UPDATE: We have updated the story with more photos and an update of the car’s status.

Tom Farrell lives outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, in the land of NASCAR, muscle cars, and hot rods. All his friends drive Mustangs and Camaros, but he has always been more attracted to foreign cars and sports cars. “I always wanted to drive something a little bit different than all my friends drive,” he says.

Farrell works as a model maker for Penske Racing South in Mooresville, North Carolina, in the wind tunnel and aerodynamics department. The team fields NASCAR Nextel Cup cars for drivers Rusty Wallace and Ryan Newman. As part of his job, Farrell can spend six to seven weeks crafting a forty-five-percent model to test in the wind tunnel. So obviously, he has the patience to restore an old car. He’s also handy with a wrench, which he proved as part of Penske South’s winning Junkyard Wars team. With this combination of talents, all he needed to make his personal car dreams come true was a project he was interested in—and a lucky connection.

That connection came through Tom’s friend Lance Hooper, a crew chief on a Craftsman Truck racing team, who was dating an Asheville woman, Lisa Jackson. Her father, Richard, was a one-time Winston Cup team owner who happened to have an old Ferrari—a fact that Hooper casually mentioned to Farrell one day, adding that the car “hasn’t moved in thirteen years.”

Farrell was all ears. “I’d always loved Ferraris, but never thought I’d be able to afford one,” he says.

Eventually, he worked up the nerve to ask if he could look at the car. Lisa cleared it with her parents and Farrell grabbed his camera, jumped in his truck, and headed toward Asheville. “It took us two hours to uncover the car,” he says. “It was a 1963 250 GTE, and had thirteen years of junk piled on it.” He took a number of photos and said he’d be interested in buying if it was available.

After several months, he and Jackson had a phone conversation. Apparently Jackson had given the Ferrari to his wife after she had seen one like it. He had found the nice silver example at FAF Motors in Georgia and surprised her with the 6,700-mile cream puff. Eventually, the car was painted bright red, and his wife drove it with gusto. “I think Richard eventually took it away from his wife because she got too many speeding tickets in it,” Farrell says. So it sat in the garage as years worth of household goods were piled on top of it.

If there was to be a sale, Jackson’s wife would have to approve, and over the years, the couple had been approached by a number of Ferrari enthusiasts. Yet everyone who expressed interest in the car wanted to dismantle it and sell it for parts, which had a value greater than the car as a whole. Farrell convinced the Jackson family that his intentions were different: he had no desire to sell the car for parts. He had wanted a Ferrari for many years, and the purchase of this car would make his dream come true.

Farrell had a dialogue with the Jacksons over the next six months. During that time, he enlisted the expertise of the Ferrari Register’s Len Miller. The register provides a listing of all Ferrari 250 models, ownership history, and other records. Miller told Farrell how much parts and service would cost, and together they came up with a range of value. Eventually, Jackson called Farrell and said he’d take $8,000 for the car. Farrell said he could only afford $7,000. Jackson accepted, and in less than three hours Farrell was sitting in Jackson’s driveway with his trailer in tow.

“When I got the car home, I had to replace most of the upper engine gaskets because they all leaked so badly,” Farrell says. “The good news was that the gas in the tank was still liquid—it hadn’t turned to jelly—probably because Jackson had run racing fuel in the car, which doesn’t go bad like pump gas.”

Farrell did have to relocate some “residents” that had lived in the car during its lengthy storage life. “I found squirrel or rat nests in the glove compartment and under the hood insulation blanket,” he says. “But overall, the car had a sound body.” When he purchased the car, it had covered 25,000 miles.

It seems that the car was stored outside, probably at the race shop, for some time during those thirteen years. When it was trailered to Jackson’s house, the brakes failed while it was being unloaded and the car rolled slowly into the edge of the garage. That explained the dented rear bumper.

Farrell drove the car for two years before disassembling it for restoration. On one last fling before taking it apart, he drove the car to a Ferrari Club of America show in North Carolina and won the People’s Choice Award in 2004.

“When we started taking it apart, my six-year-old son Jared saw the old eight-track tape deck and asked what kind of video player it was,” Farrell says, adding that his young son loves to work on the car.

The car is now disassembled, being returned to as-new condition. Even the red paint will give way to a fresh coat of the factory original silver. Not surprisingly, the restoration is taking much of Farrell’s free time. “My wife hates the car,” he says. “She says it’s my girlfriend.”

Lots of people in the Carolinas don’t know what type of car his Ferrari is, so Farrell has some fun when he tells them it’s a 1963 Ford Mustang, then shows them the prancing horse logo on the hood as “proof.” He hopes to “fool” a few more people when the car is finally ready for summer cruising in 2005.

This story was obviously written before 2005, but here is how Tom’s car looked after much of the restoration was complete. Beautiful car Tom and we all wish we could be so lucky. For more photos of the project visit Farrell Restorations.

This story originally appeared in Tom Cotter’s The Cobra in the Barn book. Subscribe to our email list for a chance to win a free copy and submit your own find stories because one is going to get published in Tom’s next In the Barn book!