The military indirectly played a very prominent role in two of the Iron Mike Pre-Run cars and their owners.

Woody Woodruff bought his 1967 Shelby GT350 new because he was getting ready to head to Vietnam to serve his country and didn’t expect to make it back alive.

Woody Woodruff bought his 1967 Shelby GT350 before shipping out for Viet Nam, and unsure if he was coming back again. (Photo: Tom Jensen)

Tom Cotter acquired his 1965 Shelby Cobra is part because its original owner was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and fled to Canada in the late 1960s with his car.

So it was somehow fitting that both Shelbys in the pre-run had war stories of a kind.

“I purchased this car new in the summer of 1967,” said Woodruff, who lives in Charlotte. “I was 21 years old. I had one year of school left and I knew I was going to go in the Army, so I bought the car that I wanted.”

Woodruff’s Shelby had a sticker price of about $4,400 but after making repeated test drives of it, he finally bargained the dealer down to $3,850.

“I was in the Army with it and travelled to 40 different states, Montreal, Nova Scotia, Orlando, and then I went to Vietnam for a year,” he said.

Tom Cotter grins happily from the cockpit of his 1965 Sheby Cobra. (Photo: Tom Jensen)

Upon Woodruff’s return, the Shelby became his daily driver until 1975 and then put it in storage for a couple of decades.

“The last 10 or 15 years, I’ve driven it pretty regularly to car shows and events,” he said.

The Shelby now has 159,000 miles on it, all on the original engine, gearbox and rear end. It has never been restored and has a lovely patina after a 1984 repaint in a dark gray Lincoln color.

Cotter’s ’65 Shelby Cobra was purchased new from Jack Loftus Ford in Hinsdale, Ill. It sold for $5,779.55 to a concert promoter who fled to Canada as a conscientious objector. “I saw pictures of him driving it in the freezing-cold weather,” said Cotter, a Road & Track contributor and author of several books on barn-find cars and motorcycles.

From there it changed hands a couple of times. Cotter purchased the Cobra in 2002 and spent nine days driving it from Walnut Creek, Calif., across the country to his home in Davidson, N.C., eschewing interstate travel to stay on back roads the whole way.

“When I bought the car, I called my wife and held the phone to the exhaust pipe,” said Cotter. “I said, ‘Listen to this thing. It’s perfect!’”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.