There’s no Shelby badge. No flawless paint. No racing stripes or original Steve McQueen movie poster in the trunk. Kyle Barnes’ ’67 Mustang isn’t selling nostalgia or a posture. It’s living in the now. The patina’s honest and the car looks how it drives. Raw, purposeful, and completely unfettered by what anyone else thinks.
Every dent, scratch, and sunburnt panel is a record of where it’s been. And that’s the point. Every time you paint a car, you erase that. History gets buried under filler, paint, and clear coat. Or sometimes scraped away altogether. Once it’s gone, it can only be remembered, not seen. Patina is different. Patina is memory. Kyle opines, “Life is a journey where you get bumps and bruises along the way, and it's cool to show those.” There’s a fine line between damage and character, between abuse and age, and Kyle walks it with intent. His car isn’t neglected. It’s preserved.
That mindset sets the tone for the rest of the build. This isn’t an overbuilt showpiece, and it’s not some half-baked budget beater either. It’s considered. Mechanical where it needs to be, restrained elsewhere. The raw exterior makes room for a fully sorted chassis. Kyle explained, “The front end's got the Shelby drop. It's got the reinforced lower control arms and it's got the cheater upper control arms. In the rear I have a Panhard with the reinforced leaf springs.” Ducting feeds fresh air to the front brakes. A period cage from the 1970s keeps things grounded in era. It’s not loud about any of it. It just works. Every choice fits into the whole.
Inside, it’s more of the same. Function over fluff. A carpet kit got thrown in to knock the edge off the noise, but there’s no insulation or sound deadening. The gears. The tires. The engine. Nothing gets filtered out. “The Mustang came pretty raw. I actually put the carpet kit in it just to make it a little more comfortable, but no insulation, no sound deadening. Whatever the engine's doing, you hear it and feel it.” He sourced a Busch NASCAR wheel, mounted up some rally timers, and kept the Shelby radio delete panel. The seat creaks, but it hugs like it was made for him. From a driving standpoint, everything is focused, direct, and stripped down, you really feel it all.
That connection to noise, smell, and mechanical feel is all over this car. “Coming from motorcycles, you're used to feeling and hearing everything. There's no music, no air conditioning, no heater. I like that ideology when it comes to cars." No music. No distractions. Just the road, the car, and the feedback loop between them. Out in the mountains, slicing through corners, he talks about hitting a kind of Zen state. “You hit a Zen point where you're really focused, listening to the car, staring at the apex of the corner, and you just zone out. It’s this clear state of mind,” he said.
He could have repainted it. He’s thought about it. But every friend with a glossy car tells him the same thing. Don’t. Leave it. Drive it. Live with it. “I go through times where I consider doing bodywork, but all my friends with super nice paint jobs always tell me not to. It's liberating to have a rough body.” Because the minute it gets nice, it gets complicated. And Kyle didn’t build this car to sit still. It’s been everywhere. Oregon. Washington. Utah. Arizona. California. It’s seen track miles. It’s been rallied. It’s had rocks thrown at it. That doesn’t bother him at all.
He always had a vision for how it should look. “I wanted it to look like it was found abandoned in a field in the early '70s, and some punk kid racer got it running and started racing again. The body's seen better days, but the bones are good.” That mental picture guided the entire build. Not some Instagram rendering. Not a checklist of parts. Just a story, told in steel, rubber, and restraint. “It’s built for a purpose. It's built for fun. It's built for using,” he added. “The engine's a mildly built 289. It's got a street cam, equal length headers, side by side exhaust. Holley 4150, upgraded coolant system.” Nothing crazy. Enough to keep it quick, but reliable enough to not sweat gas stations 200 miles apart. Now that he works as a machinist at Mountain USA, options for more power are endless. “I work at Mountain USA and I'm an engine builder machinist. It's a candy shop. Unlimited options and so much potential,” Kyle said. But restraint is a theme here. Kyle knows the difference between doing something because you can, and doing it because it makes the car better.
Some people won’t get it. They’ll see a crusty Mustang and wonder why he didn’t paint it, lower it, or clean it up. That’s fine. This car doesn’t need anyone's approval. It was built with a specific person in mind. The guy who owns it. And in that way, it’s perfect.
Patina isn’t about laziness, and its often seen as such. But it’s not a lack of effort. It’s choosing to let the car keep its story. And in Kyle Barnes’ Mustang, the story still shows. And Kyle’s still adding chapters. “At the end of the day, it does what I wanted it to do, and it's in the style I like. You can make the car perfect. But you have perfection or life experience. I choose life experience,” Kyle said.
