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R.I.P. Carroll ShelbyAuto legend Carroll Shelby, father of Cobra, dies

Carroll Hall Shelby, the Texan who created the famous Shelby Cobra and uncounted other high-performance machines that turned the auto world on its ear, and made it a whole lot more fun for 50 years, died in Dallas Thursday night at age 89. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia.

Shelby, who affected the aw-shucks demeanor of the chicken farmer he once was, said, "I never made a damn dime until I started doing what I wanted."

What he wanted was, if you will, power for the people, automotively speaking.

"I love horsepower," he said more than once.

Beyond just his efforts in the small world of hot-rodding, Shelby influenced how Detroit automakers thought about high-performance, and he proved that hard work and bit of guile can make a hero.

But to achieve that, he had to jump from chicken-raising — his fowl all died of a disease one year — and into full-time auto racing, which he'd been doing on the side, in the 1950s. He was a success — at first continuing to wear the work overalls that he did as a farmer — and parlayed that reputation into a foothold as a car builder.

The litany of significant cars he created is long, running from the original 1962 AC Cobra — small British sports car with a big (for the times) Ford engine — through a sojourn at Chrysler and a stint with GM via a failed Oldsmobile-powered car, back to Ford. He was involved with development of Ford's GT 500 Mustang, the 2013 version of which is certified as the most-powerful regular-production car in the world.

His love affair put him into the orbit of industry giants of the time, as he more and more successfully showed car companies that powerful engines in lightweight cars was a viable and roadworthy combination on which he and they could make a lot of money.

He became good friends with Lee Iacocca who was president at Ford Motor when Shelby began as a car builder. The relationship continue when Iacocca moved to Chrysler.

Iacocca serendipitously happened upon on a small dinner in a Los Angeles restaurant some years back, intended as an intimate schmooze between Shelby and a journalist. Iacocca plopped down at the table and he and Shelby started telling stories.

Among them, how the two began their relationship.

Iacocca said Shelby was pestering him for money to build the original Cobra, and was so persistent that "I finally gave him the money to get him out of my office."

Much later, in 2010, Shelby was facing two challenging phenomena: Mortality, and the changing nature of the go-fast auto business. At the time, he was taking 25 pills a day, tooling around in a motorized wheelchair and talking about passing the torch at Shelby American, the company he set up to build small numbers of exciting cars, as well as parts.

Carroll Shelby at Ford's Dearborn Development Center in Michigan during development work on the Shelby GT500KR in September, 2007.
CAPTION
By Ford, Wieck
He noted that extracting the most performance from an engine had become an exercise in computer programming, not tinkering. "I don't have the power to fight all the problems that I used to anymore," he said at the time.

"I've had a good run. I've built a lot of things that work and a lot of things that didn't work." He estimates that of the 165 car projects he tried over his lifetime, seven or eight turned a profit. Big enough, it seems, to keep the enterprise rolling.

His was a bold approach to car crafting that was too in-your-face for mainline car companies to conjure in-house. They let him come up with wild machines under their sponsorship, then refined them into cars the automakers could sell as high-performance halos.

Along the way he came up with a recipe for a mean bowl of chili, sufficiently infamous to spark an annual beat-this chili cookoff in Texas, and later even ventured into fashion timepieces.

He began his car building with subterfuge. Hoping to give the impression he was producing a lot of the original 1962 Cobras, he kept repainting the two he had built so car magazines would show them in a variety of colors.

And he had to fend off another giant, his eventual friend Robert E. Petersen, founder of Motor Trend and Hot Rod magazines, for the affections of a woman.

Petersen saw himself as merely taking advantage of an opportunity. Shelby recalled it as a work of infamy: "He'd tell her, 'You don't want to go around with a chicken farmer. And he'll lose (races), anyway'."

Rumors began circulating about a health problem when the affable auto man failed to appear as scheduled at the New York auto show in early April to promote his latest creations, the 950-horsepower Shelby 1000 and the 1,100-hp Shelby 1000 S/C.

Shelby published an update on his Facebook page in late April to say, in the vein of Mark Twain's "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," that he had been hospitalized for pneumonia, but was "resting comfortably with family and working on getting better."
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Inside Scoop: Ex-Exec Theodore's 'Last Shelby Cobra' Book Delivers

Chris Theodore had enjoyed a major-league, big-game automotive career as a senior product development engineer and executive-level program manager. His resume includes stints at AMC, Chrysler, ASC, and a long, solid run and subsequent retirement from Ford. And Chris’s Ford menu includes the Ford GT, Ford Shelby GT500, the Shelby Cobra Concept, the Shelby GT model Mustangs, and the Shelby GR-1 concept, plus countless secret projects you’ve never seen nor heard of.

During his esteemed Blue Oval tenure, Theodore developed deep business and often personal relationships with so many of the program chiefs and executives he worked with; among them guys named (Bill and Edsel II) Ford, (J) Mays, (Dan) Gurney, and most particularly in the parlance of this book, (Carroll) Shelby. And he had a front-row seat with and among them for the birth and lives of the models noted above. That is a big part of what Theodore’s hardcover book, “The Last Shelby Cobra, and My Times with Carroll Shelby,” so compelling, besides all of the great photos and illustrations. Chris knows these stories because he was there, and he either did it or saw it.When things went well, he credits those who made it happen, and when things fell short, he also names names. None of it in a nasty or spiteful way, just telling the story from his well-considered viewpoint. You like inside scoop? You get it here. It’s important that Theodore played a significant role in reconnecting Shelby with Ford, ensuring that Ford Motor Company again began to produce Shelby Mustangs.

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Like most of us that were around during the Shelby Cobra, Mustang and Ford GT40 eras, Carroll Shelby was high on Theodore’s list of heroes. He never thought he’d actually get to meet Shelby, but in as much as Shelby was a consultant on the development of the original Viper, their paths not only crossed but became entwined. The two developed not only a fruitful professional relationship, but a deep friendship as well, and that’s abundantly clear in this book. Chris often marveled at Carroll’s innate feel for cars and instinct for the car business, and several times commented on what a great driver Shelby was, as Chris spent considerable time in the passenger seats of vehicles Shelby was testing, evaluating, or just abusing.

Theodore is among the founding fathers of the 2000s-era Ford GT, from concept to production, so if you love every nugget about that particularly fabulous Ford, you’ll find a lot of it here. Also, too, is the deep story behind the Shelby Cobra Concept of 2004, which was Chris’s baby – there’s no other way to put it. What you may not know about this fascinating silver-gray Ford V-10 powered roadster is that it was a fully engineered running and tire-melting car, not a quick-and-dirty plastic body aboard an electric golf-cart chassis, as so many car-show turntable concept cars are.

At several points in this book, Theodore reminds us that he’s “not a journalist” and only a “first-time book author” -- but you’d never know it from this effort. It’s well-organized, cogent, fabulously illustrated, and tells a combination business/car/personal story that any fan of these people and these cars will enjoy and get a lot out of. The Last Shelby Cobra book stickers for $60 retail, but Amazon and other book retailers sell it for less. No matter, it’s worth every penny as a great read, and a great ride.

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More pictures......


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More pictures Book Review The Last Shelby Cobra

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More pictures Book Review The Last Shelby CobraThe Last Shelby Cobra - My Times with Carroll Shelby

By Chris Theodore

Published by Veloce Press

Hardbound, 160 pages and 200-plus photos

IBSN 978-1-787114-50-0

FORD PERFORMANCE PHOTOS / COURTESY THE AUTHOR, CHRIS THEODORE COLLECTION and FORD MOTOR COMPANY ARCHIVES

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Catch Christian Bale Burn Rubber in ‘Ford v Ferrari’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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Nov 15, 2019

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The New York Times
3.78M subscribersHow do you go about recreating a 24-hour auto race for a movie? If you’re the director James Mangold, meticulously. His latest film, “Ford v Ferrari,” takes place in the mid-1960s as the Ford Motor Company is trying to come up with a car that can beat out Ferrari in the Le Mans auto race.

he American executives bring on the car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and the driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to aid in that task. This scene takes place at the beginning of the 1966 edition of the race as Miles is preparing. Narrating the sequence, Mangold said that he wanted to use the camera following Miles down a hallway and then out to the track as a technique to reveal the

spectacle of the race, with overwhelming crowds and a heightened energy. The race starts the same way Le Mans used to actually begin, with the drivers standing across the track from their cars, then running over and leaping into the vehicles before pulling out. Mangold said the moment, captured in one shot, was a challenge to coordinate but was important to give a sense of authenticity to

the scene. He said he shot as much of the action as possible with real cars and stunt drivers, using visual effects not as much for the racing moments, but more to populate the stands so the production wouldn’t need 20,000 extras each day.

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Either win it or blow it up
Real racers understand......there is no glory in second place.

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Ken Miles | Hell Of A Drive

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Nov 13, 2020

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The Memory Lane
312 subscribers“ There’s a point at 7,000 Rpms where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless. It disappears. All that’s left, is a body moving through space, and time ” A Tribute to the greatest mechanic in the history

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Hear from the Shelby American Team how they won Le Mans in 1966 in a Ford GT for Ford Motor Company

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Jun 8, 2016

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Full Circle Productions Media
The 24 Hour of Le Mans remains a car manufacturer’s validation they are the best in the world. In 1966 Ford Motor Company finished 1-2-3 in their Ford GT’s, driven by one of the most successful car manufacturer’s in the world and the fortitude of its leader, Henry Ford II. But success did not come easily and Ford reached out to their racing partner, Carroll Shelby to conquer the European races.

On a cold and drizzly day in December 1964 a banged up and filthy Ford GT sat outside Shelby American on Princeton Avenue in Venice, CA. Shelby had eight weeks to get it ready for Daytona. It took another year, 1966, for Ford and Shelby American to stage the dramatic 1-2-3 Ford GT 24 Hour of Le Mans finish with the Shelby American Team Ford GT’s in first and second at the checkered flag

after a grueling 24 hours. This is the story of some of the Shelby American employees and team crew members who kept the Ford GT’s moving forward at such an astonishing pace. This video, of the Ken Miles/Denny Hulme Ford GT P/1015, is a tribute to Ken Miles for all of his incredible accomplishments for Shelby American and Ford Motor Company as Ford returns to the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2016.

Hear from the Shelby American Team how they won Le Mans in 1966 in a Ford GT for Ford Motor Company

136,519 views
Jun 8, 2016

1.6KDislikeShare
Save



Full Circle Productions Media
The 24 Hour of Le Mans remains a car manufacturer’s validation they are the best in the world. In 1966 Ford Motor Company finished 1-2-3 in their Ford GT’s, driven by one of the most successful car manufacturer’s in the world and the fortitude of its leader, Henry Ford II. But success did not come easily and Ford reached out to their racing partner, Carroll Shelby to conquer the European races.

On a cold and drizzly day in December 1964 a banged up and filthy Ford GT sat outside Shelby American on Princeton Avenue in Venice, CA. Shelby had eight weeks to get it ready for Daytona. It took another year, 1966, for Ford and Shelby American to stage the dramatic 1-2-3 Ford GT 24 Hour of Le Mans finish with the Shelby American Team Ford GT’s in first and second at the checkered flag

after a grueling 24 hours. This is the story of some of the Shelby American employees and team crew members who kept the Ford GT’s moving forward at such an astonishing pace. This video, of the Ken Miles/Denny Hulme Ford GT P/1015, is a tribute to Ken Miles for all of his incredible accomplishments for Shelby American and Ford Motor Company as Ford returns to the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2016.