Carroll Shelby In His Own Words

you know I became interested in cars before I can even remember nearly my father was a rural mail carrier in East Texas and I remember my first memories are that I like to ride around with him in a and a willis overland and then he got a 28 whip it and when I was four or five years old I used to ride around with him and stand up and the foot on the floorboard and the right side and go faster daddy I loved and my father loved cars too in Texas you can get your driver's license when you were 14 years old and my father had a 34 Dodge which let's see that would be 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 I said could I Drive the car around block and I took it out on a street the the best Street around there was a street called East Pike which was a four lane road then and I got stopped for doing 80 miles an hour and a 34 Dodge yeah it was a little while before I got to drive again when I was 12 years old I used to you know my bicycle and go out to the local racetracks there were no drag strips then but we had what we call local bull rings which were most album or half mile and one mile track down there and I remember the names to this day of the guys that that were you know the local drivers at the time and I used to go down and hang around in a garage a little bit there's a fella named Jean Frederick's that was I remember down on Columbia and they had a garage and I used to go down there and hang around this peak around outside I wish I could go in there and sit in the race car and one time he'd let me come in there and sit in it and I used to get on my bicycle and go out to these races every Sunday I'll just I loved racing from very early you know my earliest childhood they found 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'd have to sneak off to play baseball a little bit and I was a runt I was 5 feet 5 inches tall when I went into the service at 18 years old and a year later I mean six six months later I was nearly 6 feet tall so I always thought that my family fed me good but evidently something happens as soon as I got the service because I sprung up very very quickly and I passed the examination to go into the service they didn't find any heart murmur or anything and it didn't return till 20 years later oh I had I had a family and I tried to go into business and I went into several businesses that could have been very successful but I just some way I think I was a little dyslexic and another thing is I have an attention span deficit and back then they didn't diagnose these things and I get very bored with with with things very quickly I'll start something and get it going and it'll have a lot of potential and I'll turn around saying hell that's boring I've walked away from more situations that that could have been very successful than you can imagine and that's the reason that I decided well I've always wanted to drive race cars I think I'll just try it so I started friend of mine had an 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 whether you're getting that car out of here or you and a car getting out of here I drove for a team that was not very well known then what's very well known Aston Martin and a fellow named John Wyer was the team manager and I used to hang around the factory where they were building the cars as well as driving going out and testing hanging around those factories seeing how things were put together and how little companies operated really it is the thing that gave me the insight of how to how to put the Cobra together and the cars that I've done since then so that was really I wanted to drive race cars I enjoyed driving race cars but I also knew that I'd started late in life I started when I was 28 so I better I better get on with it and and decide what I was going to do when that was over because if you look back over the the life of a lot of race drivers when their days are over a lot of we're looking for something to do and I didn't want to wind 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'll talk to Fangio and Phil Hill and Tony Brooks and if Peter Collins were here he kind of pitted the drivers against each other and I didn't want that environment yeah yeah it felt wonderful Aston Martin never quite had the horsepower the Ferraris were always quicker down the straights but we had wonderful preparation probably a better preparation than than Ferrari had at the time and I was lucky enough to win it and that was really the high point of my life as far as driving race cars up to that time so I already had heart problems in and I was having to drive with nitroglycerine pill but not very much at Lamar in 59 the year the next year in 1960 when I won the national championship I had to take four or five nitroglycerine pills every race so I've decided that at the end of 1960 I'd never planned it but I just was driving at Laguna Seca and I took about my fifth nitroglycerine pill and I could have won the race except I had to slow down for two laps every time I took a nitroglycerine pill because it knocks the top of your head off you ever take one take one sometime it really hurts the top of your head what it does it breaks your capillaries down and gets more oxygen in your system basically but I was driving around since well I think I'll quit the time to go try to build a car I nearly had a deal with with Corvette in 1957 too in fact I took three Corvettes ed Cole gave me three Corvettes I took them to Italy and had Scaglione build the bodies for them and we were about halfway through it and I got a call one night when cold said Shelby I never gave you those cars forget about it says solar done Toth who was one of my dear dear friends and McKenzie who was in charge of the Corvette program had gotten to the Chairman found out about it and stopped the program General Motors wasn't interested in any building a sport car that would blow off the Corvettes so along in 1961 I was thinking of buying Corvette engines just dealership and building my prototypes or using the little aluminum automobile engine and drew up three or four plans for chassis x' and suddenly I read in a magazine that AC cars in England had lost their contract that stopped building the the Bristol engine which was actually designed by BMW years before and they were looking for an engine supplier they're using a 6-cylinder Ford but then ray Brock of Hot Rod Magazine came down to shop one day right after I'd moved to California and says Carroll is a new I was back in Detroit and I saw a new little thin wall cast-iron engine that Ford was building so he put me in touch with a guy to call it forward and I was selling Goodyear racing tires I was the distributor and I had to go to Pikes Peak to the Hill Climb and the people from Ford were there and and I talked and I talked to him and I said hey you have a new engine and I have an idea for a sport car that will blow off the Corvettes so he asked me to come back to Detroit and this was before I had even made a deal with AC car so I put him off I got on an airplane went to England and I said to to AC people I said if I can get an American v8 engine would you be interested in building me a couple of prototypes putting them in and they said yes they would so I got on the airplane went straight back to Detroit and met with the on Fri and a couple of other people there at Ford and they took me to Iacocca who was sales manager of the Ford division there and I said you have a new little engine here and if you will furnish me a few engines and give me twenty five thousand bucks I will just sport car that'll blow off the Corvette and I'm told and I don't know whether this is so or not but they laughed about it and told me some time a year later says I coca said you better give that got $25,000 before he bites somebody it was an archaic chassis it was 20 years old then and when we wound up with that car not one nut and bolt was in it that AC had originally put in it it had the same design too archaic old buggy Springs one in the front and one at the back but even they were different lengths the a arms all the stuff was different we if we've been smart we would have designed a new chassis but we were we had the time restricted financially restricted and Phil Remington a bunch of California hot rodders took this thing and we started developing it and made it work and wound up I think it won the national championship in production cars for about seven or eight years we did a bunch Playboy ads Ford decided that they had never advertised and Playboy and they wanted to so they wanted to see if we could get my head chopped off they they got me to advertising in Playboy then that was what it really was was to see if it was feasible that's the right thing for them to do advertising they decided not to by the way that was the was the first automobile I had ever in Playboy and I don't think the advertising playboy up till today they the youngsters talked about it at home all the time I think was the thing that I'm sure a lot of mothers and fathers really got disgusted to listening about this you know this new sport car at home but you'd be surprised I'm surprised every day at the number of 50 year old people now that'll come up and say that was my you were my idol when when I was a kid when I was in school I wanted a Cobra so bad and I've got one now look there I had to pay $300,000 for it but I've got it and I guess that's that's what started the whole thing there was a little girl that came into my office that was about five feet tall one day and she says I want to buy a Cobra I said honey you're not old enough to buy a Cobra how old are you if she says I'm 17 and I have the money to buy a Cobra I this is a little strange here about so I took her in the office and we started talking and it her name was Carol Connors and she says I'm a songwriter and says I wrote a song to know him is to love him and says I 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 her a little mother and it was about five feet tall and her little brother and her mother didn't want her to buy the car but it was her money she had earned it and she said I wanted I want I want to write a song about my Cobra so I says that I'd be fine I never thought that it was about anything six months later this song and come out and it went to number one actually number one in the country and was there one week before the Beatles came over here and knocked it flat I don't like to be loose this day though 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 little company and I've never seen a company that had as high a morale see everybody would work it wasn't uncommon for them to stay there till 2 and 3 o'clock in the morning and be back down there at 7:30 the next next morning and that wasn't uncommon at all everybody was just hyper to to go try to beat Ferrari then so we built the first Daytona couse it wasn't significantly better but we were better organized at that time you know if you remember Ferrari wasn't too well organized for their pit work their cars were probably as fast as ours but feel written and our cars were heavier but we were just as fast down the straightaway but we were held on the brakes and Phil Remington devised a process where we could change the brake rotors in 20 seconds and we changed brake rotors probably six times during the race our brakes would never have held out that more than anything else won the race for us that was the little edge that we had that Ferrari never knew about leo who called me one day and he says Shelby I want you to come back and talk to me about building a hot Mustang and I thought oh no this you know this is a Secretary's car sales for 2395 and so I rode back there and we got on the airplane went back and what had happened the people at Ford and the racing department had gone to the sport Car Club of America and he says we're going to make a sport car out of the Mustang well sport cars were accepted as to place cars then the Mustang was a four place car four seater and he said we're going to turn this into a sport car well it wasn't a sport car and the people at sport at the sport car club of america said no it's not a sport car you can't do this so I coca wasn't a real performance nut back there in fact he he didn't like spend his money on races he thought we were wasting our money on own a lot of the programs in racing but he wanted me to build this Mustang so I went back to sport car club America I said what do I have to do to make this damn thing a sport car I said I got orders to do this and I says well I'm glad you asked me show me these people from Ford came back and told us what they were going to do and said it just didn't ring true says so they says put bigger brakes on it put a racing suspension on it pop the engine up take the back seats out make it a sport car put a roll cage in it I said okay that sounds reasonable so we hired a phone named Chuck Cantwell an engineer and he and Ken miles in 60 days had the thing running we had a budget of $2,500 to do it got it done and took it out and tested it and sure enough it'll blow the that self so we built 500 cars first year 1965 and built about 20 of them as racing versions and they sold like hotcakes to these guys that wanted to go race against the Corvettes that couldn't afford the Cobras we sold them for I think 39.95 which was about thousand dollar premium over the regular Corvettes which you see things were a lot cheaper their racing that it is now the next year 66 we built 1700 cars the next year we built 5000 the next year we built something between five and six thousand everybody was a renegade at Shelby everybody everybody did three bit three men's work that was the reason it was such a successful little company I like Bill cars that's it I've never in my life money only means to me is all it means to me is that I'm not starving to death and it enables me to do what I want to do in life so you got to have enough of it to do that the rest of its wasted because you're not gonna take it with you anyway my father was a wonderful man he loved automobiles he died at a very early age most of the things that I've ever done in my life I've I've thought about I just wish dad was here to see it as far as inspiration is concerned I have a lot of I have a lot of heroes people that I look up to but it's people that I look up to a lot of different ones for different reasons because when you really get down to it not any hours can do everything a lot of people are running to think they can do everything but I think the most important thing that I've ever learned is learn what you can't do and that's the thing that I try to live by and not try to overreach I tried to overreach a lot of times in my life but if you know what you can't do you won't go too far wrong

Channel: King Rose Archives

Views: 1,115,962

Rating: 4.8925304 out of 5

Keywords: Carroll Shelby, Cobra, GT 350, Ferrari, Cobra Daytona Coupe, Lee Iacocca, Auto racing, Ken Miles, LeMans

Id: oKYoxGv_llI

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2016

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