The REAL Story of the Shelby Maverick

This summer, a TV show that has been covered heavily in other threads, attempted to do a Shelby version of my daughter's 1971 Grabber Maverick. While I was originally recruited to do the show based on the premise that the show was about "taking old cars, making them faster and racing them to show the improvements", I had no idea that a comedy with bunch of fat guys would touch my cars. That said, and it truly is "television", not "tele-truth", here is a true Maverick story for you.
My daughter is a true Maverick nut. I had one as a winer beater in high school, but despite working on and racing a slew of 50's and 60's Fords and Mercurys, she was drawn to a little red 1972 Maverick at the age of 15. She had it at the drag strip 11 days after getting her drivers license and did a ton of work to it with me over the years while she drove it to school and two jobs all through high school. After joining the Air Force, she saved up to buy a real Grabber Blue Grabber, which was her dream car. While stationed in Alaska, she found one in South Dakota that was an old drag rat, but solid and a true blue Grabber. She shipped it to my house in Ohio with hopes of restoring and customizing it similar to Ray Parrish's (Rayzorsharp) Maverick.

 

My buddy and I helped the body shop on the show disassemble the car and start some of the bodywork. I wasn't able to stay on the project past that since I had been painting my purple 1951 Mercury for another episode and had used all my vacation time on it. We had agreed on a lot of mods, including welding in the 1968 Shelby tail panel. As you may have seen on the show, the lights were just hacked into the factory panel, and were pretty crooked. They painted the car gray instead of blue which nearly brought Shelby to tears during filming. They broke the drivers seat, put the car together with zip ties and half the bolts, hacked some ghetto driving lights into the factory Grabber grille, wired it wrong, painted over dents and scratches, put the stripes on 3/4" off to one side and made one 3/8" wider than the other, etc. Sadly, I could go on and on. When we got the car back, tt was so screwed up it had to be trailered home. I had originally drove it an hour to the set.

 

At that time, I obviously realized that I had trusted a bunch of idiots to save my daughter some money and restore her car. They had seemed very willing to help out a decorated veteran and seemed sincere, but knew nothing and didn't care at all about vintage cars. It had simply become a show prop. With the help of some friends and my younger daughter we stripped the car, fixed the mechanical nightmare that they created, and began building it back into the car that we originally intended to build.

 

As you can see, most of the work was done outside.

 

One of my friends let me use an old defunct MAACO body shop booth downtown to shoot the car. He's a very talented body man and had much nicer tools than mine. With his help, we removed all the dents, put the stripes in the MIDDLE, and painted the car.

 

Once home again, I installed the chin spoiler, trim, and reassembled the car. My upholsterer buddy knocked the interior out of the park, and the car is finally back the way we intended it to be. Just to be clear, Shelby paid for the parts and interior while my friends and me did the labor. If the wasn't stationed in Alaska at the moment, she would have surely helped the entire time. I simply couldn't leave her with a screwed up car because a bunch of Hollywood types and pretend car-guy actors thought they could build a car. She's getting stained in Tampa, Florida this December and is finally getting to take her car with her where she can drive it daily again. That's the short version of the TV show Maverick. It was quite a nightmare, but with the help of a lot of cool friends, the story had a happy ending. I know there are lots of Maverick fans here and I've used this site for info while working on her car with her. I've really grown to love these cars while working with her on her red one and restoring her blue one. I never would have made it this far if not for the help of Ray Parrish. He's a truly great guy and a wealth of knowledge when it comes to Mavericks. His car was the original inspiration for my daughter's build, and his kind words along the way meant a great deal to both of us as well. Thanks for reading!

 

Cool I wasnt impressed with the show at all

 

Awesome Story Beautiful Car
Glad You Daughter Can Now Enjoy it
And Tell You Daughter Thank You For Protecting This Country

 

Thanks for the update. If the car is around next summer....bring it out to some of the area Mini-Meets and Roundup Nationals.

 

yeah i think i posted the thread that ended up bashing that show lol.... I'm so glad you took it and did it right. it looks great!

 

make that a x2!

 

I think that I would have been tempted to make a youtube video showing the shoddy work that the TV show did and then again done properly.
Nice work Gasser, Shelby now has a very sharp looking car that will be the envy of many Floridians.

 

great job on on the car.
i hated that show and was done watching after the second episode till they showed the teaser for the following week and showed the maverick. so that became the last episode i saw. i thought they had done a bad job from watching the show but man to hear what truly happened, really reaffirmed my opinion of that joke of a show. it seemed to go off air not to long after that. i imagine that the show had you sign liability wavers keeping you from any recourse. good recovery from a bad deal.

 

I'm really glad your nightmare had a happy ending. When I watched that episode, I was pretty disgusted with how those guys hacked that car up.

Oh, and I love your Signature.

 

The car looks great... Tell Shelby if she has the time to come up to Silver Springs,Fl. NPD has it's all ford show the 2nd weekend of January... We would love to have her and the car join us...