Article: The Fran Hernandez Collection - Kar-Kraft Mustangs

[Steve Holmes]

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This amazing little collection of photos was sent to me some time back by Randy Hernandez, son of the great Fran Hernandez, who headed Fords racing programs during the 1960s. We featured the Ford GT40 images supplied by Randy just recently.

The photos in this collection feature two different cars which, on the surface, are quite different. However, the photos themselves were taken just a few weeks apart, and are actually quite closely related.

[Steve Holmes]

Ford had a fairly torrid time in the 1968 Trans-Am series. They came into the season with high hopes, and took victory in the opening race at Daytona, where the Trans-Am championship had its own class in the 24 Hour race.

Knowing they were on the back-foot in terms of horsepower compare to Chevys 302 cu.in motor, Ford developed its powerful 302 engine with its tunnel-port heads, to replace the outgoing 289. However, the tunnel-port motors proved woefully unreliable, with the pair of Shelby cars suffering a blow-up in almost every race.

At seasons end, one of the 1968 Shelby Mustangs was modified with a large hole in its hood, and taken testing, running back-to-back comparisons with three different engine combinations, including the tunnel-port, a Gurney-Weslake headed motor, and a third option which would go on to be named the Boss 302. While the Gurney unit proved the fastest, Ford opted for the Boss, on account of cost. In order for the motor to be homologated for the Trans-Am, a minimum 1,000 units would have to be produced.

The photos here were taken during that late 1968 test.

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[Steve Holmes]

These engine bay shots are interesting.

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The 1968 Trans-Am Mustangs were run by the Shelby race team, who also did much of the work in designing and building them. However, some of the work was farmed out to Kar-Kraft. But for 1969, Kar-Kraft were charged with doing virtually all the design and early build work, including constructing at least one complete car.

This photo shows the prototype 1969 Kar-Kraft Trans-Am Mustang in an almost completed sate. Note the interesting large hood scoop which never actually made it onto the Boss 302 road cars or the race cars.

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[Steve Holmes]

This is the envelope Randy found the following images in, dated December 1968.

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Here is part of the article I wrote for Muscle Car Digital Magazine, where I featured the following photos:

For 1969, Ford would run its handsome new Mustang Sportsroof model, where previously they were using the coupe. In addition, Ford would run two teams, each fielding two cars (and sometimes more). Shelby was back, with drivers Peter Revson and Horst Kwech, but Shelby was now almost playing a secondary role to the returning Bud Moore Engineering, who’d entered the Trans-Am series in 1967, running the factory Mercury Cougars. When Fords top brass decided they didn’t want Mustang and Cougar competing head to head, they backed Bud Moore to convince Bill France, of NASCAR, to create a pony car series raced on speedway ovals. Beginning in 1968, NASCAR Grand Touring kicked off, and Bud Moore’s team were prominent in their factory Cougars, but Fran brought Bud back to the higher-profile Trans-Am series for 1969. The hugely talented Parnelli Jones and George Follmer would be the drivers.

Rather than have the teams build their own cars, Hernandez instead had a small batch of hand-built 1969 model Mustang Sportsroofs constructed at Kar-Kraft, and these cars featured an incredible level of detail and heavy modification in all areas, specifically to make them as fast and efficient as possible.

Pictured here is the recently completed 1969 Kar-Kraft prototype. These images date December 14, 1968, as denotes the brown envelope the negatives have been safely stored in for decades. The blue body color suggests this car was assigned to the Shelby team. Its thought Kar-Kraft built three cars to this completed stage (including a car for Smokey Yunick that would be run in the NASCAR Grand Touring series), with the remaining cars supplied in various stages of completion, being finished by the race teams.

The level of detail in these images is staggering. Clearly, straight line speed was important, and all the panel gaps and door gaps are of show-car quality. The front and rear bumpers are pinched in tightly towards the body. Fenders are cleanly flared to cater for the latest racing rubber wrapping the Trans-Am maximum 15 x 8 inch wheel size. Although the drip rails have been retained (as per the rules), there appears to be a very neat cover on the A-pillars that effectively cancels out the protrusion of the A-pillar drip rail, allowing cleaner movement through the air. Side markers have been removed, while the headlights have been filled. The front spoiler appears to be hand-made, or at least heavily modified, and mounted at a much more aggressive angle than standard, and much closer to the ground.

The side and rear quarter angles clearly show the drooped nose the Kar-Kraft cars had. To create a more aerodynamic body shape, and to get their noses as close to the ground as possible, K-K engineers cut a pie shape from the inner fender sheet metal above the shock towers and along the front. This, the engineers referred to as the “cake walk”. Essentially, 2 inches was cut from the top of the radiator support section at the front, graduating back in a wedge along the side inner fenders, before being joined back together. As a result, the nose clip and front fenders attached to this section drooped downward, bringing the nose closer to the ground. A knock-on effect of this was that the front fenders also had to be modified, as they now slanted forward, creating a panel gap between the top rear of the fender, while the lower rear of the fender overlapped the door slightly.

[Steve Holmes]

Each of the K-K cars were built like this, although SCCA tech inspectors eventually caught on, and demanded the cars be brought back to standard. Indeed, the 2 inch cut would only be brought back to a 1 inch cut. Its possible the only K-K car that was unaffected by this change was the Bud Moore supplied car which was gifted to Canadian driver Allan Moffat, to take with him to race in Australia. His car was already domiciled down-under by the time the SCCA tech guys demanded the changes be made.

The prototype Mustang pictured is wearing the popular 5-spoke American Racing ‘Torq Thrust’ wheels that most Trans-Am cars used in 1968. The front wheels and hubs are a 5 x 5 inch stud pattern, rather than the standard Ford 5 x 4.5 inches. In 1968, the factory Trans-Am Mustangs used the larger and beefier Lincoln 5 x 5 inch front brakes for greater performance and durability, which required having different front wheels cast. This was carried over onto the 1969 prototype. American Racing released their new 200-R wheel for the start of the 1969 season, and both the Bud Moore and Shelby cars wore these in the early races, although some failures saw them switch to the popular 8-spoke Minilite, which became the new Trans-Am wheel of choice among most teams.

Despite their two-pronged effort, Ford was again beaten to the Trans-Am title in 1969 by Penske, although the Mustangs dominated the early rounds, winning the first four races. Several of the Fords got wrecked during the season, placing a strain on the supply of cars and parts, which in turn put them on the back-foot as the season progressed.

For 1970, Ford made major cut-backs to its racing programs, with the Trans-Am budget thought to have been slashed by as much as 75%. But regardless, with what were basically updated versions of the cars built for 1969 by Kar-Kraft, the two car Bud Moore factory entry dominated the 1970 Trans-Am series before Ford withdrew altogether. Such was the quality of these cars.

Writer and historian Alex Gabbard interviewed Fran Hernandez for his book “Fast Mustangs”, which was released in 1990. In it, Fran remarked; “I was officed at Kar-Kraft and running the program when we were doing all that (Trans-Am) racing. I had Bud Moore, Carroll Shelby, and Bill Stroppe doing some racing for me, and also the independents. Ed Hull was the principle designer behind all my work as well as the design work behind the Mark IV Ford that we ran at Le Mans (which won the race in 1967). Ed was a very prominent person, overall, in our racing program, body and chassis. He assisted me in designing my suspension system for my Trans-Am cars. Had we (Ford) stayed with racing in 1970, as progressive as we were, and well ahead of everybody else, ’70 would have been more of a “no contest” than it was because we actually built no more chassis in 1970. ‘69s were the last cars we used. We were out of the picture. 1969 was our last big effort in racing. 1970 was when Ford got out of racing completely, the Le Mans effort shut down, the Kar-Kraft effort went away, and our racing was gone”.

[Steve Holmes]

And these are the photos that were in the envelope:

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My thanks to Randy Hernandez for kindly sharing these beautiful images.