The days of auto show cars winding up in private ownership seem to be long gone; automakers tend to keep or crush just about every cool car as soon as it leaves the rotating podium, unless they're ordinary production examples. But every once in a while, a one-off falls through the cracks and winds up on the dealership floor, often in front of customers completely oblivious to its rarity.

Just this sort of thing happened to Keith from Nashville, who was in the market for a Ford Fiesta ST and came across a very peculiar example on a local dealer's website. It was painted a unique bright blue hue and featured white-and-black leather Recaro seats with black inserts.

"They don’t make anything like that for the ST," Keith writes on OppositeLock. "The choices for Recaro seats are either orange and black or gray and black. I thought that perhaps someone had put Focus ST seats in the car, but an image search showed that those didn’t exist either in this particular color combination. In fact, I was not finding anything that looked like the seats in this car."

Unique interior options -- if you noticed them -- gave this Fiesta ST away. quite98

Something seemed a little off with the steering wheel, as well; it had what appeared to be faux-leather trim with contrasting white stitching. That's another thing no other Fiesta ST had. He searched for other photos of Fiesta ST steering wheels and found only one other car with what appeared to be the same set of options: a car that appeared at the 2015 Detroit auto show. Could this be the same Fiesta?

Over a year prior, Ford showed a GT, Mustang GT350R, Focus ST, Fiesta ST and F-150 Raptor truck all painted in the distinct liquid-blue color. Ford brought a number of specially modified cars with unique interior trimmings to Detroit that year.

"It was looking like this Nashville car could very well be the auto show car," Keith writes. "Aside from the obvious unique physical aspects of the interior of the vehicle, the build date shown on the VIN plate in the dealer photo matched up, the CARFAX suggested Ford corporate ownership and delivery mileage on the 18-month-old car indicated a vehicle that was only ever trailered around to auto shows across the nation."

Keith called the dealership but was unable to reach a deal before the car headed to auction, even though he had the funds already lined up for a Fiesta ST purchase. But that wasn't the end of the story: The car was his a few weeks later after he tracked it down at another dealership.

The takeaway from Keith's story: If a car is wearing a unique color and the chain of ownership lists the manufacturer as the first owner, chances are it's something special, something that could have been made for an auto show and then sent to auction.

Head on over to OppositeLock to read the whole saga.

H/T to Autoblog.

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