View Carroll Shelby
Carroll Shelby
Category:Auto Racing
By Gregg Leary
Born 1-11-23 (85 years young)
Grand Marshall 2004 12 Hours of Sebring
Leesburg, TX
Inducted into International Motor Sports Hall of Fame 1991
As “the greatest single influence on American Racing since 1945”
With no engineering background, created a race car that ended Ferrari’s dominance of the World Manufacturer’s Championship…the legendary COBRA
1954…drove in his first Sebring and LeMans…won the Monza 1000, helped set 70 speed records at Bonneville Salt Flats…flips 4 times in the Carrera Pan Americana in Mexico…Indians nurse him back to health
1955…10 major wins
1957…won 19 straight SCCA events
1959 Won LeMans
1956 and 1957 Sports Illustrated “Sports Car Driver of the Year”
1960…had to retire due to heart problems after winning the USAC Driving Championship…at 37…America’s best known sports car driver …flat broke with no job prospects
1961 Opens “Shelby School of High Performance Driving”
1962…had a pad of paper beside his bed…woke up during a dream.wrote one word on the paper…COBRA…
1962…the dream becomes REALITY…Cobra…fastest production car ever made…0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds
Shelby repaints his “prototype” a different color each time a different magazine test drives it …to make it look like he had a whole fleet of cars!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1964 Cobra is First in GT class at Le Mans…beating Ferrari
1965 Ford turns the GT 40 Project over to Shelby…it wins its first time out…at Daytona
1965 Shelby GT Mustang makes its debut
1965 Cobra won the GT Manufacturer’s Title
1966 Ford GT 40’s finish 1-2-3 at LeMans
1967 GT-40 wins LeMans again
1967 Shelby-American wins Trans-Am Title
1987…Shelby begins prototype of Dodge VIPER
1990 Shelby receives heart transplant
1991 a healthy Shelby paces the Indy 500 in a Viper
1996 Shelby has a kidney transplant
1999 Shelby Cobra CSX2000 named Motor Trend Magazine’s “Most significant car of the last 50 years.” Teams with Titan to produce custom motorcycle…Shelby Series 1 by Titan.
The Carroll Shelby Children’s Foundation was established to help indigent children with heart or kidney problems
Flight Instructor and Test pilot in the States WWII…sounds like Chuck Yaeger
After the War…
Started with a fleet of dump trucks
Became a “roughneck” in the oil business
Began raising chickens
Second batch of chickens caught disease and died…bankruptcy
1952 Started Drag Racing in 1932 Ford
Moved over to Sports Car Racing in MG at an Air Station in Texas
1953…Carroll hurries to the race track wearing his farm work clothes, his “TEXAS TUXEDO”…people laughed at first but the publicity was great…the bibs became his trademark.
Great Quote about Shelby…
“Carroll Shelby is a graduate of the School of hard knocks. You could put a bare-foot Shelby in the middle of the Sahara Desert and he’d be selling you a lake lot with amenities within a couple of hours.” Bill Neale