The story told by Ewin van Beurden:
I purchased the car around May 1999. A friend of mine owned this car for about 5 years.
He bought the car from a small American car dealer in a close-by village, this car dealer told me later that at least 3 Shelby Europas went through his hands (including the one in New Zeeland). My friend thought that he simply bought a Shelby Engine, but when he wanted to pick it up, he was told that he bought a nearly complete car including papers. Big surprise.
The car was completely disassembled at that time. The car dealer took the engine apart and had put some new parts in it, because it didn’t run due to a wrong camshaft. The engine was then installed in a 1970 Mach1 where it still is for this moment.
The rest of the car was put up under the ceiling at his company.
Besides the Shelby Europa, my friend owned a Mustang 1970 Mach1 and a Mustang 1967 390GTA that he started a restoration in 1996 or 1997. Due to other doings he lost interest in restoring the 390GTA. At that time I parked my 1971 convertible in his garage because I didn't have the space myself. When I asked him, what I would owe him for parking my car, he said it's OK, because he had enough room and it didn’t bother him. As I felt, I owed him something, I started to finish the restoration on his 390GTA. In the past years, I had asked him several times, if he would not sell his Shelby Europa to me, but he said it didn’t eat bread (this is a typical Dutch saying for things that are not losing value when left alone).
The restoration of the 390GTA didn’t go easy in his garage because he didn’t have the right tools. At my father’s garage, I had the right tooling and I had a car lift to work on the car. Because the restoration was going slow, he asked me what he had to pay me for finishing the car quicker. I told him that I rather didn’t make this kind of deal normally, because I am a not a professional car mechanic and only like to work on cars when I want. But I told him, when he would bring the 390GTA to my father’s garage, things would go faster. I didn’t ask him any money for the work, I did, because I still parked my convertible and another 1971 Mach1 that I purchased in his garage.
The next day I went to his garage to pick up my convertible for a drive, he came to me and said "I want to make a deal with you for the restoration. I take the 390 to your fathers garage, so you can work on it and for a X amount of money you can buy my Shelby Europa. So in other words, he would sell me the Shelby for a low price and I had to do some work for him. But I had to finish the 390 within a year from then on.
Well these kinds of things you only have to say once to me. As a real Mustang fan I was very excited about this deal of course. I took care of the restoration of the 390GTA within a year.
November 2000 I finally picked up the Shelby Europe and put it in my garage. The car is now waiting for a complete restoration. Before I had picked up the car, I found out there was another Shelby Europa in the Netherlands, so I contacted Team Mustang Center in the Netherlands, to ask If they knew about this car and give me the owner’s address.
They wouldn’t give me the owners address due to privacy reasons, but they would ask him to contact me. A few weeks later I received a phone call from the owner that I could visit him and take some pictures from his car.
Later on I also had contact with the last known owner of my Shelby. He was not able to answer me personally because of some medical reasons, but his family left me the message that if there were some pictures of the original car, they would sent them to me. Until today I did not receive anything, so they either cannot find any pictures or they have forgotten all about it.
In 1999 I had a phone conversation with Claude Dubois himself. The bad news is that he was not able to give me any information about my car because he got rid of everything. But after he saw the information and papers I had given him, he told me that he never build a GT500 officially, but that he made two or three cars with the 351-4v 356hp engine and registered them as a GT350. It was very likely that I have one of them, if you have a look at the special card that came with my car. It says there is a special camshaft in my engine.
Although my Shelby Europe is not complete, all the goodies are still with the car such as the special 15" Shelby Cal 500 wheels, the ram air system is complete, the special steering wheel is still there and the special fog lights (Marchal) are still there. The power window motors are not missing, as well.
One of the Marchal foglights was broken and rusted but I was very lucky to buy them in an as good as new condition for a whopping 150NLG (75 EURO)!
Later I will pick up the engine and transmission (matching numbers) and will start the restoration.
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