MCQUEEN’S FABLED BULLITT FINDS NEW LIFE
McQueen’s lost cultural icon was part of another family’s history all along
Steve McQueen was only 50 when he died from cancer on Nov. 7, 1980. Nearly 40 years later, he captivates us still. Once the world’s highest paid actor, it’s been well documented that McQueen loved motorcycles and cars more than being a film star. He performed many of his own stunts, including the car chase through San Francisco in Bullitt.
It was in the 1968 movie Bullitt that so many of us learned just how skilled and how good the man was, hooking us with his professionalism and talent. Wheeling a dark green 1968 Mustang Fastback, McQueen — as Det. Frank Bullitt — gave us a wild, 10-minute car chase that, with so much rawness and realness, remains to this day the best Hollywood has ever produced. And that Firestone-smoking Mustang in the film, the 1968 Mustang Fastback McQueen drove in that chase — a car estimated to be worth up to US$3.5 million today — had long ago disappeared, a mystery as deep and as fascinating as Stonehenge. Until this week. Making its debut alongside the upcoming 2019 Ford Mustang Bullitt, the 50-year old car resurfaced at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit after its owner, Sean Kiernan, 36, let Ford Motor Company in on the secret he had been sheltering for years, a secret he inherited from his father, a secret so big that even some members of his family didn’t know, a secret that so many in the old-car world had been trying to uncover for so long.
The ’68 Bullitt Mustang, still in its original green patina but updated with a refresh to its 390 engine, new fuel and brake lines, still bearing all the character (and Bondo) it acquired in the movie, was finally revealed when it snarled and strutted onto the Ford stand in Detroit.
“My dad bought it in 1974 from a classified ad in Road & Track,” Kiernan says in an interview. “Funny enough, (Bullitt) was spelled wrong. It was not the best ‘selling’ ad. It was an ‘or best offer’ ad. So my dad at the time was looking for a new daily driver and was obviously a Mustang fan, and as the second owner explained, my dad was the only guy that called, the only guy that showed up. And my dad showed up, bought it and took off. As soon as my dad got the blessing from my mother — like hey, you can do it — he saw it, went after it.”
At the time, his parents were both just 26 years old.
That classified ad in the magazine was posted by real-life police Det. Frank Marranca, who was selling the ‘Stang because he needed something more practical for his family, ending up with a Chevrolet Vega wagon. The detective had bought the car from Warner Bros. movie editor Robert Ross in 1971, with a letter from Ford certifying VIN 8R02S125559 had indeed been the Mustang owned by McQueen’s Solar Productions. Solar had acquired the car for Bullitt on McQueen’s insistence that his character drive a Mustang because it was a car that a detective could realistically afford.
“The ad itself said ‘can document’ on the classified,” Kiernan says. “When my dad went to look at it, the camera mounts instantly scream out, and there’s no way those will ever come off the car. But when he took it for a drive, the car itself has this aura and persona that just makes you go ‘wow, this is the car.’” Bob Kiernan bought the car for US$6,000.
In 1977, Steve McQueen reached out to Bob Kiernan, trying to buy back the car, but McQueen was turned down. The Kiernans had owned it three years and put 30,000 miles on it. It was part of the family at that point, Kiernan says.
“For my dad to tell him no … everybody says, ‘oh, I can’t believe you told Steve McQueen no.’ He would have told anybody no. No matter what. He hangs on to everything.”
Kiernan’s dad got a company car, and his mother drove the Mustang from 1974 to 1980 to her teaching job at a nearby school in New Jersey.
“My mom drove it every day to school. She was a third grade Catholic school teacher.”
The family put 45,000 miles on it. Kiernan was born in 1981, but the car had stopped running shortly after McQueen’s death, when the clutch went, so it sat in the family garage for a long while.
Kiernan’s father was becoming more of an insurance executive and the car wasn’t a practical daily driver in the early ’80s. The family moved to Kentucky and then Tennessee and “the car always went with us everywhere we went,” Kiernan explains. “It was always the goal to show it off, as much as we possibly could, to everyone.
“But like anybody else, and any other car guy on the planet, everybody’s got a car in the garage that they’re eventually going to get to, ours just happened to be Bullitt.”
The restoration was something Kiernan and his father always wanted to do together, but it got put off when life got in the way. Children were born. Bob Kiernan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
Father and son had already taken the car apart in the Tennessee garage when Bob Kiernan died in 2014.
“When that happened, I was avoiding the garage at all costs,” Sean says. “I didn’t even want to go into it. My wife and I would sit on the steps of my garage right after my father passed and stare at the car and not really know what to do. “I was born a car guy, and to stare at that car and know that when you build it, you’re going to have this, is one of the most scariest things I could have gone through, ever.”
When Sean finally got past the grief to put Bullitt back together, it took him 45 days.
“It was more or less the easiest thing I’d done, and very therapeutic. And right after that I contacted Ford and from there, the stars just aligned,” he said, leading to the 50th anniversary of the movie and having the car appear on the world stage with Molly McQueen, Steve’s granddaughter, at the Detroit show.
“Being able to pull it off the way it went, and then meeting Molly, and then intertwining our families together, through the whole history of the car — because the history of the car, to me, is the biggest thing, because you can see my life, and my family’s timeline, from bumper to bumper.”