Peter Gregg Trans-Am 1970 Mustang Boss 302 headed to auction
Source: Hemmings
Photos courtesy Mecum Auctions

At the end of the 1970 Trans-Am season, as Ford was pulling its factory support from Bud Moore’s team, four Kar Kraft-built Boss 302 Mustangs remained, unused in the team’s decisive trounce of the competition. Delivered as bodies in white, they would allow the team to mount one final campaign in sports car racing in 1971. Now, more than 40 years later, the first of those four cars is scheduled to cross the block at Mecum’s Monterey auction.



Moore would end up building only three of the four Boss 302s into race cars for the 1971 season, and with one designated as a backup, only two of those three would actually compete. The first of the two, known as #1-1971 (or, alternately, by its SCCA roll bar inspection number – 18159), Moore assigned to Peter Gregg, who had already enjoyed plenty of success in Trans-Am’s Under-2.5-Liter class and would take Parnelli Jones’s spot on the team. Gregg responded by finishing seven of the eight races Moore entered that year and placing in four, including the Bryar 200, in which Gregg finished second behind George Follmer in the other Moore-entered Boss 302.



At the end of the 1971 season, Moore sold #1-1971 to Marshall Robbins, who campaigned it in Trans-Am for the 1972 season. After Robbins, it passed through a few other racers’ hands, including Edward Ludtke, who restored it to its 1971 appearance in the mid-1980s and entered it in numerous vintage races. After Ludtke sold it in 1988, Trans-Am expert Richard Roedeck treated it to a more thorough restoration in the mid-1990s; #1-1971 later passed through the hands of collector John Mozart, who sold it at RM’s Monterey auction in 2003 for $343,200. Six years later, it sold at Gooding’s Scottsdale auction for $407,000, and has since returned to the historic racing circuit. More recently, it appeared at this year’s Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance.

As for the remaining body-in-white Bud Moore Boss 302s, Wolfgang Kohrn’s ponysite.de has the full rundown: the second car, #2-1971, which replaced the 1970 championship-winning car partway through the 1971 season, remains in mostly original condition; #3-1971, the designated back-up car which never raced in the 1971 Trans-Am season, has been restored to 1971 livery and is active on the vintage racing circuit; and #4-1971, which Moore left as a body in white, was never actually built into a functioning car until late last year.

Mecum’s Monterey auction will take place August 16-18 at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa. For more information, visit Mecum.com



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