Each year at SEMA, dozens of cars show up hoping to be selected for a “golden ticket”. That ticket is to the Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational, a competition that pits some of the best street going cars in the nation against one another. The invitational is widely covered by the media, and a sort of after party for hardcore performance fans once the industry’s biggest show has closed.

One lucky invitee this year was this 1967 Mustang, a collaboration between Total Cost Involved and Magnaflow, with the goal of building a car to compete against some of the best in the world.

The car features both the latest in suspension tech from TCI as well as some prototype parts. According to Magnaflow Senior Manager Rich Waitas this car features a four link, panhard bar rear suspension. However, car owner/driver Ed Moss (also owner of TCI) came up with unique means to monitor and tune the rear suspension. . “Ed and Sal (Solorzaon) came up with a way they can actually watch suspension travel live-time. There’s actually a reservoir with a drive mechanism that will tell you the bound and rebound motion of the shock absorber, so they can actually tell when they’re maxing out the car, come in to the pits, adjust spring rates, and go back out into the field, without using any type of electronic telemetry,” says Waitas.

The front suspension is a TCI custom independent front suspension. Wilwood brakes measure 14-inches at all four corners and are hidden behind Billet Specialties LeMans wheels. The wheels measure out at a staggering 18×10 front and 18×12 rear. Michelin 295/30 and 335/30 rubber hug those deep hoops.

Under the hood 427 cubic-inches of small block Ford fury lie in wait, cranking out 460 hp to the rear tires. Shifts come via a Tremec T-56 Magnum transmission, and a Currie nine-inch rear end translates that rotation into forward thrust. “The engine, the suspension, and wheel and tire package are really balanced together, the car may not get the fastest pass down the back-stretch of the track, but it will get in and out of corners pretty quick,” says Waitas.

The exhaust system was completely custom built by Magnaflow and tuned specifically for the car. Beneath the car, the exhaust has been ovalized to provide additional ground clearance. Waitas says that the system required significant custom work and fitting to make sure it cleared the car’s suspension and other components. Note the side exits just in front of the rear tires, which also had to clear the functional rear brake cooling ducts.

Inside the car there is as much beauty and luxury as performance. A host of Auto Meter gauges keep an eye on every aspect of performance. Custom built leather seats as well as other saddle/tan leather covered appointments adorn the rest of the interior with billet accents in just the right places. This is a cockpit we could see ourselves spending plenty of seat time in, and not wanting to get out until we ran the fuel dry.

While the mechanicals make the car a competent performer on the street or at the track, it’s the bodywork that sets it apart in the crowd. Our eyes were ready to bleed by the end of the SEMA show from all the good and bad wide-body cars we looked at all week long. However, the TCI/Magnaflow ’67 truly stood out from the pack, Waitas told us that the body work on this car was all steel. That’s right, there’s no fiberglass, or composite materials in the body, it’s all metal artwork. “I wanted to just bring the car out in bare metal because it was truly beautiful like that, paint is good, paint makes it pretty, but it also hides all that metal work,” says Waitas.

The wide body work was just some of the body modifications that went into this car. We could spend all day looking at the body alone and still not find all the wild, and functional details that went into making this car not just a functional performer but a true piece of hand crafted metal artwork.

The car made it’s debut at SEMA, finishing just hours before it was time to load it up and take it to the show. With no track time in the log book, Moss and the TCI crew will have their work cut out for them as they met their goal of receiving of the golden ticket and were headed to the shootout immediately following the SEMA show.

If you want to see all the work that went into this car there are plenty of build photos available on the Total Cost Involved Facebook page, documenting nearly every aspect. Regardless of how this car comes out in the results of the Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational, we’d say TCI and Magnaflow have teamed up to build a winner.