Interview with Carroll Shelby Car Exchange magazine February 1982

rshelby · Jun 20, 2005

Exclusive Interview with Carroll Shelby
Car Exchange magazine February 1982
By Dennis Adler

I have attached an interesting article I thought many of you would like. It's an entertaining read with what would be considered some pretty hot opinions on various subjects such as replica Cobras. Remember, this is from 1982 and times were quite different. It is a pdf document so you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader

Here's the opening...

Across the street from Carroll Shelby's office is a big dirt lot, and that is where we had been working all morning, photographing Shelby, a mint condition AC Cobra, and a 1982 G.T.350. Now you're probably saying, "Hey, that's a typo, he meant a 1965 G.T.350." Nope, 1982 is right - well almost, actually 1965 is correct also. Confusing isn't it? Stick around, it all makes sense later on.
Click to expand...

If any of you would like to type this up and submit it to the thread, it sure would make it a lot easier for everyone to read. Just an idea.

DeLa1Rob · Mar 22, 2009

Ok here it is

car
exchange INTERVIEWS: CARROLL SHELBY

By Dennis Adler

Across the street from Carroll Shelby’s office is a big dirt lot, and that’s where we had been working all morning, photographing Shelby, a mint condition AC Cobra and a 1982 G.T. 350.Now you’re probably saying, “Hey, that’s a typo, he meant a 1965 G.T. 350.” Nope. 1982 is right -– well almost, actually 1965 is correct also. Confusing isn’t it? Stick around, it all makes sense later on.

After the photo session we went to lunch. Not at a restaurant, but back at Carroll Shelby’s office. It’s complete with a kitchen, so a good Texas meal is never far away. Shelby made up some Tamale pie, naturally, using his own chili in the recipe, and some home-baked, (officebaked?) cornbread, to get us settled down for a long session of Carroll Shelby on Carroll Shelby. Somewhere in all of this, we managed to cover everything from the early days in racing, to the Cobra and G.T. Mustang programs at Ford, replicas, and those 1982 G.T. 350s sitting outside the office.

CE: Do you feel you accomplished everything you set out to do as a race driver?
Shelby: No, I didn’t do everything I wanted to do as a race driver, but I did more than most people. When I had been driving a couple of years, I met John Wyer, who was just taking over the Aston Martin racing team for David Brown. When I first got to Europe, I had the contact with John, and through him I stayed on as an Aston Martin team driver through 1959. I had the opportunity to go with Ferrari and some other people with much faster Formula I cars, and probably faster sport cars, but I got the best training I ever had because of John’s thoroughness and attention to detail. I learned a lot, and fact is, we won a lot of races back then, just because the cars were put together right, and because John was there.
CE: You worked with John Wyer again after you left Aston.
Shelby: When I started to build a car, we worked very close together, in the GT40 program. Then he carried on after Ford was legislated out of racing in 1967 – after we had won Le Mans for the second time.
CE: What do you mean Ford was legislated out of racing?
Shelby: Well, they outlawed the 7 liter engine, and Ford took it as a personal affront and pulled out of racing.
CE: How did you get involved in the Ford Mustang program?
Shelby: I was already building the Cobras and Lee Iacocca came to me and asked if I could make the new Mustang into a sport car. I went to the Sports Car Club of America and asked them what I had to do, and they gave me a list of things, all of which were possible, and I built the first Cobra Mustang. The SCCA put it in Class B, racing against the Corvettes, and that was basically how the idea got off the ground. It really wasn’t anything I came up with, the whole Mustang idea was Iacocca’s.
CE: But it worked out well…
Shelby: It worked but Ford didn’t build the cars. I had to take the Mustangs and make them into sport cars. It wasn’t the ideal car to start with. We took the chassis, which was just a platform, because it didn’t have the rigidity we needed, and made it work. Chuck Cantwell, Gary Peterson, and Ken Miles took the thing and made a sport car out of it. And I’ll tell you, it’s still winning National Championships, 16 years later. They did an amazing job of taking something that wasn’t supposed to handle, and making it handle.
The most important thing in that program, that made it work, was the great relationship we had in the early days with Ford, and engineers that really knew what they were doing with engine design. They took that 289 engine – the first one I ever got was a 221 cu. In. – and a year from that time, we had a 289 coming off the line with solid lifters, a camshaft that we never were able to improve on, and an engine that really delivered the goods. Ford advertised it at 271 horsepower, and that’s what you got! That was the most reliable engine, to put out power like that, that has ever come off a Detroit assembly line. You could push it to 7000 rpm in the Cobra, and it lived at that.
CE: There are people, fans if you will, who consider Carroll Shelby a legend. Do you feel like a living legend?
Shelby: No…I feel the best is yet to come, though I have mixed feelings about building another car. I’ve still got all the good people that were responsible for building the cars the last time. They’re still with me, we’re 15 years older than we were, we know the mistakes we made, but the question is do we really want to do it again? We get together about once every week or two, crack a bottle of wine, and talk about it, but I just don’t know if we want to get back into it.
CE: What’s stopping you?
Shelby: The same thing that stopped us back in 1970, all the Federal crap, and the atrocious laws that have been passed in the past 10 years. Before I would consider getting back into it, we would have to see if the Federal government is serious about lifting some of those really stupid laws, that is, if they want the automobile business to survive. That’s not to say that I’m in favor of polluting the environment, but I don’t think you can clean it up by squeezing cars into little boxes with four wheels, because you are going to get pollution from some other source. We saw it coming in 1969 and that’s when we backed away from the business of building cars, and when DeTomaso took over with the Ford planners.
CE: Are you saying that when the Shelby Mustang program ended, the Pantera was the heir apparent?
Shelby: Kind of, but the timing wasn’t right for the Pantera, I feel it was a very fine sport car, in spite of the fact that the rear ends fell out sometimes, and all the other problems they had with it. The Pantera could have been a very fine replacement for the Shelbys…
CE: But Ford had a hard time with the AC Cobras too.
Shelby: Sure the Cobra had problems. The first two we built, we took before the top brass at Ford, and they didn’t make one lap around the test track before the radiators blew up. They were awfully hot cars, but they could go like hell.
CE: At the onset of the Cobra program, dealers couldn’t sell them…
Shelby: Yeah at the beginning, they were knocking $2000 off the sticker price to get them off the floor, but by the time we had the 427’s out, the cars were selling just fine. In fact, we could have built a thousand more than we did and sold every one of them.
CE: Why didn’t you?
Shelby: It was time to move on with the G.T. 350 program.
CE: There’s a big demand for AC Cobras today. Those same cars that sold for $7500 are bringing $70,000 today, and there is a growing market for replicas of the AC Cobra.
Shelby: Now you look at those idiots out there, building replicas of a car that’s 20 years old, that leaked in the rain, was hot to drive, and generally uncomfortable. When I quit building them, I think that as just about as many as the world needed. The fact that the car won the World Championship probably created an image, and that’s what people remember today, not the car. It was the fastest street car in the world, but you think about that today, with the 55 mph speed limit. I mean where are you going to drive it? These cars were built to run at a hundred eighty, hundred ninety – what good are they if you can’t get out of second or third gear? Most people don’t want to make watch fobs out of them, or can’t afford to.
CE: Then why are there so many replicas?
Shelby: If a man really wants to build a car today, why would he copy the Cobra? There isn’t one company out there that’s making any money at it. Not even the guy in England that AC gave the Shelby American tooling to.
CE: You’re really down on Cobra replicas.
Shelby: I’m not down on them. All you have to do is sit down and realize what it cost last time, what it will cost this time, and honestly put all your costs in there, instead of bs-ing yourself, which most of these people are doing because they are enthusiasts, and not car builders. They would all like to become big automobile manufacturers, but let me tell you, Carroll Shelby never made any money on the AC Cobras either.
CE: Alright, your point is well taken, but then doesn’t it seem contradictory to turn around and build 12 G.T. 350s?
Shelby: I’m doing it for a different reason. I never got to keep one of the cars. They were all sold while I was out of the country racing. I built them and didn’t even own one. I decided last year that the only way I was going to have one, the way I wanted it, was to build the car again.
CE: Obviously, you couldn’t build new cars from the ground up, but you’re saying these 12 are 1982 models of the 1965 car, and they are not replicas?
Shelby: They’re original. What we did was find enough ’65 Mustangs to meet our needs, and order out just about 95% of the parts, brand spanking new from Ford Dealers and parts service. We got new fenders, chassis, brakes, engines, etc. There are a few things we had to find used, like the pedals, steer-ing wheels, things that just are not available any longer. In fact, most of the parts we bought, to make these cars, are not even available any longer. We built them from the ground up, just like we did in ’65.
CE: How do you think your 12 G.T. 350 convertibles will be positioned in value against the original cars you built?
Shelby: I only built six convertibles originally, and two of those have been destroyed. I don’t know how these cars will really be positioned in the market, because I didn’t build them to get back in the car business. I contacted a couple of people in the Shelby Automotive Club, and said I was going to build 12 cars, and I wanted to sell eight of them. I had a hundred offers, so the first eight got the cars. Selling those eight paid for the four I’m keeping.
CE: With that many people interested, why don’t you build more?
Shelby: Nope. That’s it. Just 12. I didn’t build them to get back into the automotive business. I did it because I wanted the car, and because the first G.T. 350 was the best Cobra, while the chassis was the size it was in ’65 and ’66. After that it kind of went to hell. The car got too big. We knew in ’67 that we were in trouble if we tried to make as fast a handling car as the ’65. If you remember, that’s also when we got out of racing. I worked with Ford on later cars, but they really were not mine. I called Don Delarosa, the number two man in styling at Ford and said to him, “What are we going to do with the ’67?” So, Carroll Shelby didn’t design the ’67, ’68, 0r ’69 cars. I worked with Don’s designers, but they weren’t mine alone.
CE: What about the Mustang GTCS, or California Special?
Shelby: That was Lee Iacocca’s idea. He said, “Hey, we’ve got this fiberglass coming off the line on the ’67, why don’t we run off 5000 cars at the San Jose plant and stick that stuff on them. Give them a California look.” There’s been a lot of criticism for that.
CE: People really associated the GTCS with Carroll Shelby.
Shelby: Yeah, but they really didn’t, and the whole idea of the program at Ford was to take what we could do away from the system, and fit it in. If you look at the Shelbys, and the Detroit Mustangs, you’ll see that their ’68 looked like our ’67, and the ’69 looked an awful lot like our ’68, and so on. It was the name of the game back then. The only excuse Carroll Shelby had for existing at Ford was to let them use our cars for market research. The people that utilized that more than any three at Ford, were Don Delarosa, Gene Bordinat and Lee Iacocca.
CE: Weren’t you kind of being used?
Shelby: That really didn’t bother me. They just wanted to see how the designs would sell, and hell, they sold every car as fast we put them in the dealer showrooms. If I couldn’t help Ford make a few bucks, there wasn’t any excuse for me living – automobilewise.
CE: If you had it to do over again, would you?
Shelby: Oh, I’d change some things, but I don’t think anybody in the world during my lifetime, has been as fortunate as I have, done as many things as I have, made as many friends, or been into as many interesting projects. Nobody has been as fortunate as I have … But I’m not through yet!

As they used to say in the newspapers – Watch this space … ce
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Interview with Carroll Shelby Car Exchange magazine February 1982

rshelby ShelbyForums Admin Staff Member

Attached Files:

CarrollShelby_CarExchange1982-02.pdf

DeLa1Rob Well-Known Member

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Interview with Carroll Shelby Car Exchange magazine February 1982

rshelby ShelbyForums Admin Staff Member

Attached Files:

CarrollShelby_CarExchange1982-02.pdf

DeLa1Rob Well-Known Member

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