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.