Carroll Shelby died May 10, 2012, at Baylor Hospital in Dallas at the age of 89.  It will take years to assess his impact on the car racing world and automotive world.

I think the part of his legend that will be remembered most is that he came out of nowhere--no education, no college degree, no business education, yet he conquered several worlds, such as the sports car world, with his Cobra, and the automotive marketing world with the Cobra and the Shelby Mustangs.    You wouldn't think  a rube from a small town in Texas could become  a world class race car driver but he won the 24 Hours of LeMans only a few years after he started racing.    When Shelby came into  the sports car world as a manufacturer, he started from California because he knew the California hot rodders--the guys who had been making their own intake manifolds and bodywork-- those were the guys who could help him create something that would beat the fancy foreign cars from Italy and England.   And he was right.   And you can't deny that the Shelby GT350 led to Ford backing Shelby in Trans-Am with the result that Shelby-prepared Mustangs took the Trans-Am trophies for several years running.  But the biggest victory for American marques was when Shelby was called late by Ford (after Ford dropped the ball in 1964) to help them with the GT40. It was Shelby and his crew at Shelby-American that turned a loser into a winner that took LeMans in '66 and '67.    When Shelby went to Chrysler, there were those who thought: "What can he  accomplish there with those little front drive puddle jumpers?" Well, he proved front wheel drive cars could be fun to drive and while those Shelby Dodges are not collected like his Ford cars, he achieved Chrysler's goal so that Americans today buy more American-made front drive cars  than they did back before Shelby turned his hand to them.
     Fans of his collaborations with Ford were happy to see Shelby get back together with Ford. It was a long time coming, and surprising in that most men his age would have long since retired to the rocker on the porch. But, no, Shelby  perserved--even having a heart and kidney transplant to keep going--so that the modern Shelby Mustangs are worthy of the name.    Only a few months before he died, he saw the introduction of a 200-mph showroom stock Shelby Mustang.     There were failures, oh, yes, big time failures like the Oldsmobile powered Series 1. And fights, those clone wars got nasty with suits and counter-suits. But the potential car builder in all of us hoped Shelby would prevail because, damn it, he was the one who honed the original ideas only to have them stolen when he was busy elsewhere.     Trying to keep up with his other activities was impossible--you check cattle ranching, horse breeding, chili mix production, you find Shelby mentioned here and there and everywhere. Like Pete Lyons wrote "In every field that caught his interest, he was able to exercise a powerful combination of intelligence, curiosity, vision, timing, guile, cunning and charm, plus what he described as 'the work ethic.' "
   There are lots of other car companies that made interesting products, but none of them had a leader who is even one-tenth the exciting personality of Shelby. And his former employees, who met annually at this event or that, seemed to like remembering working for The Man, as the highlight of their working lives.   No doubt they scratched their heads whenever they read about Shelby's latest activiity. Here he was older than them, and by all rights  should be retired, but no, he was out there shaking up the troops.    I think those who read about Shelby's life will discover a lot to emulate--the way he would learn European courses so well that, 50 years later, he could remember each turn in the Mille Miglia. The way he supported young men with their ideas, even if he wasn't sure if they could do what they claimed (case in point--Pete Brock's design for the Cobra Daytona coupe).    By far the most fun in reading about Shelby is the "merry prankster" aspect to it all, the way his crew lived it up when they went to race, and partied hardy, but still won the races. It's like reading about Robin Hood and his merry men. They had fun, and lived life to its fullest.   And, as far as drama for a story, you don't get any better in talking endurance racing of the '50s and '60s than Shelby vs. Enzo Ferrari. The Ferrari people still like to pretend that Shelby was no threat but, for a few years there --say '65-'67-- Shelby managed to wrest away the mantle from Ferrari, and for that sports car fans who aren't die-hard Ferraristi are grateful.   As far as how Shelby changed the car world, I believe his driving school was one of the first for high-performance driving. His going into cast wheels for cars and motorcycles showed his prowess as a manufacturer. But the most important thing was proving that an American-engined sports car could conquer those fancy European sports cars where you had no parts and had to learn the language of your foreign mechanic.  His charity giving programs  have had  some ups and downs but suffice to say that heart funds and vocational education have received monies.Shelby's survivors consist of his wife, Cleo Shelby; his sister and only sibling, Anne Shelby Ellison; daughter Sharon Lavine and sons Michael and Patrick Shelby (all three from his first marriage to Jeanne Fields); six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.    With Carroll Shelby's death, an era has ended. And I, for one, will lament that the car world is duller for it. We are back to the machines, but machines are not interesting if there is not an interesting creator behind them... 

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Wallace Wyss is the author of SHELBY: The Man, The Cars, The Legend(Iconografix, 2007)

Shelby 1000, Give or Take

 

 

 

       The Shelby 1000 makes 950 hp on the street, 1,100 on the track.  At the New York Auto Show, Shelby announced a package that he can add to existing Shelbys that delivers  950 hp. on the street and  1,100 horsepower on the track.

      This is one of his "post-title conversions," ie. done after you already own the car and send it to his shop for a massage. The street version is not cheap-- a mere $149,995.  this is after you bought the 2013 GT500 at $48,810.  At Shelbys they take the factory-stock 5.4-liter V-8 , tear it down and add new rods, a new piston and other bits. They improve the  stopping with 6 pistons in front and 4 pistons in the rear, and beef up the suspension with new struts, sway bars and bushings.  A new solid drive-shaft is added connected to a 9-inch rear end.  the preview was marred only by Shelby accidentally releasing a doctored press photo that showed the car lifting the front tires off the ground on acceleration. That "wheelie" was the work of Photoshop and was intended originally only to be for internal use but somehow it got released and a USA Today editor spotted it.

    Shelby American plans to produce about 1,000 of the monsters, and Shelby's business head, John Luft , said  about a quarter of them have already been ordered.  Sadly, none were available to be seen at this year's fabulous Fords Forever Event at Knott's Berry Farm in California.  Perhaps at next year's meet we will see what $198805 can buy.

Book Review Carroll Shelby: The Authorized Biography

 

Hardcover: 464 pages

Publisher: Motorbooks; First edition (April 26, 2012)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0760340560

ISBN-13: 978-0760340561

Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches

Shipping Weight: 2 pounds

Review by Wallace Wyss

   Most of the books on Cobras , Shelby Mustangs and GT40s—cars in which he was instrumental in creating —concentrate on the nitty-gritty of mechanical bits, such as how big the carburetor was in the ’66 GT350, or what additional colors there were on the ‘67s and so forth, etc.

   That’s because car reporters, who write most of these books, tend to steer away from covering personalities because they think the market wants only the nitty-gritty detail on the cars and doesn’t care that much about the background on the folks who created them.

   This book happily goes much more than usual into the man, the quirky, controversial former chicken farmer who became one of the most famous names in car racing,  Carroll Hall Shelby.

   The author is British author Rinsey Mills, who has written earlier books on Cobras He was a surprising choice because usually  British authors seem more to reflect the attitude that A.C. Cars Ltd. Was doing fine and Carroll Shelby didn’t “save them” but more took advantage of them.

But in this huge two pound book, Mills gives Shelby full credit for the idea of the Cobra.

This book starts out with Shelby as a boy, where he grew up the son of a rural mailman  in a small town near Dallas.
This book is an “authorized biography” which could mean that Shelby read every word and “authorized” the depiction of his life, but it could also mean that Shelby merely authorized Mills to contact his lifelong friends, former employees, race drivers, business partners and even ex-wives. In other words, Shelby paved the way, by handing him his Rolodex. And it shows that in a way, Mills quoting nobody but Shelby’s friends, though of course, being in business over 50 years he has stepped on a few toes and has his enemies.
   In almost all the areas, Mills tells it like it is, or was, such as in the disaster of Shelby’s one all-new car, the Series 1 Olds-powered car, telling how it became a failure.
   While his coverage of  Cobra and GT40 racing during the ’62-’67 period is very thorough, if you are not schooled in racing at the time, it is a little byzantine trying to figure out what “first in class” means as opposed to “first overall.” Some authors choose to tell the racing story twice, once about Cobras and then about the GT40s, or even three times, covering Trans-Am separately as well.  You could argue that each type of car has its own fans who want to read about their favorites separate from the others.
Mills is so busy talking about Shelby he doesn’t go into mini-biographies of some of the most interesting people Shelby hired as drivers or executives. For instance, Phil Hill. How did Shelby ever let Hill—his most talented driver along with Ken Miles—get away to the Chaparral team, who, since they were running Chevys, were the enemy camp?
Still, when he does deviate from Shelby, then you get impatient that he’s telling you more than you really want to know about some side subject. For instance, it’s known Shelby was in Africa but we don’t need to know the history of each country he hunted in, but a good 6-8 pages on African history take up room in this heavy tome, room that Cobra fans wish were devoted to Cobras and Shelbys.
   Shelby’s married life is touched on, and it was surprising to this author that the failure of Shelby’s first marriage was covered to the extent that Mills tells of the first Mrs. Shelby confronting her husband’s movie star girlfriend in California to find out what the status of her marriage was. The rest of the wives, though, get short shrift and there’s not even a line on each of his children, now grown and parents of their own. (It would have been interesting to find out why, for instance, why none followed him into the car business, and if not, why?)
It must have been a Herculean task for Mills to research each aspect of the book, but he does it so thoroughly that the thought of anyone else doing a “complete” biography makes you wonder why they would bother. Still there are some aspects that are not discussed enough for this writer—such as what the executives employing Shelby at various automakers thought of him, and so forth. Did Lee Iaccoca like him, if so why is Shelby not mentioned in most of Iaccoca's self-congratulatory books?
    The main problem with the book vis-a-vis what the fans want is that, while there are over 500 pages, there are only a few pages of pictures, less than 10% of the total number of pages. While some of the pictures are new to Shelby fans, even pictures of Shelby as a lad, it’s far from a compendium of pictures of each type of car that Shelby has been involved with. Perhaps the only true way you can cover the man and his times is to have a words book like this as your foundation and then two or three appendixes with pictures.

    I quibble too with the choice of running paintings of Cobras in some cases instead of photographs. Although Bill Neale is extraordinarily skilled at depicting cars and striking a mood with his art, I know Cobra fans are buying books with pictures of Cobras because they have a model Cobra, or are building a replica, but they want to see detailed photos of real cars, not paintings. (Idea for publishers: an art book featuring the art of the Cobra. )

    Anyone who hopes this all-encompassing book will sort out the features of each year of the modern day Shelbys, from 2007, hopes in vain because although the Mills book is published this year, it skips through the cars built after 2007 rapidly and maybe rightfully so since long lists of specifications and colors and model packages would have called for  another style of book altogether.
    So, in sum, Carroll Shelby: The Authorized Biography by Rinsey Mills has achieved a new milestone—covering its subject's life so thoroughly that it has set a tough standard for writers of any future books on Shelby  to match. What else remains in the untold story? Precious little (what about the time Shelby told Vanity Fair magazine he was a diamond merchant? Not a word of it in the Mills book...)
It will be interesting to see how this book does sales-wise. Will Shelby fans all want to have one or will some hold out, preferring the “coffee table” type book, the type that are heavy on pictures and sparse on words, like those by Randy Leffingwell and Colin Comer? I have those on my bookshelf but wanted a big fat biography too to provide almost a year by year saga of Shelby's life.
I think Shelby fans want both but this book represents a more academic direction, one that might not have as big a market as MBI hopes. Maybe a series of smaller books, each concentrating on one aspect only-- is the best way to satisfy the fans because I can’t think of a more satisfying Cobra book as an example than the one that’s just on Daytonas called The Cobra-Ferrari Wars by Mike Shoen. That author, who actually owned a Daytona coupe, didn’t bother summarizing Shelby’s life before or after the Daytona but just concentrated on why that particular model was developed, how it was developed, and its racing career. Then there’s Go Like Hell, by A.J. Baime,  that discusses only why Ford went racing at LeMans and cuts the subject off right after the ’66 victory. Yet both books are satisfying in how well they cover their narrowly-defined area. So dividing the subject of Shelby into smaller chunks maybe makes more sense than a 500-plus page book that tries to do it all.

 But don’t take that as a negative. For the price, with the retail price of $35.00 (and almost one third lower online), it is a small price to pay to get almost the whole span of Shelby’s life between two covers. Think of the Mills book as the basic building block of your Shelby library….

The Reviewer: Wallace Wyss has written three books on the subject and is now preparing a second edition of one of them, SHELBY: The Man, The Cars,The Legend.