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The SHELBY AMERICAN
Spring 2016 11
The SHELBY AMERICAN
My Dad ordered his Boss 351 new
in February of 1971 and it was deliv-
ered in April. He ordered it with a
“radio delete” option because he said
he wanted to “
hear that engine
.” I
don’t think my mother thought very
much of it, and a year and a month
later he replaced it with a new ‘72
Mercury Montego. I bought the Boss
from him. I put a factory AM/8-track
stereo radio in it, along with Shelby
10-spoke wheels, rear window louvers
and a Mach I urethane front bumper.
I pulled the Boss 351 engine and
dropped it into my Pantera. The
12,000-mile Pantera engine went into
the Boss. Back in those days at Ford, I
was working so much overtime that I
didn’t have time to get the Boss run-
ning. I sold it to a friend who owned a
Pantera with the 351-C installed. He
got the car back into running condi-
tion.
About a year later, 1976 or 1977, I
got a call from the guy I had sold the
Boss to. He said that the car had died
on him on the road and he had to walk
to a phone booth to get help. By the
time he had gotten back to the car,
somebody had tossed a Molotov cock-
tail into it. It burned up and was de-
stroyed.
When I sold the Pantera I kept the
Boss 351 engine which had originally
come in my Dad’s Boss. I knew that
someday I would build a Cobra kit car
and this was the engine I wanted to
put in it. I took the engine to a builder
friend of mine who had previously
done some small jobs for me. I had
planned to have him rebuild it; it had
over 100,000 miles on it. To my horror,
the guy went bankrupt, closed his
shop and sold my Boss 351 engine.
– Jeff Burgy
Burgy [
left
] drove the Boss on his wedding day. Note: the decorations didn’t last long.
Since that episode I have checked
eBay on occasion, hoping I might find
my old Boss 351 engine. Imagine my
shock when I found my old car, the
Boss 351, for sale. I had thought it had
been destroyed, but apparently not. I
guess the Molotov cocktail damaged
the engine compartment but didn’t in-
cinerate the entire car as I had imag-
ined.
The sale of the car on eBay gener-
ated a lot negative press on the site.
Almost everybody said it was a fake
and could not be a
REAL
Boss 351 be-
cause it had a Mach I bumper, was set
up for an automatic transmission and
a regular, non-Boss 351C engine. Even
though I, myself, had installed the
Mach I urethane bumper and con-
verted the car from a four-speed to a
C6 automatic, most of the naysayers
on eBay and the Boss 302 Exchange
remained unconvinced.
The car was still in Michigan, so I
went to look at it. I was 100% con-
vinced it was my old Boss. Although I
would have liked to get it back, it was
just way too rusty for my taste. I’m
done with rust-buckets.
The car still had the rear window
louvers I had installed as well as the
rear bumper, which I had painted with
rattle-cans. It was amazing that it
held up that well. Whoever painted
the car screwed up and painted the
hood in the Mach I style black-out in-
stead of the Boss-style black-out. The
Boss 351 side scallops were also posi-
tioned too high on the front fenders. I
got a call a few months later from the
guy who bought the car from eBay. It
was still in Michigan, but I’ve since
lost his contact information. I never
found the engine, either.
Burgy was involved with a similar Boss
351 that was owned by a friend of his, John
Denyer. A friend of Denyer’s was street
racing the car when he crashed it.