but many are not. Here is what the records show about how the Hertz GT350H came to be, what renters got, and what the cars are worth now.

First, a word on the count. Sources disagree by a car or two, so “about 1,000” is the honest number.

How the Hertz GT350H deal came together

The idea started small. According to Hagerty’s history of the rent-a-racer program, Shelby first pitched Hertz on roughly 100 black-and-gold GT350s in the fall of 1965. However, the order grew. Hertz ended up taking about a thousand cars, and Hagerty says the final GT350H reached Hertz in May 1966.

The exact total depends on who you ask. Hagerty’s history calls it about a thousand-car fleet. Meanwhile, a separate Hagerty car profile puts the figure at 1,001. Old Cars Weekly notes that published totals run from 999 to 1,001.

The money worked for both sides. Old Cars Weekly reports that Hertz paid $3,815 per car. Shelby then agreed to buy each one back for $2,589, minus repair costs.

What renters got for $17 a day

The rate was simple. Hertz charged $17 a day plus 17 cents a mile, a figure all three Hagerty articles agree on. Renters had to be at least 25 years old. In addition, Old Cars Weekly says they had to be members of the Hertz Sports Car Club.

Under the hood sat the same engine as a retail GT350. Old Cars Weekly lists the K-code 289-cubic-inch V8 at 306 horsepower at 6,000 rpm and 329 lb-ft of torque. Hagerty’s history also says the rental cars were mechanically identical to the standard 1966 GT350.

The details set them apart, though. The cars rolled on Magnum 500 wheels with “Hertz Sports Car Club” center medallions, according to Old Cars Weekly. They also wore rear brake scoops feeding air through 3-inch ducts.

Black and gold, mostly

Shelby offered five colors on its retail 1966 GT350s, and Hagerty says the Hertz plan first called for an even split among them. That didn’t happen. Instead, Hagerty’s tally comes to about 60 blue, 61 red and 59 green cars, plus roughly 71 white ones. The rest were Raven Black with gold stripes.

That black-and-gold look became the signature of the program. Still, the exact number of black cars is not settled. Old Cars Weekly puts it at about 750, while Hagerty’s color counts point to fewer, so no single figure holds up.

Four-speeds, automatics and hard brakes

Transmissions were supposed to split evenly too. In practice, Hagerty says only the first 85 cars got the four-speed manual. After that, Hertz took automatics, and Old Cars Weekly names the gearbox as the C-4 Cruise-O-Matic. Hagerty counts 86 four-speed cars in all once a prototype is included.

The brakes caused trouble of their own. The cars used metallic pads built to resist fade, but Hagerty says they barely worked at low speed until they warmed up. As a result, each car carried a dash warning. It told drivers the car had competition brakes and might need “heavier than normal brake pedal pressure.”

The racing legends, checked

Ask around and you will hear that renters took these cars racing every weekend. Some swapped engines, the story goes, and then returned the cars with a stock motor. In reality, Hagerty found only a handful of documented cases, and most are less dramatic than the legend.

For example, Hagerty describes a Cobra owner who drove a GT350H in a Charleston parking-lot autocross. The car was much heavier than the sports cars it ran against. Another story involves Ray Heppenstall, who pulled the engine for a Daytona 24 Hours Falcon. That engine came from a former rental he had bought after it was wrecked, not from a car still in service.

What happened to the cars, and what they bring now

After their rental duty, the cars went back to Shelby dealers. According to Old Cars Weekly, the dealers sold them as used cars or sent them to auction. For years the rental past counted against them. Hagerty says ex-Hertz cars in the 1970s and 1980s were worth 10 to 20 percent less than a standard GT350 of the same year.

That has since flipped. Today Hagerty says a former Hertz car brings 10 to 20 percent more than a non-rental GT350. In fact, its profile of the model lists values from $98,900 for a car in #4 (Fair) condition to $235,000 for the best concours examples.

Hertz also brought the idea back. Hagerty notes that Ford built 500 Shelby GT-H models for Hertz in 2006 and 2007, each with a 325-horsepower 4.6-liter V8. Then, according to Hagerty’s look at the later rent-a-racers, a 2016 GT-H run added 140 more cars to the fleet.

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This article was created with the help of AI and was reviewed and edited by Fast Lane Only editors before publication.