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A genuine Indianapolis 500 Pace Car promotional Mustang, hidden for decades under a coat of white paint with no stripes, is now bidding on Hagerty Marketplace out of Sterling Heights, Michigan. As of this writing the auction shows a high bid of $14,500 with several days still left on the clock, and the current owner has had the car since 1982 — 44 years and counting.
A car that forgot what it was
Ford built roughly 220 of these Pace Car Mustangs to commemorate the 1964 Indianapolis 500, finishing them in Pace Car White with blue rocker stripes and Indy 500 graphics on the doors. This one, reportedly identified as car number 041, followed a strange path to obscurity. According to the seller, the Mustang was ordered by a Missouri family for their son's high school graduation through Fellini-Mayfield Ford in Springfield, but delivery was delayed because the car itself had been sent to Indianapolis to serve as a courtesy vehicle during the race weekend.
Not long after the original owner finally took possession, the car picked up a dent in a parking lot. The insurance settlement didn't cover restriping, so the shop doing the bodywork simply pulled the Pace Car graphics off entirely. From that point on, it was just a white Mustang — and every subsequent owner, including the seller when they bought it in 1982, had no idea what they were looking at.
The truth came out through detective work rather than paperwork. The current owner traced the car's identity through its paint code and the Pace Car etching hidden in the radiator core support, then confirmed the story by phone with the original owner, who supplied a period photo and a letter recounting the car's history. The Pace Car graphics went back on in 1983, and the seller has kept the car — and the documentation trail — ever since.
What's actually under the graphics
The chassis number, 5F07F119460, decodes to a 1965 model-year Mustang coupe built at the Dearborn, Michigan plant with the F-code 260-cubic-inch V8, backed here by a C4 automatic transmission. That drivetrain saw an overhaul and reseal in 1983, the transmission was rebuilt in 2008, and the carburetor was rebuilt again in 2020, alongside a new stainless exhaust system. The seller notes the engine bay itself was deliberately left alone during the refresh, specifically to preserve the original Pace Car identification stamped into the core support.
Cosmetically, this isn't a show car, and the listing doesn't pretend otherwise: there's paint bubbling and chipping on the quarter panels, evidence of an old right-rear quarter-panel repair from that original parking-lot dent, aged weatherstripping, and a scratch in the passenger glass that the seller says came courtesy of the original owner's cousin on a road trip to New York decades ago. The car rides on period-correct Firestone 7.00-13 bias-ply tires, and the sale includes a date-code-correct radio, the spare, and a stack of ownership and Pace Car documentation. Odometer reads 4,405 miles, though it's noted as TMU — too many miles unknown — given the car's age and the rollover-prone five-digit odometers of the era.
Where the market sits right now
For a sense of scale, Hagerty's Valuation Tools currently price a 1965 Mustang coupe with this exact drivetrain — the 260-cubic-inch 2-barrel V8 — at $20,400 in #3 "Good" condition, a figure that's actually softened about 6% recently. That's the baseline for a solid, drivable example without factoring in the Pace Car history, the documentation, or the single-family, 44-year ownership chain, all of which are exactly the kind of provenance that tends to move a car above guide numbers once bidders start comparing notes. It's also worth noting Hagerty's own market research has found that private-sale prices have closed much of the gap with auction results over the past couple of years, largely because condition and paperwork now matter more to buyers than the venue a car sells through — which makes a documented history like this one worth real money at the hammer.
Six-cylinder '65 coupes value in the high teens, while V8 convertibles and GT-spec cars climb well into the thirties and beyond, so where this particular coupe lands will come down to how bidders weigh a well-documented but cosmetically honest Pace Car against the cost of sorting one out.
For more from this corner of the hobby, check out our look at the coolest cars currently listed on Hagerty Marketplace, this one-family-owned Porsche 356SC that stayed with the same household for 66 years, our roundup of the coolest pace cars ever built, a restorable 1979 Mustang Indy Pace Car from a later generation of the breed, and ten things you probably didn't know about the classic Mustang.
The auction remains live on Hagerty Marketplace, with bidding and comments open to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the car's history before it changes hands again.
