Carroll Shelby “The Hot Roddin’ King of the Road”
By HP Jeschke • Mar 18th, 2008 • Category: Cover Storyby: Rachel Moran
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Carrol Shelby
“I’m a hot rodder.” “I’m an innovator. I’m not an engineer. I hope I’m never accused of that, because that narrows your thinking.”
The former race car driver and automotive designer, a native of Texas, is all about thinking big. Carroll Shelby won multiple national sports car championships throughout the 1950s. Mr. Shelby won the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans for Aston Martin and set land speed records for Austin Healey at the salt flats at Bonneville. Carroll was named Sports Illustrated’s Driver of the Year twice. Carroll went to sleep one night and literally dreamed up the Cobra Mark I, a CSX2000 chassis with a Ford 260 engine. Throughout the 60s, he built the Shelby 289 and the venerated 427 Cobras while racing Ferraris, Jaguars and Porsches in Europe. Team Shelby captured the Grand Touring World Championship in 1965 and then the 24 Hours of Le Mans in ‘66 and ‘67.
Carroll Shelby is the only automotive designer to have worked on a visible level with the Big Three - Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. His Shelby Automobiles production factory in Las Vegas, Nevada is still cranking out winners with the CSX4000, CSX7000 and CSX8000 series component vehicles.
He’s also the founder of the Carroll Shelby Children’s Foundation™, which provides assistance for children who need coronary and kidney care. Shelby produced a line of 8-spoke alloy wheels for Saab. He’s also got a boat with his name, the Donzi Shelby 22 GT. Mr. Shelby founded the Terlingua International Chili Championship© and has a line of chili fixins with his namesake and, at the end of last year, Italian watchmaker Anonimo Firenze introduced the Shelby Mark II SE watch, a limited-edition chronograph bearing Shelby’s signature stripes. No one is accusing Carroll Shelby of thinking narrowly.
Rarin’ to Go
Carroll Hall Shelby was born in 1923 to Warren Hall and Eloise Lawrence Shelby in Leesburg, Texas. Carroll graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas and, at the age of eighteen, began training as a flight instructor at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio during World War II. Married at twenty and the father of a daughter by twenty-one, Shelby left the Air Corps in 1945 and started a dump-truck business in Dallas. Shelby had two sons and started raising chickens. His first batch of broilers turned a five-thousand dollar profit, but the second batch died of a disease that left paralyzed chickens strewn across the central Texas plain. Shelby was thirty-one years old with three children and flat-broke, so when friends offered him a shot at amateur racing, he jumped at it.His first was a quarter-mile drag race; it was behind the wheel of a friend’s MG TC.
Carroll Shelby in his signature overalls
Carroll won, beating out the Jaguar XK120s. Shelby spent the next year touring, slamming through the southwest region of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) in Cadillac-powered Allards and quickly gaining notoriety for his signature striped overalls. By 1954, the attention he was attracting was beginning to build him an international career. Carroll traveled to Argentina and won the SCCA Kimberly Cup in Cad Allards and caught the eye of John Wyer of Aston Martin, who invited him to drive the Aston Martin DB3 at Sebring. Mechanical failure plagued the effort after seventy-seven laps, but his career had taken off. A month later, he finished second at Aintree in a private Aston Martin, a success that led to a ride with co-driver Paul Fre’re at Le Mans.At home, Donald Healy, whom Shelby had met in England, invited him to Bonneville, where he helped set Class D - modified coupes, sedans and sports cars - speed records at the salt flats approximately 90 miles west of Salt Lake City, Utah.Shelby then went on to enter the Carrera Pan Americana Mexico in November 1954, but crashed and rolled his Aston Martin four times during practice in the desert, breaking his arm and shattering his elbow. He was still in a fiberglass sling and slated for more surgery by spring, but he wouldn’t give up driving. His close and controversial second-place at Sebring with fellow racer, Phil Hill, in a Monza Ferrari saw him through to another succession of wins at home in 1955, mostly behind the wheel of construction tycoon Tony Parravano’s Ferraris.
The tenacity and the relationship with Parravano paid off. “It was him that got Maserati to give me a Formula One,” says Shelby. “I could’ve driven for the factory, Maserati, in ‘56 if I wanted to, but I couldn’t stay over there . . . I had the kids back in Texas and I couldn’t stay for the whole season.”
Back in Texas, Shelby opened Carroll Shelby Sports Cars and took a total of nineteen consecutive and twenty-seven total SCCA wins in 1956, but he hadn’t reached his pinnacle yet.
A New Winning Streak
That same year, Sports Illustrated named Shelby its Sports Car Driver of the Year. The magazine bestowed the honor on him again the following year for yet another streak of wins, but his international credibility was secured for the long run in 1959 when he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Grand Prix of Endurance.
Carroll Shelby in the famous 98
Le Mans, held annually since 1923, intends to test cars not just for speed, but for reliability. The Circuit de la Sarthe consists of permanent track and public roads. Initially, the track entered the town of Le Mans, but now safety concerns send drivers through the Dunlop Curve and Tertre Rouge corners, before rejoining the old circuit on the Mulsanne, which has also seen modification after the FIA declared it could not condone any circuit that has a straight longer than 2 kilometers or approximately 1.2 miles. Shelby, who drove when the Mulsanne was a straight, raced Le Mans with Roy Salvadori in the Aston Martin DBR1. Stirling Moss, who was also part of the Aston Martin team that year, was instructed to go as fast as he could in order to burn out the Ferraris overnight. The trick worked and Shelby and Salvadori won, having covered the track at an average speed of 112.6 mph. Shelby cleared about $8000 in winnings and was pleased with the take.
AC Cars, a British car manufacturer, had been using the Bristol Straight-6 engine, a BMW pre-war design that was outdated by the 1960s. When Bristol stopped production in 1961, AC was ripe for Shelby’s airmailed proposal that AC build him a car modified to accept a V-8. Shelby understood the potential of Anglo-American hybrids from his days driving the Cad Allards, and he asked Chevrolet if it would provide him with an engine.
Chevy wasn’t interested in supporting competition for its Corvette, but Ford felt differently and just so happened to have a new, thin-wall, small-block engine. AC air-freighted its CSX2000 chassis to Shelby in Los Angeles, where he fit the frame with its new engine and transmission in under eight hours on February 2, 1962.
“I always had in mind I wanted to build my own car,” Shelby told The Car Connection in 2002, “since I got out of the service, and saw the MGs and the Allards and all those cars come over here from England and Europe with little forty horsepower engines when you could put a three-hundred horsepower American V-8 in that same hole.
“I kept fiddling with it, with the car companies, and finally struck gold when AC Cars lost their engine supplier and Ford came out with a new little thin-wall casting for their V-8, so I put a deal together where Ford gave me a few engines and Lee Iacocca gave me $25,000. I told him I could build a car that would outrun a Corvette. And sure enough, we did that.”
By August of that year, despite the fact that Shelby fudged the appearance of large-scale production by painting the original CSX2000 a different color every time a member of the automotive press drove it, the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile) homologated the Cobra in the more-than-2-liter class for the FIA Manufacturers’ Championship. Shelby had only built eight cars, but he had to build at least one hundred within a year.
He was up to the challenge and, by the following January, his driver Ken Miles was so confident, he stopped in the pit at Riverside to get a drink of water and still re-lapped the Corvette Stingrays to finish second behind fellow Shelby driver, Dave McDonald.
Shelby had outdone Corvette, as promised, and was cleaning up at home, but he still had to contend with Ferrari. In January 1965, the 427 Cobra, featuring a tube frame, aluminum body and coil-spring chassis, was unveiled at Riverside International Raceway. While the FIA wouldn’t certify the 427, because one hundred cars weren’t finished - and, besides, Ferrari provided no factory competition in the 1965 European season, anyway - the 427 street Cobra was finished in April. The 1966 427 Cobra cost $7,500 against a national average vehicle cost of $2,650. They sell today for approximately half a million dollars. The 1966 Super Snake sold for $5.5 million in January last year.
King of the Road
Around the same time of the development of the 427, Shelby started working with Ford. Henry Ford II was obsessed with showing the world what his company could do on an international level, so he turned over development of its GT40 to Shelby-American, which used the 427 big-block engine to build the GT40 Mark II. Shelby-American and Ford assaulted Le Mans in ‘65 with two 427 GT40 Mark II’s, four 289 GT40 Mark I’s and five Cobra Daytona Coupes, but only the Daytona finished.
Carroll Shelby with Steve McQueen
The setback didn’t deter anyone. In 1966, Ford wrested Le Mans away from Ferrari and kept the streak going through 1969. Carroll Shelby had officially beaten every kind of car in the world in one form or another. With the final 427 Cobra Roadster built in 1967, the partnership with Ford became one of the most important in Shelby’s career.
“I had a meeting with Iaccoca and he said, ‘Corvette’s coming out with King of the Road. They’ve got the brochures. They’re gonna announce it in two weeks.’ and I says, ‘Gosh, that’s a name I always wanted,’ so I picked up a telephone and called my trade lawyer in Washington and said, ‘Is King of the Road taken?’ and he says, ‘I’ll find out and call ya in the morning’ . . . He called back and says, ‘No, it’s not taken,’ and I said, ‘OK, we’re gonna call them GT500KRs for King of the Road.’”
The 1968 Shelby Cobra GT500KR was a mid-year introduction, based on the 1968 Shelby GT500. Ford added “Cobra” to the name because of the new 428 Cobra Jet V-8 that was planted under the KR’s custom fiberglass hood. The 2008 Shelby GT500KR is the third modern Mustang to come from the Ford-Shelby partnership.
“We aren’t fixing our attention on one or two attributes, but working on the vehicle as a whole,” says Gary Patterson, Vice President of Operations for Shelby Automobiles. “The throttle response, power delivery, exhaust note, and handling should all gel together to deliver a total driving experience.”
The 2008 GT500K features a 5.4-liter supercharged V-8 with 540 horsepower, 510 ft.-lbs. of torque, a TR6060 six-speed manual gearbox, front brake cooling ducts and a variety of embellishments, including “Shelby” lettering across the hood and decklid, 40th Anniversary badges and embroidered headrests and floor mats.
Happy 85th
Shelby’s innovative spirit imbues more than just cars these days. The Shelby name is licensed to numerous products. At 85 years old Shelby is still the “King of the Road.”
Carrol Shelby on his 85th birtday
The cover photo was taken during Carroll Shelby’s 85th birthday celebration weekend; the guest list included the who’s who from the automotive and racing world. The birthday celebration finished off with a Barrett-Jackson auction.
Carroll sold the 2008 Ford Shelby GT500KR for $550,000.00.
And, so, the innovations of Carroll Shelby are still making their mark.
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HP Jeschke is Publisher of hr: magazine.
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Nice Blog. I like the layout you used. Did you make that yourself?
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[...] Phil wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptChevy wasn’t interested in supporting competition for its Corvette, but Ford felt differently and just so happened to have a new, thin-wall, small-block engine. AC air-freighted its CSX2000 chassis to Shelby in Los Angeles, … [...]
[...] http://www.hrluxury.com/cover-story/carroll-shelby-hot-roddin-king-of-the-road/Shelby-American and Ford assaulted Le Mans in ‘65 with two 427 GT40 Mark II’s, four 289 GT40 Mark I’s and five Cobra Daytona Coupes, but only the Daytona finished. Carroll Shelby with Steve McQueen. The setback didn’t deter anyone. … [...]