Carroll Shelby In His Own Words

You know, I got interested in cars before I could remember almost my dad was a rural mailman in East Texas and I remember my earliest memories are that I liked riding with him in a and a Willis Overland and then he got a 28 . spank him and when I was four or five years old I used to walk with him and stop and put my foot on the ground and on the right side and go faster, dad. I loved it and my dad also loved cars in Texas, you can get your driver. license when you were 14 years old and my father had a 34 Dodge, let's see I was 11 years old that was a three year old car well I got my driver's license the day after I got my driver's license I asked dad he said I could drive the car around the block and I took it out on a street, the best street in the area was a street called East Pike, which was then a four lane highway and I got pulled over for going 80 miles an hour and a 34 Dodge, yeah .

It was a while before I could drive again when I was 12 years old. I used to get to know my bike and go to the local racecourses. There were no racetracks back then, but we had what we called local bullrings, which were more albums. or half a mile and a mile track there and I remember the names to this day of the guys that were, you know the local drivers at that time and I used to go and hang out in a garage, there's a guy called I remember that it was Jean Frederick in Columbia and they had a garage and I used to go there and ride this peak outside.

I wish I could go in there and sit in the race car and one time he let me come. There and I would sit on it and I used to get on my bike and go to these races every Sunday. I just loved running from a very early age, you know, in my early childhood, I was found to have a heart condition when I was about eight years old. The school nurse found a murmur and I wasn't allowed to do any physical exercise I couldn't play soccer I had to sneak out to play a little baseball and I was a midget I was 5 feet 5 inches tall when I went I entered the service at 18 and a A year later, I mean, six, six months later, I was almost 6 feet tall, so I always thought my family fed me well, but obviously something happened as soon as I got the service because I grew very, very big. quickly and I passed the exam to enter the service, they didn't find any heart murmur or anything and it didn't come back until 20 years later, oh, I had a family and I tried to do a business and I got into several. businesses that could have been very successful but somehow I think I was a little dyslexic and another thing is that I have attention deficit and back then they didn't diagnose these things and I get very bored with things very quickly.

I'll start something and I'll get it going and it'll have so much potential and I'll turn around saying "damn, that's boring." I've walked away from more situations that could have been very successful than you can imagine and that's the reason I decided well, I always wanted to drive racing cars, I think I'll give it a try, so I started, a friend of mine I had a mg and we started building a car in my garage in Dallas and rightfully so, my wife at the present. time says I don't know if you'll get that car out of here or you and a car getting out of here.

I drove for a team that wasn't very well known then, what is very well known is Aston Martin and a guy called John Wyer. He was the team manager and I used to hang around the factory where the cars were built, as well as drive, go out and test in those factories to see how things were put together and the few companies that operated. It's actually what gave me the idea of ​​how to put together the Cobra and the cars I've made since then, so I really wanted to drive race cars. I enjoyed driving race cars, but I also knew I had started late in life.

I started when I was 28 so I better move on and decide what I was going to do when that was over because if you look back at the lives of many racing drivers when their days were over, a lot of us're looking for something to do and I didn't want to end up in that category. Ferrari made me an offer in 54 56 57 and 58 to drive for him and I never wanted to drive for mr. Ferrari because the drivers, if you talk to Fangio, Phil Hill and Tony Brooks, and if Peter Collins was here, he would pit the drivers against each other and he didn't want that environment, yeah, yeah, it felt wonderful.

Aston Martin had never had it. the horsepower, the Ferraris were always faster on the straights, but we had wonderful preparation, probably better preparation than Ferrari had at the time and I was lucky enough to win it and that was really the highlight of my life in when it comes to driving race cars. Up to that point I already had heart problems and had to drive on nitroglycerin pills, but not much at Lamar in '59, the next year in 1960, when I won the national championship, I had to take four or five nitroglycerin pills. in every race, so I decided that in late 1960 I had never planned it, but I was driving at Laguna Seca and took my fifth nitroglycerin pill and I could have won the race, except I had to slow down for two laps each time.

I took a nitroglycerin pill because it hits the top of your head. you ever take one, you take one sometime, it really hurts the top of your head. What it does, it breaks up your capillaries and gets more oxygen into your system, basically, but I. I was driving since then, well I guess I'll leave the time to try to build a car that I almost had a deal with Corvette in 1957, in fact I took three Corvettes. Ed Cole gave me three Corvettes. I took them to Italy and I had Scaglione build the bodies for them and we were halfway there and one night I got a call when Cold said Shelby, I never gave you those cars, forget it, it says solar done.

Toth, who was one of my dear friends, and McKenzie, who was in The person in charge of the Corvette program had reached the president, found out and stopped the program. General Motors was not interested in building a sports car that would outperform the Corvettes, so in 1961 I was thinking about buying Corvette engines from a dealership and I was building my prototypes or using the small aluminum automobile engine and drew up three or four plans for the x' chassis and suddenly I read in a magazine that AC cars in England had lost their contract which stopped manufacturing the Bristol engine which was actually designed by BMW. years before and were looking for an engine supplier, they were using a 6 cylinder Ford, but then Ray Brock from Hot Rod magazine came shopping one day right after I moved to California and said Carroll is new.

In Detroit and I saw a new small thin wall cast iron engine that Ford was building, so he put me in touch with a guy to call him and I was selling Goodyear racing tires. He was the dealer and he had to go to Pikes Peak. to Hill Climb and the Ford people were there and I talked and talked to him and said, hey, you have a new engine and I have an idea for a sports car that will outperform Corvettes, so he asked me to come. I came back to Detroit and this was before I had even done a deal with AC Car, so I quit.

I got on a plane, went to England and told the AC people. I told him if he could get an American V8 engine, would he be interested? By building me a couple of prototypes, I installed them and they said yes, so I got on the plane and went straight back to Detroit and met up with Friday and a couple other people there at Ford and they took me to Iacocca, who was managing Ford division sales there and I told him that you have a new little engine here and if you give me some engines and give me twenty-five thousand dollars, I will just buy a sports car that will outperform the Corvette and they told me and I don't know if this is so or no, but they laughed about it and told me a while later, a year later, he says, coke, he said, you better give him that, he got $25,000 before he bites someone, it was an archaic chassis, then he was 20 years old . and when we were done with that car, there wasn't a single nut and bolt that AC had originally put on it.

It had the same design that was too archaic and old. Springs, one in the front and one in the rear, but they even had different lengths. arms, everything was different, if we had been smart we would have designed a new chassis, but we were financially restricted on time and Phil Remington, a group of California hot rodders took this and we started developing it and we did it. I worked and finished. I think he won the national production car championship for about seven or eight years. We did a lot of Playboy ads. Ford decided they had never done advertising and Playboy wanted to do it, so they wanted to see if we could figure out my head. they cut me off they took me to advertise in Playboy so that was what it really was to see if it was feasible that's the right thing for them to advertise they decided not to do it by the way that was the first car I had in Playboy and I don't think the playboy advertising Until today, young people will talk about it at home all the time.

I think it was something that I'm sure a lot of moms and dads were really upset to hear about, you know? this new sports car at home, but you would be surprised. I'm amazed every day how many 50-year-olds now come up and say, "You were my idol when I was a kid." I wanted a Cobra so much at school and now I have one. Look, I had to pay $300,000 for it, but I have it and I guess that's what started it all. There was a girl who came into my office. One day it was about five feet tall and she says, I want to buy a Cobra.

I told him honey, you're not old enough to buy a Cobra. How old are you if she says I'm 17 and have the money to buy a Cobra? This is a little strange so I took her to the office and we started talking and her name was Carol Connors and she says I'm a songwriter and she says I wrote a song, to know him is to love him and she says, You have enough money to buy a Cobra, I said , but you're not old enough to buy a Cobra. You have to bring your mother with you, so she brought him a little mother who was about five feet tall and her little brother and her mother not.

I didn't want her to buy the car, but it was her money that had been earned and she said, I want, I want, I want to write a song about my Cobra, so I told her that would be fine. I never thought it was about anything. Six months later, this song came out and it went to number one, in fact, number one in the country and it was there a week before the Beatles came here and destroyed it. I don't like being loose this day, although we had hot rodders. from England from Switzerland from France from Japan Australia New Zealand people from all over the world really wanted to work for this small company and I had never seen a company that had such high morale, seeing that everyone would work, it wasn't unusual for them to stay there until 2 and 3 in the morning and get back there at 7:30 the next morning and that wasn't unusual at all, everyone was excited to try to beat Ferrari, so we built the The first race at Daytona wasn't significantly better, but we were better organized at that time.

If you remember, Ferrari wasn't very well organized for their pit work, their cars were probably as fast as ours, but they feel scripted and our cars were heavier, but. We were just as fast on the straight, but we had to brake and Phil Remington came up with a process where we could change the brake rotors in 20 seconds and we changed the brake rotors probably six times during the race, our brakes would never have held up that long. more than anything, he won the race for us, that was the little advantage we had, that Ferrari never heard from Leo, who called me one day and said, Shelby, I want you to come back and talk to me about how to build a cool Mustang and I thought . oh no, this you know, it's a secretary's car sales for 2395, so I went back there and we got on the plane.

We came back and what had happened is that the people from Ford and the racing department had gone to the Sport Car Club of America and he says we're going to make a sports car with the Mustang, well, sports cars were accepted to put cars in, so the Mustang was a four-seater, four-seater car and he said we're going to turn this into a sports car, well, it was. It's not a sports car and the people at the Sport Car Club of America said no, it's not a sports car, you can't do this, so Coca didn't really like the performance, in fact, he didn't like it. spend his money on racing, he thought we were wasting our money on a lot of the racing programs, but he wanted me to build this Mustang, so I went back to the American Sports Car Club and said what do I have to do to do this ? thing, a sports car, I said, I got orders to do this and I said, well, I'm glad you asked me, show me, these Ford people came back and told us what they were going to do and said it just didn't ring true, he says.

So they say: Put bigger brakes on it. Give him a racing suspension. Raise the engine. Take out the back seats. Turn it into a sports car. Put a roll cage on it. I said okay, that sounds reasonable, so we hired a phone guy named Chuck Cantwell, an engineer. and he and Ken Miles in 60 daysThey had it running, we had a budget of $2,500 to do it, we did it, we took it out and we tested it and sure enough it will blow up so we built 500 cars the first year 1965 and we built about 20 of them as racing versions and they were sold as Hot cakes to these guys who wanted to compete against the Corvettes that the Cobras couldn't afford.

We sold them for, I think, 39.95, which was about a thousand dollars premium over the regular Corvettes that Mira, things were a lot cheaper, their races now are next year 66, we built 1700 cars, the next year we built 5,000 , the next year we built something between five and six thousand. Everyone was a renegade at Shelby everyone everyone did three three man jobs, that was the reason it was such a successful little company. I like Bill's cars. That's all. Never in my life has money only meant to me that's all it means to me. that I'm not starving and that allows me to do what I want to do in life, so you have to have enough to do that, the rest is wasted because you're not going to take it with you anyway, my father.

He was a wonderful man, he loved cars, he died at a very young age, most of the things I've done in my life I've thought about, I just wish dad was here to see it as far as inspiration goes. I have a lot of heroes, people I admire, but they are people I admire, a lot of different people for different reasons, because when you really get down to it, there are no hours that can do everything. People run thinking they can do everything, but I think the most important thing I have learned is to learn what cannot be done and that is what I try to live by and not try to overextend myself.

I tried to overreach. Many times in my life, but if you know what you can't do, you won't go too far wrong.