1968 Ford Mustang ‘Bullitt’ Hero Car’s Complicated History
Steve McQueen himself was unable to buy his four-wheeled co-star back from its longtime owner.
History isn’t always made on the battlefield or in a courtroom. It may not be written with ink. Back in the late 1960s, automotive history was made on the streets and hills of San Francisco, and scrawled on the pavement by the tires of green Ford Mustangs in the Steve McQueen film Bullitt.
Two Mustangs were used in the filming of the movie that includes what many consider to be one of the most iconic car chases in cinematic history. Ford recently paid homage to the Mustang-vs-Charger battle when it announced the 2019 Mustang Bullitt in the video below.
One of those cars was used as a stunt machine, making jumps and generally taking a lot of abuse. It wound up in a Mexican junkyard. The other Mustang, the “hero” car that lived a much easier on-set life, has a spotty past. Hagerty went through the trouble of documenting it in one of its newest articles, which tells a story about the bond between family members, the connection between a man and a machine, and how life can sometimes leave blank chapters in someone’s personal automotive history.
After Bullitt, the Highland Green 1968 Mustang fastback was used as a commuter car by a movie editor at the Warner Bros. studios. A police detective named Frank Marranca became the next owner of the Bullitt hero car in 1971. He had it shipped to New Jersey. It was during his ownership that some hoodlum stole the car’s shift knob and aftermarket wood steering wheel. Eventually, Marranca needed a more family-friendly car, so he advertised his 1968 Mustang with the GT package and a 390-cubic-inch V8 for sale in the October 1974 issue of Road & Track magazine. Another man in New Jersey bought it for $6,000. His name was Bob Kiernan. The Mustang has been a part of his family since then.
Not even Steve McQueen, who wrote to Kiernan offering to buy the car back in 1977, could part him from the possession he valued so much. Only three years later, the same year McQueen died, the clutch went out and the iconic Mustang went into a garage. Over the years, the car moved with or without Kiernan and his family from Cincinnati to a family friend’s place in Kentucky to the Kiernan farm in Tennessee.
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In 2001, when Ford introduced a Bullitt version of its contemporary Mustang GT, Kiernan and his son Sean planned to get the ’68 back on the road. The Hagerty piece reads, “Now 33 years old and with a bad clutch, the Bullitt was tired. ‘We planned to do just enough to make it drivable. We didn’t want to touch the history,’ said Sean. They took it apart, but then, Sean said, ‘Life happened.’ Bob was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Sean got married and had a kid. And the Mustang sat, in pieces.”
