Carroll Shelby, Man at Speed AutoWeek Honors a Lifetime of Achievement by Our Kind of Guy PETE LYONS Published Date: 12/19/05 “I’ve approached life and lived it pretty damned well just like I wanted to because I didn’t think I’d live very long.” —Carroll Shelby Many racers behave like something is hot on their tails, but Carroll Shelby’s demon was real. A hereditary heart disorder that took both his parents at early ages began causing him angina when he was just 36. Being a racer, he kept right on racing. He was already a sick man in 1959 when he won Le Mans. Only later did he see a doctor. “In 1960 I drove with a nitroglycerine pill under my tongue, just in case,” he confirmed to AutoWeek in a 1990 interview. “You ever try nitro? It knocks the top of your head off. It dilates your arteries and veins, and gives you a headache for 30 seconds. You don’t want to do it in a race car.” He did, though. At Northern California’s Laguna Seca Raceway that last year of his career, he says he took five such hits during the race. Sliding a Maserati 250F at the 1958 British Grand Prix. “That’s why it was not hard to give up drivin’—nitro gives you an incentive to quit. I wanted to build my car anyway...” At the end of 1960 Shelby did finally retire from race driving—so it has been 45 years since the man who didn’t think he would live very long really got going—and in so doing created something immortal. It is for what Shelby accomplished during his time as a racer, as well as in the years following, that inspired us to name him as the inaugural recipient of the AutoWeek Lifetime Achievement Award. The Carroll Shelby saga hardly needs retelling here: how this son of a postal clerk grew up in Depression-era Dallas and thus always had to work—paper routes, caddying, truck driving, oil field labor, chicken farming (hence the famous bib overalls), car dealing; how this lanky, amiable Texan turned out to have a remarkable talent for sports car racing and found opportunities to show it, thanks to an equally remarkable talent for charming car owners; how all that led to the three national championships, two driver of the year awards, the factory ride with Aston Martin and the triumph in France. Shelby confers with race car builder John Holman. There came the celebrated (if possibly apocryphal) audience with ilCommendatore, Enzo Ferrari, which legend has ending in fury, Shelby storming out with the vow, “One day I’ll beat your ass!” And eventually he did. Three times. At Le Mans. He started by founding his own automobile marque. Is it possible to imagine anyone but Carroll Shelby pulling off the Cobra stunt? “I’m nothing but a soap salesman,” he has said of himself, but his mix of gifts is surely unique: restless vision, insatiable curiosity, steel-sharp intelligence, a startlingly acute judgment of and memory for people, ambition bordering on ruthlessness, irrepressible audacity, a racer’s instinct for seizing a moment... perhaps most potent among the man’s weapons is that Ol’ Shel grin; it makes the most wary of strangers feel like a lifelong crony. All that went into the Cobra. All his life cars were “my No. 1 interest,” Shelby says, and he dreamed of creating his own for years. He had already made a false start with a minimally cooperative Chevrolet. In 1961 he happened to hear from auto magazine friends that Ford was about to launch a new, lightweight V8 to challenge the small-block Chevy. Shelby drives a 4.9 liter Ferrari next to Marvin Panch's Battlebird at the 1957 New Smyrna Beach Airport Races in Florida. Shelby moved, like a striking snake. Flying to Dearborn, he claimed to have a deal with a small English company, AC Cars, to drop the new powerplant into its appealing but underpowered Ace roadster. Going on to England, he represented to AC that Ford was already onboard. Neither claim was precisely accurate, but if either party saw through him, they didn’t care. They knew the idea, and perhaps the association with a remarkable man, was too good to pass up. Using all his human skills, Shelby proceeded to gather one of the racing world’s great teams of competitors, a multinational assembly of engineers, craftsmen, mechanics and drivers—in some cases all the same person—that would go on to dominate races and win championships across the United States and around the globe. Crowning triumphs came at Le Mans with both the Cobra Coupe (1965, GT class victory) and Ford’s own GT40 prototypes (1966 and 1967, overall wins). To American fans who watched, chests swelling, the achievements of the Cobra men were nothing less than vindication of the American way in the face of the scornful world. It’s a glow that still shines out from every Cobra and every Cobra replica to this day. A stable of Cobras that won the 1963 United States Road Race of Champions manufacturers' championships. Had Carroll Shelby’s troublesome heart given out after his fourth personal victory at Le Mans in 1967, he would have gone down a transcendent success at age 44. But he had too much left to do. More racing and more car making, of course, but also other ventures: ranching and horse breeding, a safari company, real estate and hotels, food production, aviation, research and development, charity. That last came in the wake of his heart transplant in 1990. While enduring the wait for a suitable replacement, Shelby saw how many children shared his plight, and undertook to help. The Carroll Shelby Children’s Foundation may well be the primary interest of his life now. Shelby is not tireless, but he is restless, always involved in something, a fireworks display of ideas, questions, schemes. In successive moments he can be cantankerous and courtly, testy and patient, fiercely acquisitive and warmly generous. In any group, he is in charge, the point of focus—yet acutely and solicitously aware of everyone else. He seems to know them all. At 82 (his 83rd birthday comes on the day AutoWeek will present him with its Lifetime Achievement Award, Jan. 11), Shelby can still spark a certain look in a woman’s eye. The GT40's first overall win at the 1965 Daytona Continental 2000-kilometer race with Ken Miles, Shelby, Lloyd Ruby, Leo Beebe and Ray Geddes. In our interview before his transplant we asked about the races he won, the cars he built, the businesses he founded; what was his most important achievement? Without hesitation Shelby replied, “Three kids who have never been dopers, who have the work ethic, who are three wonderful human beings. The world is better off because they are in the world: Sharon, Pat and Mike. That’s No. 1.” Simply, it’s our world that is better off because Carroll Shelby is racing through it. Hammer down, Shel. You too can see Carroll Shelby receive the AutoWeek Lifetime Achievement Award at Design Forum on January 11 just go to www.autoweek.com/dforum and register. Auto Week Magazine
