Mecum wrapped its four-day Harrisburg sale over the weekend — roughly 1,200 vehicles across the block, headlined by the Great Lakes Collection, a run of American performance cars anchored by a 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302. It's an easy car to undersell if you don't know the backstory: Ford didn't build the Boss 302 because buyers were clamoring for a 302-cubic-inch small-block. It built it because SCCA's Trans-Am rules capped race engines at 305 cubic inches and required the engine to exist in a car you could actually buy at a dealership. So Ford built one, sold it to the public in the thousands just to satisfy the rulebook, and only then got to go racing with it. The strategy worked — the Boss 302 won Ford the 1970 Trans-Am championship — but the road car in the Great Lakes Collection exists purely as a byproduct of paperwork.

That's a more common story in this hobby than people realize, and it's the same story sitting in our own upcoming lineup.

Our 1963 Superformance MKII FIA Cobra , going up August 7, is a continuation of a car that has the identical origin. Carroll Shelby didn't build the FIA-spec 289 roadster to sell to weekend drivers — he built it because the FIA's GT category required a homologated production chassis before Shelby could take on Ferrari's 250 GTO internationally. The open roadster turned out to be too aerodynamically compromised for the long straights at Le Mans and Daytona, so designer Pete Brock reworked the same chassis into the closed-roof Daytona Coupe, and that car went on to win Shelby the 1965 FIA GT World Manufacturers' Championship — the first title an American manufacturer had ever taken from Ferrari. The roadster crossing our block never got that headline moment, but it's the direct, rarer ancestor of the car that did, built to the same original chassis geometry under Superformance's exclusive license from Carroll Shelby Licensing.

It's not the only piece of that era on our site right now. A Superformance GT40 MKI in Gulf's blue-and-orange racing livery goes up August 26 — another continuation of a car Ford built specifically to beat Ferrari at Le Mans after Enzo Ferrari refused to sell Henry Ford II the company outright. And if racing homologation isn't your thing, the 1966 Ford F100 starting August 4 is the counterpoint: a plain, honest truck that was never built to satisfy anyone's rulebook, which is its own kind of appeal.

All of which brings us to Wednesday's usual question: what are you actually hunting for?

This week, more than one message in our inbox has been some version of "I want a real homologation special, not a tribute car" — which, fittingly, is a hard want ad to fill. Manufacturers built these cars in the smallest numbers the rules would technically allow, which means genuine originals surface rarely and get expensive fast the moment they do. It's exactly why licensed continuations like the MKII-FIA and the GT40 exist in the first place — they're the practical way to actually own and drive that chapter of racing history instead of just reading about it.

If there's a specific car, chassis, or story like that you've been chasing, tell us. We'll keep an eye out as new consignments come in — and if it happens to be sitting in someone's barn in Ohio, so much the better.