Representative 1966 Shelby GT350H, not Allen's car. Photo: crudmucosa / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0
Tim Allen says his 1966 Shelby GT350H is “one of five, I believe,” four-speed cars built for Hertz. Shelby supplied Hertz with 1,000 GT350H cars that year, and about 915 of them had the C4 automatic, according to the RM Sotheby’s catalog for a GT350H it sold in Arizona in 2024. That leaves roughly 85 manuals.
Allen made the claim in the first episode of Open Garage, a new Petersen Automotive Museum YouTube series that went inside his shop with two back-to-back episodes posted October 10. Part one runs 21 minutes and had passed 850,000 views by Tuesday. Part two runs 22. Allen opens by asking the crew whether they hadn’t already done this about five years ago.
He hedges more than most collectors do on camera. He introduces his Ford RS200 story with “I exaggerate to clarify,” and before naming a Cadillac engine size he warns that his numbers are probably wrong. So we checked the ones he did commit to against factory records, the same way we sorted Cristiano Ronaldo’s garage and Dolly Parton’s.
The Hertz car and the 911S
The GT350H is the car Allen calls his dream car since childhood. His version of the program’s history: renters took the Shelbys to Detroit Dragway for the day, Hertz switched to automatics, and then it stopped renting them. Once he finally drove his, he called his man in Detroit to report something wrong with it. It was hard to park at the grocery store. The answer he got was that a ’66 Mustang is basically a truck with a big motor.
If you are shopping for a four-speed GT350H, the serial number matters more than the gearbox in the car today. The Shelby American Automobile Club registry tracks these cars individually, and Hertz-era records can be thin: RM’s catalog for chassis SFM 6S715 says its original color “was not recorded in surviving documents.” We covered an all-original GT350H that resurfaced last year.
Allen’s early Porsche 911S gets the same treatment. He calls the short-wheelbase car particularly dangerous for him, says Michael and Mario Andretti told him the question was when it would spin rather than if, and says Porsche fixed it by stretching the wheelbase five or six inches. Porsche’s own history says the wheelbase grew 57 mm, about 2.2 inches, starting with model year 1969. Porsche did fix the problem he describes, with a stretch less than half the size he remembers.
The Dodges
Allen tells a story about needling Tim Kuniskis, then running Dodge, with the claim that a Tesla Model S Plaid had 1,000 horsepower. Months later, he says, Kuniskis sent him a picture of the Demon 170. Dodge rated the 170 at 1,025 hp on E85 and 900 hp on E10. Allen’s complaint is the ethanol: he says you have to drive all over town to find a station that sells it.
He credits the original Demon, his favorite of the pair, with 900 hp. Dodge’s figure for the 2018 Demon was 840. The 900 belongs to the 170 on pump gas. His account of testing the 170 holds up better as a story: a police-closed city street, a fit of laughter halfway down it, and Jay Leno’s crew, who had the other car, reporting the same reaction. Demon 170 engines are valuable enough that one turned up inside a wrecked Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT.
The tour starts with the newest car in the building, a Ford Mustang GTD, which Allen says has very little Mustang in it. Ford’s spec sheet backs him on the hardware: 815 hp and a rear-mounted eight-speed transaxle. Ford is still choosing buyers, and its European applications close October 16.
The Impala and the Cadillacs
Episode two includes a custom Impala that Chevrolet helped him build around the four-cam LT5 from the Corvette ZR-1, an engine he says Mercury Marine built in Oklahoma City. GM contracted Mercury Marine to build the LT5 at its plant in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and rated it at 375 hp at launch in 1990 and 405 hp by 1993, according to the National Corvette Museum. Allen puts his Impala at about 780 hp and doesn’t say what was done to the engine to roughly double the factory rating. He built two, he says. The second is a slug with no engine or interior, made for show duty.
He also claims a share of the idea behind Cadillac’s V-Series. Allen says he and a Detroit builder, since deceased, put together five or six performance Cadillacs, including a DeVille DTS for Motor Trend, and that today’s V-Series cars, which he calls the Blackhawks, descend from that work. He says Cadillac won’t acknowledge it and that he doesn’t want credit, which leaves nothing on paper to check.
His 1950 Series 61 is a garage find on its second restoration, now with three Stromberg carburetors and a three-on-the-tree. Allen guesses the factory engine displaced 342 or 346 cubic inches. Cadillac’s V8 that year was 331, the figure the Revs Institute lists for the Series 61 that Sam and Miles Collier drove to 10th at Le Mans in 1950. Allen’s broader point, that this was one of the few American cars raced there, checks out.
The Volvo
The slowest car on the tour belongs to his wife, a Volvo coupe like the one from The Saint, bought as a surprise. The seller called it a 100-point restoration. It wouldn’t start, and Allen says it took almost a year to put right. He says one owner online has 1.2 million miles on the same model. The best-documented one, Irv Gordon’s 1966 P1800, passed 3 million miles in 2013, according to Volvo.
What goes next
Allen says of his 1967 Ferrari 330 GTC, the first expensive car he bought, from a man in Chicago, that he doesn’t buy cars to sell them. Later in the same tour he says he is thinning the herd, using his mentor Bruce Meyer’s collection as the model, where every car in the building matters. He puts himself about 80% of the way there, and one row in episode two is already missing a 442 and a Hemi. He has let cars go before: a Brawler GT-R motorcycle he bought in 2015 sold at auction in 2024.
He doesn’t say which cars are leaving. Some of the cars on the tour work for his ABC sitcom Shifting Gears, including a 1970 Pontiac with the Ram Air IV 400, the kind of car he drag raced on Woodward Avenue, which he still drives, and he says the show has a third season coming at midseason. The Petersen says new Open Garage episodes will post weekly, with other collectors.
Allen’s shop runs from a 1,025-hp Demon to a Volvo he says his mother could outrun with a walker. If you could drive one car out, is it the Hertz Shelby or the Demon 170?
Sources: Petersen Automotive Museum, Open Garage episodes one and two (YouTube, Oct. 10, 2026); RM Sotheby’s lot catalog, 1966 Shelby GT350 H, chassis SFM 6S715; Porsche Newsroom, 60 Years Porsche 911 press kit; Stellantis, Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 announcement; Ford, Mustang GTD specifications; National Corvette Museum, LT5 engine history; Revs Institute, 1950 Cadillac Series 61; Volvo Cars press release on Irv Gordon’s P1800.
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