There have been many famous Eleanors over the years. Take Eleanor Roosevelt, for instance, the longest-serving First Lady in U.S. history, or Eleanor Powell, the critically acclaimed movie star who dominated the Golden Age of Hollywood’s musical scene. Say the name to a car obsessive, though, and they’ll get goosebumps for a very different reason.
Meet Eleanor Raines (we might have voluntarily added the Raines bit in), which is the hero car used by Memphis Raines (Nicholas Cage) in “Gone in 60 Seconds” – a car movie so good it didn’t need a sequel. Eleanor is a first-generation Shelby Mustang GT500 … sort of. Because the movie’s producers didn’t want to harm actual GT500s — a smart move in hindsight, given that only a fraction of the movie cars survived — they used regular and more accessible Mustang Fastbacks instead.
To make their miniature army of Eleanors look the part, and to draw maximum oohs and ahs from theatergoers, they carried out a spate of modifications. Aside from the iconic black stripes and gray body exterior finish, those include a completely bespoke body kit, a pair of central fog lights, a more pronounced hood, side-exit exhaust pipes, and unique wheels. So, if you were wondering whether the producers just snatched nearly a dozen cars from the late, great Carroll Shelby and took them to “Pimp My Ride,” you can set your mind at ease.
You see, original GT500s were — and are — ridiculously valuable. Some people get around it by making knockoff examples, helped by the fact that the federal court says you can build an Eleanor Mustang legally now. But the producers thought of a different solution: Why not just pretend like the movie features GT500s, when in truth, they’re just modified versions of regular 1967 Ford Mustang Fastbacks? It was the perfect crime.
To make things more convincing, they did managed to obtain a real GT500 to sling around Willow Springs for a couple of hours, which then became the on-screen sound for Eleanor. The car(s) you see sliding around and making a general mockery of the boys in blue, though, are largely 289 Ford Mustang Fastbacks with automatic gearboxes. Some of the cars used in the more frantic scenes were upgraded with Ford’s 351 V8 crate engines, producing around 400 horsepower, and paired with manual transmissions to make the sequences easier to do.
11 cars were built in total, with three of them being fully functional and used in the main scenes with Cage. The others predominantly served as backup stunt cars and as props during promotional events. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, most of the functioning cars didn’t make it to the movie premiere. It’s unclear exactly how many of the original Eleanors still exist, but we do know the actual lead car sold for over $1 million in 2013. We’d rather not even think about what it’s worth now.
Regardless of how badly you want one, we’re urging people to stop doing Eleanor restomods as well. The idea behind restomods is really very cool: Take a clunker of a car, give it a shiny new design and modernized internals, and charge a crazy amount of money for it. Even the Lotus Elise is already getting the treatment, which probably shows how old we all are. But it doesn’t work on everything, and Eleanor is one of those cars best left in all its rarity and glory for the pages of history.