A racing legend with a lot of heart Jim Reeves - In My Opinion Posted on Thu, Jan. 29, 2004 Carroll Shelby has come a long way since he was known as the Chicken Poop Kid in 1952. That's the sanitized version, you understand. Known for the (ahem) well-decorated overalls he wore straight from his chicken ranch outside Dallas, Carroll Shelby would pull up to the racetrack in a dust-covered pickup, climb behind the wheel of a sports car and drive like the devil was on his tail. He came from the Satchel Paige school of thought: "Never look back, because you never know what might be gaining on you." All Shelby did that day more than five decades ago at Eagle Mountain Lake Marine Reserve Base west of Fort Worth was win his very first sports car race, driving up one runway and down another. It was the beginning of a legendary career in car racing, designing and engineering that culminated Tuesday night when the 81-year-old Shelby was the recipient of the Bruton Smith Legends Award for lifetime achievement at the Texas Motorsports Hall of Fame inaugural gala. "A sportswriter named Blackie Sherrod interviewed me that day and wrote a story about me in the Fort Worth Press," Shelby recalled Wednesday morning at the Texas Tour 2004 Media Day. There was no way to know it then, but it was a meeting between two men who both would go on to become Texas legends. If you're as motorsports-challenged as I am, you might not know of Shelby's amazing exploits in racing. But you might have been eating his chili, just as I have, for years. The Carroll Shelby chili fixin's, produced by The Original Texas Chili Company, that you can find in the little brown bag on your grocery store shelves? Same innovative guy. Shelby sold the company 15 years ago, but it was another of his brainstorms, which included coming up with the idea for a chili cookoff at Terlingua in far West Texas, where he just happened to have a few thousand acres he wanted to sell. That came long after he was a World War II test pilot, after his chicken ranch failed in the early '50s, and after Sports Illustrated named him "Sports Car Driver of the Year" in 1956 and '57. He won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1959. You're getting the idea, right? We're talking about a pioneer here, a Texas legend in every sense of the word. At 81, despite a heart transplant 14 years ago and a kidney transplant -- his son Michael donated one of his -- in 1996, Shelby is going strong. And we haven't even gotten to the really good stuff yet. Sports car racing was always Shelby's first love and like any driver, he wanted to go faster and faster. He quickly discovered that he wasn't going to be able to do that in Texas, so Shelby, born in the small town of Pittsburg in deep East Texas and raised in Dallas, moved to California. "Nobody gave a [flip] about racing or sports cars in Texas back then," Shelby said. "California was the place where the hot-rodders were who could help me build my cars." Shelby, you see, wanted to design and build the fastest sports car ever. Some believe he did just that. He's the creator and godfather of the legendary Ford Cobra, an idea that came to him in the middle of the night. He awoke the next morning to find the word "Cobra" written on a notepad on his bedside table. The rest is racing and sports car history. Cobra won the FIA Manufacturers Grand Touring World Championship in 1965, the only American make ever to do so. Shelby went from there to helping Ford with special edition Mustangs from 1965 to '70, always keeping a close eye on his home state to see if racing would ever catch on in Texas. "I saw the racetrack built at College Station, and nobody cared," Shelby said, referring to Texas World Speedway. "I thought Bruton [Smith] was crazy to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to build a racetrack here [north of Fort Worth]. I'm just happy I've lived long enough to see this kind of interest in my home state because racing has been my life. "I'm one lucky son of a gun." Shelby is right; he is lucky. By all rights, he should have been in his grave long ago. Born with a hereditary heart impairment, it appeared he had outgrown it as a young man, only to see it return in his mid-30s. Three bypass surgeries later, he'd worn out one heart and needed another. After a year on the waiting list, time was growing short. "Lying in the hospital, I watched two kids die in the bed beside me, waiting on hearts," Shelby said. "I told the man upstairs, if he'd just get me a heart, I'd find a way to help children." God and Shelby each upheld their ends of the bargain. Shelby got his new heart and promptly formed the Shelby Heart Fund, which evolved into the Carroll Shelby Children's Foundation, benefiting kids who need transplants. Not long after his own transplant, Shelby got a call from a doctor saying famed sports broadcaster Chris Schenkel had a friend with a newborn daughter who needed a heart within two days or she would die. Shelby pulled every string he could and found one for her. Today, Leah Smith is 13, a four-state ice skating champion with a chance to be named to the U.S. Olympic team. "That's why I'm glad I'm still alive," Shelby said. "That, and building sports cars." I did mention that he hasn't slowed down any, right? His latest project currently is featured on the cover of AutoWeek magazine. It's Ford's prototype 605-horsepower V-10 concept, a roadster based on the original Cobra. Project head Chris Theodore calls Shelby the project's "spiritual adviser." The V-10, which debuted Jan. 4 at the Detroit Auto Show, is a 6.4-liter, 4-cam, 40-valve, 10-cylinder sports car, cast in aluminum. Three thousand pounds of get-up and fly. "We wanted to capture the spirit of the original Cobra," Theodore told AutoWeek. "You know, big engine, little car, all about engine, all about performance, all about dynamics. "All the muscle and bone, and then you drape a sexy body over it." The V-10 will have a theoretical top speed of -- hold onto your hats -- 267 mph and should be available in Ford dealerships in 2006 with a price tag of around $100,000. In his spare time, Shelby, who spent 12 years in Africa studying a Rhodesian cattle breed called Tuli, is busy nurturing about 400 head of the animals on his ranch near DeKalb. Blocked from bringing actual cows over to the United States by an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease, Shelby brought fertilized eggs instead, had them implanted in cows and raised the calves himself. "These cows take the heat better than Brahmas and graze like Angus," Shelby said. "The folks out at Texas A&M are saying it's the biggest breakthrough in the cattle industry since the Texas Longhorn." Why am I not surprised? That's why the man is a legend.
