Peter Brock shares the true story behind the Shelby Cobra Daytona

This was about 1957 when I returned to Detroit. I think I was only 19 years old. I was the youngest guy they ever hired there and I worked with Earl and with Mitchell on the Stingray corvette, which became this. Well, I worked on the car that was the prototype that they called the stingray racer and it was great working with Bill Mitchell because he was like the epitome of the great designers of that era and I kept trying to tell mr. Mitchell, you know, I think the nose should be a little lower, the rear should be a little higher and I think this is what we should do.

The lines look good. He says I designed the Corvettes around here, just do what I tell you, okay? We built the car the way you wanted and I mean today it's considered a design icon, the Stingray Corvettes, one of the most beautiful cars of all time, but the nose is too high and the tail is too high and consequently , drive that thing at about 140 on the front wheels. It took off, so that's again all the lessons I learned and applied to this car. Carroll said, I want to go to Europe and how are we going to go faster and the guys are already getting so much power from the 289 engines.

We were running the Cobra toasters and I tried to explain it to Carol. I said, "Well, look, the car has too much drag to go faster, we have to reduce the drag or we have to increase the horsepower." He said that if you double the speed, the resistance is squared and if you want to double that with horsepower, you have to cube it and there's no way we're going to cube the horsepower and unless we change the bodywork completely. There's no hope with the roadster either, but I said this is the way to do it, so I made a rough sketch of what the car would look like and I said, "You know this car is going to be a very different looking car and Carol He didn't seem to care what the car looked like, all he wants to know is he says will it be faster and I said I don't know but I think the guys who came up with these ideas were a lot smarter than anyone else and these were the ones.

Germans from 1939. There was a whole group of them, a guy named Orwen Commenda It Porsche and a guy called Kernighan Fashionville Germany and Dr. Vonda Volcom were leaders in advanced aerodynamics in the late '30s, but no one else knew anything about it and they had written some articles and built prototypes and, of course, all of that was destroyed in World War II, so there was very little information left in it, but slowly, slowly, I had dug up a little bit in the GM library, there was. a series of mimeograph sheets describing how the Allies after the war had gone through Germany to get all the technical data they could find and if it was something about cholera Beals, well, they copied it all and sent it to all the car companies and That was where I discovered the secret of German aerodynamic designs, although I couldn't read German, I could understand the numbers and the results. that they understood with the ideas and again, like I said, Carol didn't really bring justice, is it going to work? and I said, I think so, but I showed it to the guys in the workshop and no one wanted to work on it, it was so ugly.

They figured they didn't want anything to do with it, they just won all three championships in 1963 with a Cobra roadster. They were a pretty proud bunch and they just didn't want to waste time working on something that looked like a The lost proposal was a guy from New Zealand called John Olson who had just come to work in the shop, he didn't want to go back to England in the winter and they hired him , so he was kind of an outsider and Phil Remington said, "Well, I'll give you a John you can work with and then ten miles was one of the best racing drivers in Southern California who believed in the idea and convinced to Carroll that we should go ahead and try the idea because he had built a couple of his own specials, so let's try the idea, basically ten miles, John and I for the three of us who worked on this car to start, the prototype of this car It was built in 90 days from the first sketch to the moment we ran it, so it was really a pretty rough piece of equipment, but again we had the best fabricators in the company and they all started coming in and helping us and working on it and doing it.

We took to Riverside the first time. It was February 1, 1964. They remembered the date and left. Not everyone came out. Many people didn't care. They thought a car has to be heavier than the Roadster. It won't be faster or anything so ugly. Anyway, it didn't have to be that fast, so we had the believers and the non-believers and we went to Riverside Raceway and Kent Mile didn't really run many laps in the car, I was so impressed with the car it was. The first one out came back and said, "You know what gear we have in this thing" and of course we had the same gear we used in the Roadster and because we wanted to do a straight dad, no and the car was a lot faster. because the chassis was stiffer and it was so much faster down the stretch that we went from a top speed of about 165 miles per hour with the roadsters to about 185, so at that point we knew we were going to be comparatively faster. rapid. with the Ferraris of that date and we hadn't touched the car, I mean, this was ready to go and there were third parties, all kinds of compromises that we had to make on the car, I would have been very worried that we were going to have some lift on the rear that that speed and had tried to convince Phil Remington, our chief engineer, that we should.

I designed a moving wing at the rear of the car, this was before the era of moving aerodynamics was banned. race cars and he said, I looked at Gotti's, which will take us three or four days to build and we just don't have time to do it, so let's run the car without it and see how it works and you know, he was saying, well, you guys go out and fall flat on your face and then we don't have a lot of extra work on that so anyway the car was actually really fast so I went back to the shop and everyone was applauding and it became the focus of our attention Carol gathered the group of guys and said, "Okay, we're going to go to Daytona with this car," and I said, "Okay, now we can build the wing." No, no, no, we don't have time to do it. that we're going to drive it as is, it's already fast enough if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so we went to Daytona and the car was so fast from the get-go and there was nothing.

Worry about the lift because we were running on a high bank there in the G forces that keep holding the bank and Bob hugged Hobart, who had never driven the car, got in the car and got out and he just said, "I can get through." for the Ferraris as you know I haven't even peaked at the redline yet so Ken Miles had been appointed team manager for that event and he said okay we'll get the RPM down around 700 rpm so keep going. low RPM now, we're going slower, but we're going the same speed as the Ferraris, so we did our fuel consumption tests at that point and got 25% better fuel efficiency, so we said okay, I'll do it. we have achieved now because we can run the 2000.

KS and we will not have to go in and refuel and we go at the same speed as the Ferrari, so we will simply pass them in the number of pit stops, we have to stop less and if we have any problems, all of you. What you have to do is raise the RPM and, you know, take it at the end, so that was the strategy, unfortunately we had a fire in the pits, we were too far away and we left the seven seven laps in the lead, so we had to I parked the car because the rear end had burned out so we couldn't run it again until Sebring and at that point the car won its first race and then Ford saw how fast the car was going and that was the point at which Ford Motor Cayman and Cayman decided to give us help and decided that they would back us for a program to go to Europe, so at that time we decided that we would build six of these coupes and the only car that we had finished was the prototype and at that time there were only 12 guys in the workshop.

I mean, this is really a minimal effort. We went to Europe, but that meant most of the guys had to go to Europe and they went to the Targa Florio to race and this car. I went to LeMond with John Olsen and he was sitting there waiting for the team to come out of the Targa Florio because there was no one else who could drive the car and the big difference at that time was that Ford Motor Company had just come out with the gt40 and this It was going to be the most complicated car ever built.

I mean, they had spent millions of dollars on this car and there's a lot of publicity about it because they were introducing it the same weekend we were going. We didn't have a driver so the car was parked in the pits and it's a bit cold and rainy and not a very nice day, so the first driver out in the GT40 was the best German. It will be the best French driver, Jo Schlesser, and the car was dynamically unstable, so the gt40 crashed and fortunately Jo was not injured and got out of the car, so he was walking through the pits and crossed paths with John Olsen , of course.

They knew each other a little bit about racing and they said why don't you try this car while all the guys are at the Targa Florio and until Carroll gets here I just have to wait for him, he says, well, I'd like to drive the car so that Johnson, well, I can't let you drive it, but we'll get the car set up for you to tune up. AddThis eats for him, I put all the belts on him and Carol arrived the next day. and Carol already had a lot of respect for Joe and said, "Okay, none of our guys are here because Greene was there." Jerry Grant, all our drivers were on Targa Florio when they weren't up, so we put Joe Schlesser on. the car and I said it was still raining and a little gloomy so we said let's wait a bit they are going to race the second gt40 so they had Roy Salvadori in it and Roy was the guy who drove with Carol Shelby to win 1959. in the Aston Martin at Lamont, a very respected driver, he gets into the second gt40 and he goes out and it's aerodynamically unstable, he crashes and destroys the car, so in two days Ford canceled his two cars and Joe Schlesser gets into this thing and he goes. he goes out and smokes them all, that's the GT lap record and he's running almost as fast as the prototypes, so from the start we knew we looked pretty good and we hadn't even tuned the car yet.

He was around 22 years old at the time. point over and over again I'm just the kid that works with these great guys like Phil Remington what an opportunity then they were the success of this car they made it the ideas were all there and but without that talent it would never have been built and I don't want to say that this It's the last era in which race cars were designed by the collective experience of the guys in the shop. You could come with the idea, but it was your ability to take an idea and build it without a full process. set of drawings, you know, I mean, I couldn't have done it, Jim, because they would have required a full set of engineering drawings, there would have been a committee to study it, they would have called in aerodynamics experts, who would have said we didn't work, so that there was no way it could have been done except the way we did it and that was really the great part of being able to work with all these guys and use their collective experience to build a car and then make it all work.