1975 Yellow Pages ad

Back in 1975, when this ad ran in The Yellow Pages, there was still a large number of new car dealerships within the Buffalo city limits. One of them was a little different from most of the others, though. It wasn’t selling new cars from “The Big Three,” or American Motors, or even any of the popular imports. It was building and selling replicas of the Ford GT40, a high performance sports car which won the 24 Hours of LeMans four times in a row back in the early 1960s. A car that in recent years once again went into production at Ford (for real, not a replicar) for model years 2005 and 2006, and then, again, that was it.

early 1960s Ford GT40

There were many replicar versions of the original GT40 (Ford couldn’t use the name “GT40″ for the newer cars because they no longer owned the name, thus the “Ford GT”), starting back in the 1960s, and continuing today. Obviously, this building, which housed Classic Auto Replicas at 584 Wilson St. on Buffalo’s east side, is not currently building Ford GTs. From the looks of it, I’d hazard a guess not much of anything is going on in there. But, back in the day… what a cool car!

Jim Corbran, You Auto Know

2005 Ford GT

early Ford GT40 replicar

584 Wilson St., Buffalo N.Y today