Donald’s call had come right after I’d spent time with John Wyer and the Aston Martin DB3, so my name was known in England and would add an American driver to Healey’s mission, and that’s what he wanted.
We made a deal and I flew up to Utah and met them at a desert tank town called Wendover that wasn’t much good for anything but cheap rooms. The salt was just right and Donald went out and set a string of new records, then George did the same. This was in late August. We all got into it for the International Class D records, changing drivers about every three hours for 24 hours straight.
I goosed the 100S up to 157mph and then did 186 for an hour in the supercharged car. Donald ran the blown Healey up to 200 in the traps. In the end we set 53 International and American records with those four-cylinder cars and still got around 27 miles to a gallon of gas. My British friends went home happy.
I was glad to get off the flats, shake the salt out of my clothes and rest up. In November I was back in an Austin-Healey for the five-day Carrera Panamericana race the length of Mexico. My co-pilot, Roy Jackson-Moore, and I decided we would leapfrog, flying ahead each day, so that I would drive one leg and he would drive the next.
He never got a stint because on that first day out of Tuxtla Gutiérrez I was chasing the big American Lincolns and about to catch Ray Crawford’s when I smacked a rock in the road outside Oaxaca that sent our Healey end-over-end four times. Roy was lucky. If he’d been riding along it might have killed him – the Healey’s passenger side was wiped out and both wheels ripped off.
Some Mexicans put me on a blanket and fed me homemade beer, and a couple of girls on their way to Guatemala gave me brandy. I was feeling no pain, but my left arm looked bad and I was covered with cuts and bruises. When the road finally opened to traffic again an ambulance showed up carrying another Carrera driver in misery with his hide scraped off, and it was a hundred miles before we got to the hospital in Puebla. The doctor there told me my arm was badly broken and to get back to the States as soon as I could and have it set.
The problem was, the Mexican authorities said I could not leave the country until the Healey was ready to take back across the border in one piece, the way it had come in, but some Mexicans overnight after the crash stole everything on it that would unscrew. It was three or four days later when the American Embassy got me rubber-stamped to fly home, where my shattered elbow was operated on and put in a cast. It wouldn’t heal for almost a year, and meantime I had races to drive.
My friend to this day, at 83, Dr Hal Fenner from Hobbs, New Mexico, the orthopedist who was the Snell helmet doctor for 50 years, would go to the races with me and take off my plaster cast and put on one made of lightweight fibreglass so I could drive. After the race he’d put back on a new plaster of Paris cast, and I won a lot that way, including Pebble Beach with the 750 Monza that Phil Hill and I had driven at Sebring and thought we were first there until a scoring error put us back to second.
For the 1955 Carrera, Ferrari built two 24-plug, 4.9-litre cars called 410 Sports. The Mexico race was cancelled and I wound up later driving the 410 that was made for Fangio. But I’ll always remember those Austin-Healeys at Bonneville and in Mexico. Eyston was one of the finest gentlemen I ever knew. He had a lot to do in those early times helping me not only in my racing career with Aston Martin, with Castrol a sponsor, but also during the Cobra days when we won the World Championship using Castrol – all thanks to Captain George Eyston.
When we lost Bob Petersen last March, everybody in the automobile world lost one of its finest – and one of my closest – friends. His Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles honoured me on November 8 in front of 800 people, and I wish Bob could have been there. The same goes for Wally Parks, who we lost in September. Wally was a wonderful man who took drag racing off the streets with his creation of the National Hot Rod Association. I told the audience that Wally and Bob did more to fill the banquet room at the Petersen Museum’s tribute for me than Carroll Shelby ever did.
Margie Petersen, Bob’s widow, was at my table along with my wife Cleo; Sandy and Jim Hall, and Parnelli Jones and Dan Gurney sat with us, too. Jim’s from Texas like I am and he and his brother Richard helped get me started selling sport cars in Dallas back in the 1950s. I won the Pebble Beach race in ’56 in Richard’s Monza before I went driving for John Edgar.
John’s son William was called on stage by emcee Dave McClelland and remembered that I ‘drove like a sumbitch’ back in those days, and I guess I did. I’m sorry I didn’t get to race much with Jim Hall then but he was still just a kid and it would have been uneven.
Bill Neale, who’s also from Texas and painted all those pictures of us, talked about a venture we had going in the ’60s down in Terlingua, Texas, near the Mexican border. Bill designed the rabbit logo of the Terlingua Racing Team for our Shelby GT350, and Ken Miles gave us its first win.Terlingua has more goats than people and Bill was almost right when he told everybody at the Petersen that the only thing that would grow there was rocks.
Shelby Automobiles in Las Vegas is bringing the name back now with the Terlingua Mustangs we unveiled at the SEMA show the week before that night at the Petersen. We’ve got Bill’s black-and-yellow rabbit logo stretched over a 375-horsepower V6. We’re doing a Terlingua 427 Cobra, too. That’s all part of the 8000 to 10,000 cars we build a year in Las Vegas.
Bill Krause was also at the dinner. He’s the first driver I hired for developing the Cobra, and I wish he’d stayed with it instead of going over to Mickey Thompson, but we’re still good friends. So many of my friends were there that night, including John Morton. He started with my driving school at Riverside and wound up racing Cobras for us. John said he didn’t think they handled very well at first, and he’s right. It took a lot of good people to get the Cobra to where it was a winner.
Phil Remington was one of them, and Phil’s 88 now and still working five days a week for Gurney. Phil stood up and said I’d been the buffer between the Ford hierarchy and ourselves in racing. I was lucky enough back then to run into Phil Remington. You can’t say you do anything; you only do things with people. There were a lot of people there that night at the Petersen from our old racing days, and God bless them. It was very comforting to me to see them again.
Parnelli told how he won the Riverside Grand Prix in our Cooper Monaco ‘King Cobra’ on Firestones – when I was a Goodyear tyre dealer! And Bob Bondurant told everybody that he came over from driving Corvettes to find out the weak points in our Cobra, then went out and won his first race in one. We all wound up taking the cars to Europe and beat Enzo Ferrari. Gurney and Foyt won Le Mans for us later in our Ford GT, and Dan talked about how he and I put together All American Racers.
‘The Snake’, Don Prudromme, cracked up the audience with his stories, one of them about how he was ‘too slow’ in sport cars. He said he liked the 330-mile-an-hour rush from drag racing better. He got his biggest laugh after saying the thrill only lasts for a short time, and that he’d stop there. Everyone knew what Don meant.
Somebody told me I spoke a thousand words when it was my time at the microphone. Maybe I did, once I got going. I remember saying in the beginning that I never think about all the things that have been said about me, because I’ll be too damn busy tomorrow morning. I don’t think much about all this stuff because it ain’t half over yet. One thing I’m sure of – back in 1959 after winning Le Mans, I had to go to California where all the hot rodders were in order to build what became the Cobra.
It’s like I say, you don’t do things alone, you only do them with people.
Lance Reventlow beat me to the punch back in 1958 when he launched his American-built Scarab sport car while the Cobra was still just an idea in my head. I knew Lance from the races and saw him as a bright young guy who could do something with family money he had and I didn’t. When he debuted his Scarab at Phoenix that year, the SCCA wouldn’t let him drive because he’d been under age at prior races and got away with it. So Richie Ginther and Lance’s school pal Bruce Kessler drove the Scarab only in practice, but they broke the track record and it was plain that the Scarab would be a hot contender.
Two years later, when I was chasing the USAC Sport Car Championship, I got behind the wheel of a Scarab at Continental Divide Raceway in Colorado. I’d already won the 1960 USAC race at Riverside in a Birdcage Maserati and had a good chance to add more points with the Scarab. Its Chevy V8 looked like a winner and could give me what I was after.
Lance’s Scarab was the result of development money being in the right hands at the right time. He was born in London to wealthy American socialite Barbara Hutton and Curt Reventlow, a Danish count. She married Cary Grant next. By the time Lance was 12 he had another stepfather – Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, who’d won the Targa Florio driving a Ferrari. Porfirio Rubirosa was another stepdad. Lance was still a teenager when he started racing his own alloy-body Mercedes 300SL.
After Lance drove Formula Two cars in Europe he set out to make his own sport car and hired Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes to build the first Scarab, with a second and third Scarab built by Phil Remington and Emil Diedt. Their competition was Ferrari, Maserati and Lister-Jaguar, but Scarabs were winning right and left with Chuck Daigh and Lance driving. Grand Prix was next. Unfortunately, Lance got in with his new front-engine F1 Scarab at exactly the wrong time – when rear-engine cars were coming into fashion.
At Spa he retired after one lap, the week before I drove a Scarab sport car in Colorado. The reason that particular Scarab was so damn fast is because of Red Byron – not only one of the greatest NASCAR race drivers that ever lived but one of the finest mechanics I ever knew, and I had a lot of respect for him. When Red put that Scarab together for me in Colorado, he said, ‘Shelby, this sumbitch will run – I’ve added 40 horsepower to it.’ He knew he had congenital heart failure and was going to die, but Red worked his ass off right up until he croaked.
My friend Jim Hall had the lap record there at Continental Divide in a Birdcage, and when I took the Scarab out I clipped four seconds off his old time. The Scarab won wire-to-wire and gave me the USAC points I needed to make the title mine at the end of the season. Across the pond, Lance was already packing up his Formula One Scarab – as much a failure as his sport car was a success.
It’s too bad his F1 car didn’t come up to expectations. They went through a lot of gyrations with it, and the story of how they got the desmodromic valve train is something that a movie could be made of. But they never really learned how to make it work.
Driving that American-made Scarab at Colorado, winning with it, and seeing all the other wins it racked up against the finest imports, only made me more raring to get on with that dream to build my own lightweight, high-powered sport car here in the States. The rest of that story is Shelby Cobra history.
Lance was a great guy and he and Warren Olson tried to put the right kind of programme together, but they were just a little ahead of their time. Then Lance did a really hell of a job when he later had Phil Remington design and build him a rear-engine Scarab – I think the best rear-engine car ever built for that era. I made a huge mistake in not using it for my King Cobra instead of the Coopers. But I’ve made a lot of mistakes.
Later on, Troutman and Barnes built Jim Hall his first front-engine Chaparral. Rob Walton, who owns both the Scarab and Chaparral now, says the Chaparral was even better and faster than the Scarab. Troutman and Barnes were the crème-de-la-crème of car building in America during the late ’50s and early ’60s.
In 1972, Lance Reventlow died in a plane crash near Aspen, cutting short a life that played a large part in the post-war American sport car movement. We were lucky to have him when we did.
This year’s Barrett-Jackson sale, presented by Ford, was the best-ever auction of Shelby Mustangs. My wife Cleo and I flew to Scottsdale for this Arizona event that brings car people in from all over the world. Steve Davis, the auction’s president and a true expert when it comes to Shelbys, ran an outstanding show that had hundreds of the best collector cars in North America going up for auction.
I don’t want to be just a reporter here – I’m too old for that. I turned 85 in January but I’m still a hot rodder, an innovator, and I’m committed to always upping the ante when it comes to performance, and to telling about it. Barrett-Jackson is an important showplace for the rekindling of the muscle car war, and selling Shelby cars is why I build them, for people to want and to buy and to enjoy. Most will be driven, some will go into private collections or museums.
I don’t care which. What I really care about are the cars we’re building today and that we’ll be building a year from now. Chrysler brought its own modern muscle car to Scottsdale, the first 2008 Dodge Challenger SRT8 with a 372cu-in V8, that went for $400,000. So old Dodge muscle is coming back strong.
At Barrett-Jackson, Jay Leno had a lot to say in favour of GM CEO Rick Wagoner’s 2009 $100,000-sticker Corvette ZR1. Over 600 horsepower, it’s what Zora Duntov wanted to build 30 years ago, but it took until now to get it done by GM’s Corvette Division. Along with North America GM president Troy Clarke, Jay was there to talk about getting the best bang for your buck. It was a hell of a price war for this first ZR1.
Bidder Dave Ressler finally topped everyone with $1 million after upping his own call of $900,000, with proceeds going to charity. Chevrolet went big with this and another high sale of $1.6 million for the one-off 1963 concept Corvette Rondine, bodied by Pininfarina.
The ’63 Ford Thunderbird fastback factory concept Italien, built by Andy Hotton’s Dearborn Steel Tubing and for a while a daily driver in California, sold for $600,000 to the Blackhawk Collection. This was historically significant because Detroit was looking to the Italian design houses for inspiration back then – a time when Henry Ford II tried to buy Ferrari, a story I’ve already told here.
Robert Parker, Ford’s car marketing manager, got up on Barrett-Jackson’s stage and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the muscle car wars have begun again!’ That’s when we brought in our new Shelby King of the Road that we make with Ford SVT and Ford Racing’s collaboration. Actor/racer Patrick Dempsey drove me onto the ramp in that first 540 horsepower, 40th-anniversary glass-roof GT500KR. On stage with my wife
Cleo, I told the packed auditorium that we were here for a historic moment with this new KR. I wish Edsel Ford could have been there, but I said Robert Parker and I would do our best to entice everybody to give too much money for this KR of ours because all the money goes to Edsel’s charity, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. I put on my black hat and said, ‘Open up your purse and your heart!’ Drag racer Joe Amato started the bidding at a hundred grand and it shot up to $550,000, selling to Ron Pratt, who’d also bought my old Supersnake Cobra at Barrett-Jackson last year for $5.5 million to put into his private museum.
We have almost 10% of all Americans affected by diabetes each year, so the charity’s a vital cause and it’s great to be doing this with Ford. On the car side of it, our new Shelby GT500KR beats them all. We’re doing 1000 of them and they’ll be coming to Ford dealers’ showrooms this spring.
My personal 1969 GT500 red convertible that I’ve owned since new was auctioned too, another big bid-winner at $675,000, going to Ron Pratt again. I’ve owned only one Shelby longer, my original Cobra CSX2000, and it’s not for sale. I’ve turned down $20 million for it. Buyers love low serial numbers, like the auctioned ’65 GT350 fastback, number 69 of the original 100 we built for homologation and which was raced in SCCA – it went for $420,000. And a couple of early Cobras sold at $600,000 and above.
One of our old Hertz Shelby GT350H Mustangs was on the block, a rare blue-with-gold-stripes fastback, still good-looking and one you can bet your shirt that car renters had memorable times with. I smiled when it drew $135,000. I love all our Shelbys and the way people go for them – and how they look for what’s coming from us next.
Peter Collins introduced me to John Wyer down in Argentina in January 1954 when Phil Hill, Bob Said, Masten Gregory and I went there for the 1000km at Buenos Aires, and I drove an old Allard with Dale Duncan to finish tenth in my first International race. I’d known about John Wyer and he’d heard of me, and he said, ‘Why don’t you drive an Aston Martin for us at Sebring?’ Of course I said I would, and I got all ready for my first 12 Hours. Charlie Wallace, a hair-dresser who later raced D-types for Briggs Cunningham, was my co-driver at Sebring. We gave that 2.9-litre Aston a good run before the rear end broke in the fifth hour.
I really wanted to go racing abroad but I didn’t have the money to pay my way, so a West Texas oilman that I’d raced for, Guy Mabee, said he’d buy a DB3S for me to drive in England, and in May we went over to Aintree. I knew this was where the Grand National steeplechase was run, and having a sport car race on the new motor circuit next to the horse turf was a big difference from what I’d been used to, racing on old airports in the States.
The C-types were the cars to beat at Aintree, and Duncan Hamilton won it in one. I think I could have passed him, but it was my first race in England and I didn’t want to screw up the car.
I listened to John Wyer, who was 13 years older than me and probably the best team manager who ever lived in that era. Back in ’54, you didn’t dare over-rev the engines, the gearboxes weren’t strong enough and the brakes weren’t always adequate. Anyway, I felt good about finishing second in the rain behind Duncan and ahead of the rest of the Jaguars. It meant a lot to me that I had done that well in my first British race and got that recognition, and it made John happy.
After Aintree I went over to Le Mans to drive the same Aston again, the DB3S chassis number 3 that was painted for me in American racing white with blue stripes. Paul Frère, an experienced driver and fine journalist, was my co-driver for Le Mans – and he was a wonderful friend for many years after. I’m very sad that he’s gone now, living to be 91 until this past February. But in 1954 I was only 31 and Paul was 37, trying our best at Le Mans.
In the middle of the night, while chasing Briggs Cunningham’s big C4-R down the Straight into braking for Mulsanne Corner, I went deep and ran our Aston into a sandbank, but got it back into the race. I felt the front end shimmy and pitted. They jacked up the car and a front wheel fell off – the spindle was broken. All the rest of the works Astons dropped out, too. Froilan Gonzales and Maurice Trintignant won in the 4.9 Ferrari that would later go overseas to John Edgar’s stable, where I would drive.
I was disappointed with what happened to Paul’s and my Aston, but in another five years I’d win the 24 Hours with Roy Salvadori in the DBR1 and meanwhile spend many of my best racing days with John Wyer and David Brown.
Two weeks after the broken spindle at Le Mans we took the Aston over to Monza, another place I’d never been, and ran the 1000km Supercortemaggiore, named after an Italian petrol. Graham Whitehead was my co-driver and it rained, luckily, because the wet meant a slower pace and better finish for us, and we got fifth along with 2000 bucks prize money that I really needed. So I headed back to England for Silverstone and the sport car race there that shared the same weekend with the British Grand Prix.
The Astons beat all the new D-type Jaguars at Silverstone to finish 1-2-3, with Collins taking the win and me following Salvadori for third in front of Reg Parnell in a V12 Lagonda. I’d been dicing with Reg before he lost a plug, and after that he made it tough on anybody who thought they’d try to get around me. Those were times I’ll always remember, staying at the Vicarage and all the fun we had. Old Reg was a great friend who unfortunately died on the operating table during an appendectomy about ten years later.
Nineteen fifty-four with the Aston Martins and being in England and Europe that spring and summer with friends and teammates was one of the best times of my life. John Wyer gave me a chance that gave me a name that led to a lot of good stuff in years later.
‘When did YOU start driving?’ People used to ask me that a lot – and still do. Everybody knows how it was with themselves and how they got into cars, and they’d want to hear what I would have to say about that time when I was still a kid.
My father, Warren Hall Shelby, was a rural mail carrier in East Texas and, after he gave up using a horse and buggy, he drove cars. In 1928 he had a four-cylinder Whippet with 35 horsepower, made by Willys-Overland, the company that would later make the Jeep for World War Two. I was five then and I remember that Whippet of my dad’s to this day.
Quite a while later, in 1956, after I won the SCCA National Championship, Sports Illustrated named me Driver of the Year and sent Ken Rudeen to my home in Texas to write a cover story about me. They had in the magazine a picture of me wearing overalls at the wheel of my first car – a little pedal car. I was about four and I had a big homemade pipe stuck in my mouth, pretending I could smoke and be grown up already. Ken and I had a good time with that story. He was Sports Illustrated’s motor racing editor for years and wrote the well-known book Men at Speed. We lost him to cancer five years ago, sadly.
When I was 14 I learned to drive for real, in a ’34 Dodge. After that my dad gave me a Willys I’d already beat up while it was still his. I was caught speeding in it by the police and I didn’t drive again for six months. After that I drove Model T and Model A Fords, and I’d go to the local dirt tracks and watch the oval races.
In May 1952 my friend in Dallas, Ed Wilkins, let me drive his MG TC in a road race at Norman, Oklahoma. I’d joined a sport car club that Ed was in and, when a rally from Boston arrived in Dallas, one of the drivers stopped and asked Ed where a liquor store was. Ed told him, and the guy went and bought some champagne and cracked that bottle across the radiator cap of the MG and announced, ‘I hereby christen thee Theodore Roosevelt, you rough-ridin’ son of a bitch!’ I’ll never forget that.
Anyway, I drove Ed’s TC at Norman. It was my first sport car race and I had no idea what to do but just drive, and I won it and another race there, too. I outran the Jaguar XK120s with the MG. That MG is now owned by publisher Syd Silverman, whose grandfather started the showbiz tabloid Variety. Syd loves vintage race cars and probably wouldn’t sell it for anything less than a lot of money. I’d like to have it because when Ed Wilkins died last year he left my foundation 10,000 dollars. Ed was just a draftsman all of his life, but the highlight of his living was those races way back then. He and I built a little go-kart kind of thing in 1937 and we put a Maytag washing machine motor in it to power it.
After driving Ed’s MG TC at Norman and whipping the Jags, I got to drive an XK120 in a road race at Muskogee, Oklahoma. I was getting to really like racing sport cars, and in September I was at Elkhart Lake to drive an XK120M with wire wheels that belonged to Hay Bales Richter, a trucking magnate from Enid, Oklahoma. I really finished third, but they scored me around ninth or something. After I did that race in the XKM people started coming to me in droves to drive their race cars.
That’s when I drove Charlie Brown’s Allard at Caddo Mills, Texas, in 1953. There’s a guy now who owns that same Allard in Phoenix, Arizona, and he wants to drive it over to Los Angeles and have me sign the dash.
I later took Roy Cherryholmes’ Allard J2X to Argentina and drove it there in the 1000-kilometre race with my co-driver Dale Duncan. During Dale’s stint our Allard caught fire under him, so he stopped and peed in the carburettor to put out the fire in the Cadillac engine. We finished tenth! After that I went to Sebring with John Wyer and raced the Aston Martin DB3S that I talked about in last month’s column.
All of that seems like a long time ago, and it was. I’ve always liked to think about how things get started and where they go from there. I’ve had a lot of success in my life, and some bad times with my heart until I got a new one. At 85 now, I’m not about to stop being me and doing what I do.