The auction listing reads like a dare wrapped in a liability waiver. A 1967 Ford Mustang fastback, gutted to its bare unibody, with a Westinghouse J34 turbojet engine crammed where the cabin used to be. The same powerplant once pushed U.S. Navy McDonnell F2H Banshees through Cold War skies.
It’s called the Krispy Kritter, and the name isn’t cute. It’s a survival advisory.
Ted Trischle built this thing decades ago, starting with a brand-new Mustang body and a surplus military jet engine. He didn’t so much install the J34 as build a rolling shroud around it. The front axle came from a 1939 Plymouth, the finned brake drums were pulled from a 1958 Buick, and twin drag chutes mount above custom fiberglass rear bodywork shaped to accommodate the exhaust.
The interior is mostly turbine and fuel tank, with a sliver of space left over for one brave human being.
Documentation that accompanies the car includes a page titled “No, No’s” that should be required reading for anyone who thinks they want this machine. Pull the throttle completely off mid-run and you get, in Trischle’s own words, “YOUR CAR AND YOURSELF ONE PUFF OF SMOKE.” Abort during a low-RPM start and “Your car will BURN AROUND YOU.
Keep a fire extinguisher handy, he advises, with the casual tone of someone reminding you to check your tire pressure.
The Krispy Kritter reportedly exceeded 300 mph on drag strips, a claim supported by eyewitness accounts. One commenter on the Bring a Trailer listing said his brother watched it blast off at Maple Grove Raceway in Pennsylvania. “It’s something you never forget,” he wrote.
That tracks. A jet-powered Mustang screaming down a quarter mile at triple the speed a stock 390 V8 could ever dream of tends to leave an impression.
Here’s the catch: nobody knows when the engine last ran. There is no odometer. The seller can’t confirm operational status.
The car is being sold as a static piece, a rolling monument to one man’s refusal to accept that turbine-powered street machines died with Chrysler’s experimental program in the 1960s.
Bidding on Bring a Trailer sat at $10,750 with two days remaining as of the listing’s peak activity. That’s less than a loaded F-150 Lariat, for a machine that once outran everything on a drag strip and could literally incinerate its driver if mishandled. The auction includes a trailer, which is both practical and darkly poetic.
The comments section split predictably. Museum piece, said some. Get it running, said others. One person asked about California emissions compliance, which is either dry humor or a profound misunderstanding of what’s being sold here.
Another suggested it needs a “Fight Climate Change” bumper sticker. The jet fuel consumption alone would make an EPA administrator weep.
What makes the Krispy Kritter genuinely fascinating isn’t the top speed or the military-surplus engine or the hand-scrawled warnings about spontaneous combustion. It’s that Trischle actually did it. He looked at a brand-new Mustang, looked at a decommissioned fighter jet engine, and decided they belonged together.
No corporate engineering team. No wind tunnel testing. No safety board sign-off. Just a guy with a welder, a vision, and a comfort level with catastrophic risk that most of us will never possess.
Whoever buys this thing gets a piece of drag racing folk history and a very specific set of instructions they’d better read twice before turning any knobs.
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