Shelby and AC Cobra E-Book

Brian Laban

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In the new edition of this classic text, Brian Laban brings the story of the AC Cobra up to date. In the early 1960s, a flamboyant Texan, Carroll Shelby, dreamed of a special kind of sports car, a marriage of European style with lusty, affordable American V8 power. He took his dream forward and he persuaded British sports car specialist AC Cars to build his car, and US industry giant the Ford Motor Co to fund it. Its name also came to him in a dream - Cobra. The original production of the Cobra lasted just five years and encompassed barely a thousand cars built within the original framework. But it was only the beginning of a story that is still very much alive, encompassing 'continuations', spin-offs, and a massive worldwide replica industry. Shelby and AC Cobra details the man behind the cars, the story of their development and engineering, racing pedigree and owning and driving these powerful, iconic cars today. Fully illustrated with 250 archive colour photographs.

Leseprobe

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2015 by The Crowood Press Ltd Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2015

© Brian Laban 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 004 1

All images other than those identified as having been supplied by The Motoring Picture Library, Beaulieu, are from the author’s own photographic archive or were sourced on-line, and credited to the original copyright holder where that information is known. For any other image, every effort has been made to discover the identity of and to contact the original copyright holder, but where this has not been possible, the publisher and author would be grateful to acknowledge any further information.

Dedication

To Peter Brook – who will understand why …

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 CARROLL SHELBY BEFORE THE COBRA

CHAPTER 2 A SPORTING HERITAGE

CHAPTER 3 THE ACE

CHAPTER 4 FROM ACE TO COBRA

CHAPTER 5 THE LEAF-SPRING COBRA

CHAPTER 6 COIL SPRINGS AND THE 427

CHAPTER 7 THE COMPETITION ROADSTERS

CHAPTER 8 THE DAYTONA – SHELBY’S CHAMPION

CHAPTER 9 THE COBRA FRINGES

CHAPTER 10 AC AFTER THE COBRA

CHAPTER 11 AC MkIV AND THE ANGLISS YEARS

CHAPTER 12 SHELBY AFTER THE COBRA

CHAPTER 13 SHELBY COBRAS AFTER THE COBRA

CHAPTER 14 OWNING AND DRIVING

Index

INTRODUCTION

Carroll Shelby, ‘father of the Cobra’, died on 10 May 2012, aged eighty-nine. Through most of his life, including his racing career, he had suffered heart problems, and in recent years had had both heart and kidney transplants, but rarely stopped working. In anything resembling its 1960s guise, AC Cars, midwife to Shelby’s baby, had passed on long before Shelby did. But the Cobra name (and various more or less faithful pastiches of the ‘authentic’ Cobra) outlived both of them. In fact the Cobra thrived, to the extent of reaching a ‘50th Anniversary’ Series in 2014, marketed by the modern Shelby company and carrying the magical ‘CSX’ chassis number prefix that Shelby (and others) always argued was the true identifying mark of any ‘genuine’ Cobra.

The Cobra itself was (and is) a mechanically simple, race-bred, old-school sports car, and one of the most successful competition cars in motor sport history – albeit with an extraordinarily convoluted commercial and political history, dominated by conflicting claims to its parentage, by recurrent litigation about its title, and by multiple challenges to the right of kit-car and replica builders even to copy its essence.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Even the title of this book reflects the contention. Shelby himself was very helpful in researching AC Cobra – The Complete Story, published in 1991, but he never liked the original title. Much as he respected AC’s role, to Shelby, a Cobra was always a Shelby Cobra. By the time that edition was published, Shelby’s relationship with the later AC regime (and especially with Brian Angliss, who ran the company from 1982 to 1986) had degenerated almost to the point of open warfare. And maybe he had a point: while taking nothing away from AC at the time, without Shelby there would have been no Cobra.

The absence of Shelby’s name and the steering wheel shifted to the right (by an artist, not an engineer) indicate a brochure for the European 289 – but every inch the definitive Cobra.

Shelby himself was always adamant about what his car was called. He signed a copy of the original edition of this book at Laguna Seca in 1997, with subtle editing.

The Cobra was conceived and created in the early 1960s, and in essence it was made possible by Shelby’s vision, the Ford Motor Co.’s money, and AC’s manufacturing skills, shepherded by Shelby when none of the three would have produced the car individually.

At the time, the exact name wasn’t high on anyone’s agenda compared to making the car happen. Shelby’s motive was to fulfil his idea of putting a big American engine into a sporty European chassis; Ford’s was to support their 1960s marketing mantra of ‘Total Performance’, on and off track; AC’s was simply to survive in the perilous business of being a small-volume specialist car-maker that had just lost vital supply chains.

Shelby (plus Ford) and AC were almost literally worlds apart, on opposite sides of the Atlantic; and probably just as far apart in terms of business philosophies and personalities. Shelby was the brash, larger-than-life Texan, sometime chicken farmer, retired racer, middling engineer, consummate self-promoter; Ford was the motor sport-obsessed corporate giant, with deep pockets but mainly bought-in race-engineering talent; AC was the small, artisan, staunchly British sporting car builder who did almost everything by hand and didn’t make as many cars in a year as Ford did in a morning.

POWERED BY FORD

Ford’s interest in having their name on the car extended only as far as wanting it discreetly to carry the evocative ‘Powered by Ford’ tag. In the USA, few among Ford’s target market for the Cobra would have known the AC name from a hole in the ground, and certainly wouldn’t have gone out of their way to buy one, even with a US V8 under the bonnet. British driver Tommy Cole (tragically killed at Le Mans in 1953) is credited with starting that particular transplant trend in the early 1950s by being the first to shoehorn a Cadillac V8 into a British Allard chassis; all-American sporting hero Briggs Cunningham also squeezed a 5.5-litre Cadillac V8 into the first Healey Silverstone to reach the USA. But without a big manufacturer like Ford to back and sell the concept, motor sport aficionados aside, neither Allard nor Healey were beating the US buyers off with a stick. Ditto in the UK – anybody who knew the Shelby name probably knew him as a former driver with Aston Martin, who had given that even more English sports car maker victory at Le Mans in 1959.

The Father of the Cobra with offspring. The Cobra was the halo car, the Shelby Mustangs in the background were the money-makers that spun off from Ford’s investment.

Backers Ford were always surprisingly reticent about their direct involvement in the Cobra, at least in terms of badging, but look and you would find it.

So in 1963, when the Cobra went into production, it had a seemingly fairly trivial identity crisis, being labelled at various times and in different markets as Shelby Ford AC Cobra, Shelby AC/Cobra (for some reason including the forward slash), AC Cobra, Shelby Cobra, and in later incarnations even Ford Cobra. The only immutable bit was ‘Cobra’ – a name that Shelby claimed came to him in a dream, which he wrote down on a notepad, and which Ford and AC were both happy to go along with.

While the precise title dispute rumbled on even fifty years later, there has never been much argument about the car’s place in the sports car pantheon: the Cobra is an icon.

Simplicity, far from being a limitation, became its underlying and defining strength. It put a large-capacity but not especially sophisticated, mass-produced US V8 engine into a suitably uprated version of an equally uncomplicated but clearly competent European-style chassis – under a body again made beautiful by its simplicity.

The Cobra couldn’t have existed as a competition car without the street car to provide the numbers, but the street car benefited in almost every respect from the racer – in this case a light and lithe early 289 and the muscular full race 427 in Shelby colours.

The Cobra never went away: this is the celebration CSX4000 series 289 FIA.

It was such an obvious marriage: lots of affordable power, not much weight, minimal frills. It was by no means the first time it had been done, but Shelby, Ford and AC finally showed how to do it properly, and the Cobra became much more than the sum of its parts.

As a road car (this in the early 1960s) it redefined the upper levels of straightline performance – not so much in top speed, given its original aerodynamic limitations, but certainly in terms of ferocious acceleration, where it actually mattered more. It came to fulfil both Ford and Shelby’s underpinning motor sporting ambitions at all levels of sports car and endurance racing. From day one it began to give the previously dominant Corvettes and Jaguars a very hard time in American club racing, quickly carried its winning ways back to Europe, and eventually took the ultimate prize by beating Ferrari in the Manufacturers category of the World Sports Car Championship.

COBRAS BEYOND THE COBRA

One place where the (genuine) Cobra didn’t set the record-books ablaze was in terms of production volumes – although it would look like a runaway best-seller along-side the likes of the Allards and Healeys. In its first, indisputably Shelby-fostered incarnation (pre-AC MkIV and subsequent continuations), the Cobra only lasted seven years from first production 260 to final European-spec (AC-badged) 289. The original-generation roster (again pre-MkIV) details 655 leaf-spring 260s and 289s, 348 coil-spring 427s (the majority of which were actually 428-powered), and twenty-seven Europe-only coil-sprung AC MkIIIs. That’s 1,030 cars in all. Then there are the follow-ons, from Shelby and from various incarnations of AC (via Autokraft), of both sanctioned and disputed title.

There are the (mainly Shelby-built) cars with ‘run-on’ versions of the original, magical CSX nomenclature, and the (mainly AC-built) ones without; there are cars built long after Cobra production ostensibly ended in 1969, including Shelby’s CSX4000 and 6000 Series 427 Cobra S/C roadsters from the late 1990s, through to the CSX7000 Series FIA 289 race-car re-creations, and the limited edition ‘50th Anniversary’ of 2014.

Most controversially of all, there are the legions of replicas and recreations, some every bit as good as the real thing in terms of nuts and bolts but in no way the real thing in terms of provenance; some truly awful, but almost all generically dubbed ‘Cobra’, begging questions of imitation and flattery – though Shelby was hardly ever flattered.

The true intrigue of the Cobra is the unique union of Carroll Shelby, AC Cars and the Ford Motor Co., of motor sport in the 1960s, and of big engines in small cars. It encompasses key characters in the wings: the Hurlock brothers, who controlled AC at the crucial time and had the courage to take on Shelby’s ideas; John Tojeiro, designer of the ‘surrogate’ AC Ace (if Shelby was father of the Cobra, Tojeiro was its grandfather); racer and test driver Ken Miles, who took the Cobra prototypes by the scruff of the neck and tested and tuned them until they worked; Pete Brock, who created the Ferrari-beating Daytona coupé; Lee Iacocca, who held the reins at Ford in the days of Total Performance; Ford’s Dave Evans, who gave Shelby the engine to make his dream a reality; and Phil Remington, who Shelby respected possibly most of all, as both brilliant engineer and down-to-earth administrator.

Spotted by Shelby in 1961 (and possibly before that as their Le Mans golden days overlapped), the Ace was a good-looking, fine-handling sports car. Launched in 1953, it had revitalized AC’s image and turned them back into a sporting marque. Initially it had AC’s own 6-cylinder engine. From 1956 it was offered with the well-regarded 6-cylinder Bristol engine, but by early 1961 as Bristol (slightly ironically) switched to American Chrysler V8 power, the Ace was a car looking for another engine.

So far as the car itself is concerned, that’s where the Cobra story starts; but the bigger picture begins best with the man who was looking for a car when it mattered, the man who had the vision and the essential can-do philosophy, the ‘father of the Cobra’ himself.

Without the Ace, here at AC’s spiritual home of Brooklands, there would have been no Cobra.

CHAPTER ONE

CARROLL SHELBY BEFORE THE COBRA

Carroll Hall Shelby was born on 11 January 1923 in Leesburg, Texas, a tiny, remote community of barely 200 people at the time, on the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway, 120 miles (193km) northeast of the rather larger city of Dallas. His parents were local people, and church-going Baptists. Leesburg’s founders may have been a bit optimistic in 1873 when the tiny settlement opened a post office, but in 1923 Shelby’s father Warren Hall Shelby was a Texas mailman, who made most of his deliveries by horse-drawn buggy. When he was around three, Carroll’s mother Eloise (née Lawrence) gave Carroll a sister.

It was a back-country life, but a reasonably comfortable one. The US mail paid Shelby’s father enough for him to buy his first (second-hand) car just before Carroll reached his fifth birthday – a dark-green 1925 Willys Overland tourer with folding top, artillery wheels, manual gearshift and wood-rimmed steering wheel. It was hardly sporty, but a virtually identical model appeared in Willys Overland publicity shots in 1923, sign-written on the open bodywork with the boast: ‘This Stock 1923 Overland – First Car To Reach Lake Tahoe (Via Placerville)’, a short but brutal trek through the mountains between California and Nevada in the days when the American road network was still pretty sketchy.

Shelby Sr loved cars and Carroll picked up the bug, watching his father tinkering with the Overland engine, or sitting on his knee holding the steering wheel. Warren obviously liked Overlands (built in Toledo, Ohio) and in 1928 bought a slightly sportier Overland Whippet, with a 2.2-litre 4-cylinder engine and wire wheels, which made an even deeper impression on the boy.

Then, in 1930, the family moved to Dallas, where Warren was promoted to postal clerk and Carroll started attending Woodrow Wilson High School. He was a sickly child, and by age nine or ten he was showing signs of the heart problems that would dog him through his life, meaning he was often prescribed afternoon bed rest in his pre-teen years.

By the time he was around fourteen, though, the problems seemed to have eased. Shelby had started to grow taller and stronger, and while he tired easily he was living a more normal teenage life, still fascinated by cars, and now by aeroplanes, too.

His father had helped young Carroll learn to drive, in a scruffy 1934 Dodge; by 1938 he had a car of his own, registered in his father’s name, as Carroll (at just fifteen) still wasn’t old enough legally to own it himself. That, and most of the other cars he occasionally got to drive, had tricky manual ‘crash’ gearboxes, so he learned one useful driving skill for a future racing driver quite early – how to double-declutch.

Modest four-wheel beginnings for the boy from Leesburg, Texas, in the late 1920s.

Warren Hall Shelby, Texas mailman and father of Carroll, had an affinity for Overlands, built in Toledo, Ohio – rugged and dependable with just a hint of sporty.

The boy had a brief flirtation with flying, and apparently dressed the part.

WHEELS AND WINGS

Racing was already creeping into Carroll’s consciousness as his father took him to the dirt-track races at the local ‘bullring’ ovals. When his father couldn’t take him, he’d go on his own, and get involved in a bit of fetching and carrying for the racers.

Alongside that came a growing interest in flying. Rural Texas was scattered with small airfields and private landing strips, and young Shelby started odd-jobbing at some of those, too. That occasionally allowed him to sit in a cockpit, and eventually his indulgent father paid for his first joy ride, in a Ford Trimotor. Shelby admitted that it frightened him to death, but again he had the bug. He negotiated passenger rides whenever he could, and after graduating from Woodrow Wilson High in 1940 he enrolled on an aeronautical engineering course at the Georgia School of Technology.

By this time he had also worked as a motorcycle delivery rider for a local drugstore, using an Excelsior bike. But he wasn’t good on two wheels, and while he never hurt himself badly he eventually grew sick of falling off, and quit his job on the spot. From then on, he would stick to four wheels, always with the option of a bit more serious flying.

Appropriately enough for his future connections, Shelby’s first joy ride, sponsored by his father, was in a Ford Trimotor – in this case, also appropriately, a mail plane.

Around 1939 Shelby met Jeanne Fields at a Baptist church social, and married her in December 1943, just after his father had died, from the heart problems that Carroll probably inherited from him. By December 1944 they had a daughter, Sharon Anne, and Shelby’s life had moved on quite dramatically. He never completed the course at Georgia Tech; as World War II started to draw America in, Shelby had joined the United States Army Air Corps; in November 1941 he started training at San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center (later to become Lackland Air Force base). Between his new military career, his courting of Jeanne and his mother’s reduced financial circumstances, any ideas of getting more involved in motor racing were temporarily pushed into the background.

A QUIET WAR

With the help of a friendly recruiting sergeant (and before the realities of war kicked in), Shelby organized a posting near to his mother and wife-to-be’s homes, at Randolph Field, a vast base around 15 miles (24km) from San Antonio, opened in 1931 and still America’s primary flight training facility. In his Basic Flying Training Squadron, Carroll Shelby combined his training with less glamorous duties – including moving tons of chicken manure from an old farm to flower beds around the base’s Spanish Colonial-style buildings. Moving chicken manure would have a resonance in the Shelby story a few years later.

He also drove a fire truck on the base for a few months, until with the war in Europe under way he finally got his chance to fly regularly. His pre-flight training started at Randolph in November 1941 and in September 1942, as a sergeant, he was transferred to Ellington Field, this time near Houston. In his training days he used to fly over his fiancée’s family farm, occasionally dropping letters and once even landing to take Jeanne (and her mother!) for a highly unofficial joy-ride. Shelby was never a slave to the rule book.

In December 1942 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant, but that was as far as his promotions went, and he neither saw active service nor did much travelling: the furthest he went in his four-and-a-half years of military flying was the Gulf of Mexico.

Shelby’s first Army Air Corps posting was Randolph Field, with its famous colonial-style buildings, and conveniently close to home in Dallas.

His time as a military pilot (and later instructor) wasn’t without its adventures. As well as the unsanctioned diversions to Jeanne’s family farm, he crashed in the desert during a simulated bombing run. He got his student pilots out of the plane while it was still in the air, then hung on as long as he could himself before bailing out too – to face a long walk home.

A bit like falling off motorbikes, it helped get the flying bug out of his system, so by the time he left the service in 1945 he had no ambition to carry on as a commercial pilot. Unfortunately, he had no particularly relevant training to do anything else either, so his immediate post-war career options were strictly limited – although the birth of Carroll and Jeanne’s first son, Michael Hall Shelby, in November 1946, and younger brother Patrick Burke Shelby in October 1947, meant he needed some way of paying the bills.

With long-time friend Bailey Gordon, Carroll went into the ready-mixed concrete business, starting with one truck each but quickly building up a fairly substantial business, with more trucks and employing a number of other drivers.

In 1947 Shelby expanded into his own trucking operation, mainly carrying timber for the building industry. While that was a successful move, he was always aware of the possibility of a slump in the building business, which could have taken him with it; so with a little help from his oil-man father-in-law he sold out of the trucking business and went into oil.

Like many of Shelby’s early career paths, that didn’t last long. Starting from the bottom during 1948 and working as a ‘do-anything’ roughneck, he soon found that there was little money and few prospects in that area of the business, so it was time for another change. This one would become a famous part of the Shelby story.

For all his apparent butterfly tendencies, he wasn’t afraid of hard work, or of seeking outside advice. Determined to be successful at something, he now submitted himself to a series of aptitude tests, which for some reason suggested that he would be best suited to working with animals. A Shelby legend was about to take shape.

CHICKEN FARMER TO RACER

At the time, chicken farming was a growing industry in this part of Texas; there was government finance on offer to help would-be entrepreneurs get started in the business. And Shelby had his Air Corps experience with at least one aspect of chickens.

Typically, he didn’t go for half measures. His first batch was 20,000 birds and in the first three-month cycle he made around $5,000 profit, which was a promising start. But it was too good to last, and his second batch of birds was wiped out by disease. His money and business plans went with them, sending him back to scratching a meagre living by odd-jobbing, while raising a few pheasants and Irish setters on the old chicken farm.

More as a hobby than as a job, Shelby now got involved with cars again, specifically working on a backyard-built, ladder-framed racer with a Ford flathead V8 and home-made body, owned and built by an old school friend, Ed Wilkins. Then one thing led to another.

In January 1952, Shelby (now a father of three) raced the car in a drag race meeting at Grand Prairie Naval Airbase, near Dallas Fort Worth. Without much to beat, and without the complication of having to go round corners, Shelby won quite easily, prompting Wilkins to give him a chance on the next step of the motor sport ladder, in a proper circuit race. The car was an imported MG TC – British sports car of choice for a post-war generation of US servicemen returning from Europe, and MG’s big contribution to Britain’s desperate post-war export drive, when earning dollars was top of the wish-list.

The chicken-farmer overalls started out of expediency but became a trademark, and even in later life Shelby was happy to play up to it.

In the early postwar years, the MG T Series was one of Britain’s key exports to the USA, and the way into motor sport for many a would-be driver – including Shelby.

In his first circuit race, at Norman, Oklahoma in May 1952, Shelby won his class again, in an event sanctioned by the newly formed Sports Car Club of America. The SCCA was another catalyst; without it there wouldn’t have been any serious racing in the USA at the time. The Club was founded in 1944, essentially as an enthusiasts’ social club, but in 1948 it started to sanction and organize races across the country. By 1951 it had created the SCCA National Sports Car Championship, and although the SCCA followed a strictly amateur code until 1962, the organization itself was thoroughly professional. In that first race at Norman, Shelby was helped by the early leader spinning off, but later on the same day he won again, still with the TC but against several much more powerful Jaguar XK120s. As quickly as that, Carroll Shelby was a racing driver, and quite a promising one.

He won again in August, with a borrowed XK120 in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. In November, already attracting driving opportunities from better-funded car owners, he won a 50-mile (80km) race at Caddo Mills, Texas, driving a Cadillac-Allard (as conceived by Tom Cole) owned by wealthy sportsman Charles Brown of Monroe, Louisiana.

Among the people he beat that day was Masten Gregory, from Kansas City, another future Le Mans winner, GP and Indy 500 driver, who became a lifelong friend to Shelby. It was Gregory’s first race and, like Shelby, he drove an Allard, in Gregory’s case with a Mercury V8. Gregory was famous throughout his racing career for his thick-lensed glasses, but Shelby later described him as ‘the fastest American ever to go over there and race a Grand Prix car’. A few years later they would be racing GP cars against each other.

Their backgrounds were very different. Gregory’s family made a fortune in the insurance industry and his Allard was paid for from his share of his family inheritance. Shelby, on the other hand, was still barely scratching a living from the farm, and drove throughout the 1953 season as an amateur. Most of the time he drove various examples of the fearsome Cadillac-Allards, first for Charlie Brown, then for Roy Cherryhomes of Jacksboro, Texas – who paid Shelby’s expenses (which was a small step in the right direction) while Shelby rewarded him with nine wins from nine starts.

Among those was a race at Eagle Mountain Naval Airbase. Redundant military runways featured in a high proportion of America’s early post-war races, not just because there were literally hundreds of them but because of another fortuitous SCCA connection. General Curtis E. LeMay was famous as the man who shaped US bombing strategy through World War II, oversaw the Berlin airlift, and became USAF Chief of Staff in the early 1960s. LeMay was also a huge sports car racing enthusiast, and facilitated access to many disused (and even active) airbases for the SCCA’s early races.

Long before Shelby and AC put a Ford V8 into the Ace and created the Cobra, people were putting US V8s into British Allards – in this case a Cadillac engine, with Sydney Allard driving.

Curtis LeMay was better known as the architect of American air power during World War II, but he was also a committed sports car racing enthusiast, and supporter of the SCCA.

THE SHELBY TRADEMARK

Eagle Mountain was one of those, and it was where Shelby appeared for the first time in what was to become his trademark outfit – his striped dungarees: ‘I’d been working on the farm when I realized I was due to race. It was a hot day so I didn’t bother to change. I found the overalls cool and comfortable, and I won the race, too. I became identified with them and after that I just wore them all the time.’

First time around: the dungarees in Shelby’s heyday, here in the pit lane at Goodwood.

If Shelby dressed like a chicken farmer, he looked increasingly like a serious racing driver. In January 1954 his career took another step with his first race outside North America, in the Mil Kilometres de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, where Shelby was one of four SCCA drivers invited by the Automobile Club of Argentina.

It was another indicator of the growing revival of motor racing after the War – the first ever South American round of the FIA’s World Sports Car Championship and a considerably more important race than anything Shelby had done to date. It ran on a 5.9-mile (9.5km) circuit inside the city, combining two long, parallel out-and-back straights on the Avenida General Paz linked by short 180-degree loops at each end, with a bigger loop part-way along one of the straights into the Autodromo Oscar Alfredo Galvez, in a city park.

Cherryhomes supplied the familiar Cadillac-Allard and paid Shelby’s expenses but didn’t go to the event, while Shelby’s co-driver, airline pilot Dale Duncan (who also happened to be Masten Gregory’s brother-in-law) took care of the travel arrangements. Duncan also put out a carburettor fire while the car was in the pits, improvising when no fire extinguisher was available; suffice it to say that the first stage of the fire-fighting involved climbing up onto the bonnet of the car and unbuttoning his overalls…

The race was punctuated by accidents and won by a works Ferrari 375 Plus driven by 1950 World Champion Giuseppe Farina with Umberto Maglioli, at an average of almost 90mph (145km/h). Shelby and Duncan survived to finish tenth overall and to win the amateur division – and the Kimberly Cup, donated to the SCCA by ‘Gentleman Jim’ Kimberly, millionaire sportsman, racing enthusiast, and the Kimberly of Kimberly-Clark, makers of Kleenex. They finished four places ahead of Gregory, also in his first ‘overseas’ race. ‘Gentleman Jim’ was one more member of this early SCCA coterie. As a driver he won the Club’s National Championship; as SCCA President he was a staunch advocate of the original amateur code – while ensuring that everything he was involved with was ultra-professional.

Shelby inevitably went through the Allard phase in his early career, in this case in a typically race-modified J2X, with first wife Jeanne on the pit crew.

The man who took Shelby to Europe, John Wyer, Aston Martin racing boss and ‘Death Ray’ even to his friends, for the unflinching stare.

The Mil Kilometres would be Shelby’s last race in Cherryhome’s Allard, but the start of something far bigger for his longer-term racing prospects. Again, it involved some Shelby serendipity. Aston Martin works driver (and European rising star) Peter Collins was staying at the same hotel as Shelby, was impressed by his performance (or maybe his dungarees) and introduced him to Aston Martin’s visiting race director, John Wyer.

Wyer was sufficiently impressed by what he had seen and heard of Shelby to offer him another big step up, with an expenses-paid drive for Aston Martin at Sebring, Florida, in March 1954 – by any standards, a very serious race.

Sebring, almost inevitably, was based on another massive redundant bomber base (formerly Hendricks Field) and held its first, six-hour race on New Year’s Eve 1950. In 1952 it started the tradition of a 12-Hour endurance race, which soon became a round of the Sports Car World Championship, widely regarded as second only to the 24 Hours of Le Mans as a test of car and drivers, and taken very seriously by both American and European teams.

In 1954, Shelby jumped at the opportunity to race there, and although he was forced out when the rear axle broke after seventy-seven laps, he had been quick enough to convince Wyer that he had real potential. What’s more, Shelby was now racing against the best drivers in the sport, from Europe as well as the USA. The 1954 Sebring 12-Hour race was won by Stirling Moss and Bill Lloyd in an OSCA entered by Briggs Cunningham; Mike Hawthorn would win in 1955 (in a D-Type Jaguar) and Juan Manuel Fangio in 1956 (for Ferrari) and 1957 (for Maserati) – a very illustrious winners list.

EUROPE CALLS

So Wyer invited Shelby to Europe to drive the Aston DBR, providing he could pay his own expenses; and while he obviously couldn’t do that himself, Shelby’s growing reputation meant he now knew both Americans and Europeans who might help.

That also meant that the Aston Martin opportunity wasn’t Carroll Shelby’s only option. At the time he was considering another offer from a west Texan oil millionaire, Guy Mabee. While Shelby didn’t take up that offer, it may have planted a seed in his mind. Eight years before the Cobra would appear, Mabee’s plan was to build an American sports car to beat the Europeans at their own game. In 1953 he had built a 200mph (320km/h) special for his son Joe to drive at the Bonneville Speed Trials. Part of his plan was to have Shelby develop a road-going sports car around the same basic layout of tubular chassis, front beam axle and a big Chrysler V8. You can certainly see the train of thought.

Bolstered by Jeanne’s encouragement in spite of the obvious financial challenges, Shelby chose the Aston Martin deal and the chance to race in Europe – while keeping Mabee in the equation, as he helped Shelby finance the trip, and tentatively agreed to buy an Aston from the works team for Shelby to run in races where the team hadn’t entered him themselves. The unspoken potential bonus was that Shelby would be able to pick up ideas for Mabee’s planned car from the best that Europe could offer at the time.

In the event, Mabee didn’t buy the Aston, and Wyer, fully aware of Shelby’s personal financial position, declined his new driver’s honourable but totally impracticable offer to buy the car himself. This also said a good deal about the urbane and pragmatic Wyer, who would become arguably the biggest influence of all in Shelby’s progression up to and far beyond the Cobra.

If Shelby hadn’t been transported to Europe by Wyer and Aston, his future might have been steered by Guy Mabee, Texan millionaire and builder of racing and record-breaking specials.

In April 1954, Motor Racing magazine marked Shelby’s first race in Europe, at Aintree in a DBR3, with the cover photograph recording his second-place finish.

Leaving Jeanne at home, Shelby arrived in Europe in April 1954 and started his European racing career in an Aston DBR3 in a wet race at Aintree. Finishing second to Duncan Hamilton (who had won Le Mans in 1953) was a respectable result that helped Shelby persuade Wyer to let him race at the biggest endurance race of all, at Le Mans, in June, to partner Belgian journalist and racer Paul Frère (a future winner himself, in 1960).

It wouldn’t be an auspicious Le Mans debut for the tall Texan, but through no fault of his own. Le Mans was (and is) the jewel in the global sports car crown, and by 1954 Aston Martin were taking it seriously – though at this stage in their Le Mans campaign they were still overshadowed by Jaguar, Ferrari and potentially by ever-threatening American wild card, Cunningham. They should have faced Maserati, too, but Maserati’s works cars were eliminated before they arrived, after a road accident on the way to the race. Expected entries from Lancia and Mercedes-Benz stayed away, too, and Austin-Healey withdrew in protest at the inclusion of ‘prototypes’ in the entry, which made it virtually impossible for the smaller, production-based teams to expect much success.

What was left was enough to make a strong race of it: Aston Martin entered four works DB3Ss (two open and two closed cars) plus one ‘Lagonda’ (effectively a V12-engined DB3S), and there was also a privately entered DB2/4. They faced three of Jaguar’s ground-breaking D-Types, plus a privately entered C-Type, and five Ferraris – including one entered by Cunningham alongside his two C-4Rs.

It rained for most of the race, often torrentially, and no one got close to the battle between Jaguar and Ferrari, eventually won (by just 2.5 miles/4km) by Ferrari durability over Jaguar speed. None of the five Astons (or the Lagonda) finished. Shelby’s Le Mans baptism had a particularly dramatic ending. During the night, he brought his open car (in the same white and blue American racing colours as the Cunninghams) into the pits to complain of a wobble in the steering. When the mechanics jacked the car up, a front wheel fell off, taking the broken stub-axle with it – possibly as a result of Shelby having been off the circuit and into the scenery earlier in the race.

Shelby’s first taste of the greatest endurance race in the world, Le Mans, was in 1954, with the Aston Martin in white and blue American racing colours. It was an interesting debut.

But Shelby started to come good in Europe, and even to see some reward for the adventure. Sharing a ‘semi-private’ Aston with regular team driver Graham Whitehead at the Supercortemaggiore GP at Monza, he finished fifth and won his first professional purse, $2,000 – enough to send something home even after his expenses. His final outing in his first European season was at Silverstone in July, when he finished third behind Collins and Roy Salvadori in an Aston one-two-three. Importantly, he’d done enough to justify Wyer’s backing.

On the down side, by the time he returned to America in August the Mabee project was on hold so Shelby was in effect unemployed, until Cherryhomes temporarily came to the rescue by paying Shelby to drive his Jaguar C-Type in two late-season races.

JOHN WYER – THE MAN FROM ASTON

By recruiting Shelby into the Aston Martin team and bringing him to Europe, John Wyer laid one of the key foundation stones in the Cobra story; and he would continue to play an influential part in Shelby’s life through the Cobra’s birth and beyond.

Had it not been for Wyer, it’s highly unlikely that Shelby would have come to Europe in 1954, and while he might have joined forces with Guy Mabee and forged a different path in America, it wouldn’t have ended with the authentic Cobra.

If Wyer hadn’t been as influential as he was, Shelby wouldn’t have made the European contacts that he did. By the time Shelby went to Aston Martin, Wyer was already well established there – a hard taskmaster, nicknamed ‘Death Ray’ for his famously hard stare, but undoubtedly one of motor sport’s most respected team managers.

He was born in 1909 in Kidderminster, in the British Midlands, where his father was a Sunbeam distributor; in 1927 Wyer was apprenticed to Sunbeam (who only three years earlier had been GP winners), sparking his love of motor racing while still at school.

Aston Martin entered Wyer’s world in 1947, after he joined race-preparation company Monaco Engineering in Watford, where one of his first jobs was team-managing new Monaco director Dudley Folland’s 2-litre Aston in sports car races around Europe. In 1949 that took Wyer to Le Mans for the first time, when Folland raced his Aston with Anthony Heal, of the Heal’s store family. That introduced Wyer to new Aston Martin proprietor David Brown, who in March 1950 offered him the job of racing manager for Aston and Lagonda. What was meant to be a one-year appointment would last for more than thirteen – right up to 1963.

As Development Engineer, Wyer oversaw road car design, as well as a fledgling racing programme based on race-prepared road cars. By 1951 (having recruited pre-war Auto Union designer Eberan von Eberhorst), Wyer had evolved purpose-built cars like the DB3 and DB3S. With right-hand man Reg Parnell he also recruited many fine drivers, including Stirling Moss, Peter Collins, Tony Brooks, Roy Salvadori – and Shelby.

Limited time and resources often forced conflicts between Aston’s racing and road car needs (even the ill-starred GP car), so the 1950s were rollercoaster years. The DB2 came third at Le Mans in 1951, but it was four years before Aston had another finisher there. Other high spots included GT class wins in the Mille Miglia in 1951 and 1952, a hat-trick of Goodwood Nine-Hour wins, three Nürburgring 1000km wins, second places at Sebring in 1953, Le Mans in 1955, 1956 and 1958, a 1953 TT onetwo, even numerous rally wins. Through it all, though, Le Mans continued to elude them – until 1959.

That was the glory year for Wyer and Aston, as Salvadori and Shelby (five years after Wyer first brought him to Europe) finally won the 24 Hours outright in the DBR1, and steered Aston to the World Sports Car Championship – helped by another win in the Tourist Trophy, at Goodwood, and victory for Stirling Moss in the Nürburgring 1000km with a borrowed DBR1 supported by Wyer.