Welcome!

Twisted from the Sprue is my little corner of the internet. This site started as a simple web presence for the Three Rivers IPMS model club - as in middle-aged guys who never quite out-grew gluing together miniature cars and planes (and not a club of really good looking people who have their pictures taken for underwear ads and the like). The club now has a real web-site, and this blog is a place for me to post stuff I find interesting or just want to ramble on about.

Its reassuring to know you're not the only guy with an obsession for trivia - if you happen across something interesting here, or have a question or something to contribute, please leave a comment or drop me an email at dnschmtz@gmail.com

Don
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Sunday, August 16, 2015

The Faceless Heroes of Shelby American (part 1)

Out on the Internets Carroll Shelby has become a legend of Paul Bunyan proportions; he is credited with designing and building every Ford racing car of the 1960s and single-handedly putting Enzo Ferrari in his place.  Not only is Shelby's history as a racing driver largely forgotten, but so are a few people who did much of the real work of making the Shelby name larger-than-life. Trying to explain the history to someone on a social network is pointless, but maybe here someone will read and appreciate it...


Unlike the U.S., European cities had grown up hundreds of years before the automobile and were naturally pedestrian friendly, so cars there tended to be smaller (to deal with the narrow streets) and more of a luxury item than in the US. These were the perfect conditions for the sports car to develop and flourish. Sports car racing developed on "The Continent" much like NASCAR had in the States, starting as a way for car owners to have a bit of fun and measure their driving skills and the speed of their cars against the other guy's. Unlike a NASCAR race that was for some set number of laps or miles, sports car races were typically endurance races, run for a set number of hours, with the car covering the greatest distance taking the win.

With even the short races lasting 6+ hours, there wasn't time to have more than 1 race on a weekend, so there were multiple classes of cars running at the same time. The classes and rules were established and enforced by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (the FIA). The most visible classes were GT - for the fastest true production sports cars, and Prototype - which allowed nearly unlimited technology but still required the cars to be road-worthy (they were required to have two seats, room for a standard size set of luggage and had to run with a spare-tire). Most manufacturers would compete in GT, with just the top few marques (Ferrari and Jaguar and Porsche) dabbling in the Prototype class more as a demonstration of their engineering capabilities than a preview of future production cars.

Endurance races were often held on the public roads and streets of a city, with the events taking on a festival air. Thanks largely to a course that allowed very high speeds, the 24 hour race at the French town of Le Mans became the crown jewel of European sports car racing.

A bit of a diversion: Le Mans is the name of the town where the race is held, the name of the race is the 24 Hours of Le Mans (in French 24 Heures du Mans). The name of the race course they hold the race on is the Circuit de la Sarthe - so named as it follows the Sarthe river - and you sometimes hear sports car fans throw La Sarthe into their bench-racing bull-sessions to sound sophisticated.

While we're covering the complexities of French names, let me throw in a brief mention of the straight-away that Le Mans is famous for: in French this part of the course is known as the Ligne Droite des Hunaudieres , which is typically Anglicized as the Mulsanne Straight. Hunaudieres is the name of a village in the middle of the straight, Mulsanne is the next town just past the far end of the straight and much easier for English speakers to pronounce, though the course never actually reaches Mulsanne.  The name isn't so important as the fact that the straight is nearly 4 miles long and for much of the track's history it was a true straight allowing cars to run full throttle and reach serious top speeds (in 1990 two "chicanes" - sharp kinks - were added to the straight to slow the cars down). In the early 1960s, with no chicanes, the fastest cars were pushing 175mph on the not-very-wide tree-lined road before they had to brake for the Mulsanne Corner at the end.

Of course it was good publicity for the manufacturers when their cars won races, so before long there were "racing specials" designed just for the track and factory backed racing teams. Right after WWII there was an explosion of new and newly revived auto makers in Europe - Alfa Romeo, Porsche, Ferrari, Jaguar, Mercedes, MG, Triumph, Austin Healey and Aston Martin to name just the bigger players - and all of them were hoping to sell high-profit sports cars in America where the economy was booming and the growing middle-class was developing a taste for luxury items. Sports car racing would take on a new urgency in Europe during the early 1950s.

Compared to a Chevy Impala or Ford Galaxie, a tiny two seater with an only somewhat water-resistant canvas-top was totally impractical as everyday transportation in the auto-centric United States, but that was the point: owning these cars was all about having fun and showing off while doing it, and a certain breed of Americans took to them with a vengeance. Many of the eccentric folks buying these cars were also interested in racing them, and so by the mid 1950s there were a number of amateur racing series in the States, many organized by clubs such as the fledgling Sports Car Club of America (SCCA).

With the background out of the way, lets rewind a bit. Carroll Shelby was born in small town Texas in 1923. Despite a heart condition that kept him bed-ridden for much of his childhood, he had the usual school-kid's interest in go-karts and motorcycles and things mechanical. In November 1941, a month before Pearl Harbor, he would join the Army (which at the time included the Air Corps) becoming a pilot. As a flight instructor he would spend the WWII years stateside, getting married in 1943 and becoming a father a year later. After the war he would bounce between jobs in the Texas oilfields and small business ventures such as trucking and chicken farming with varying amounts of success.

In 1952 a friend who was one of those amateur "club racers" would let Shelby drive his MG TC in a small race in Oklahoma. The fact that the car belonged to someone else may have made Shelby a bit more willing to push the car to its limits: surprisingly for someone who had never raced before, Shelby would handily win two races, including a race in a class with much more powerful Jaguar XK120s.  Word spread quickly of Shelby's talent behind the wheel; he would have plenty of offers to drive other people's cars, including the then hot Cadillac V8 powered Allards.

Along the way Shelby managed to make friends with some important people in the racing world (Shelby always seemed to have friends in the right places). One friend in particular was John Wyer, an Englishman who was running the Aston Martin factory racing team. After seeing Shelby's driving, in 1954 he would offer him a ride in a DB3 at the big 12 hour endurance race in Sebring, Florida. Shelby would pull out a 2nd place finish and earn an offer to drive for Aston Martin in Europe, where he had quite a bit of success against serious competition from Jaguar. He would also have his first race at Le Mans, ending in a DNF.

In the fall of 1954 Shelby would have a fairly spectacular crash while driving an Austin Healey in the Carrera Pan Americana in Mexico. The crash may have made the big name racing teams wary of Shelby, but he still managed to bounce around the racing world, racking up wins and gaining notoriety.  Ever the entrepreneur, in 1957 Shelby would team with oilman Dick Hall (brother of Jim Hall, creator of the Chapparal racing cars) to open Carroll Shelby Sports Cars in Dallas. Shelby would use his considerable contacts at the various European automakers to import and sell a number of foreign marques - both high-end Maseratis and more pedestrian Lotuses and Austin Healeys and such - to wealthy oil-men and well paid oil-workers.

Shelby would continue driving for various teams through the late 1950s, eventually bringing home a win for Aston Martin at Le Mans in 1959, but he had his sights set on bigger things. Or maybe he just realized that being a race-driver was a young-man's game and he was getting older. In 1960 a heart condition would force him to retire from driving.  Shelby's next goal was to build his own cars and run his own racing team much like American Briggs Cunningham, who a few years earlier had used part of his family fortune to develop a line of sports cars powered by first generation Chrysler V8s, taking them to Europe to do battle with Jaguar and Aston Martin and rising star Ferrari (although with only limited success).

A 1954 Cunningham C4R, photographed at the Simeone Museum in Philadelphia.

Without a family fortune of his own, Shelby fell back on his network of contacts. In 1959, with backing from Dick Hall and minor support from Ed Cole at Chevrolet, Shelby sent three new Corvettes to Scaglietti in Italy to be re-bodied with Ferrari inspired, lightweight aluminum coachwork, with the idea that GM would produce the cars as limited production racing specials.  Unfortunately GM had just entered a self-imposed ban on racing (intended to show GM was a responsible company who cared about safety) and Shelby's idea was quickly squashed by GM management - the 3 Corvettes would find homes with sports car enthusiasts and car collectors, becoming a minor footnote to the Shelby story.

In 1960 Shelby would divorce his first wife and move to California, opening a Goodyear Racing Tire dealership in Los Angeles in the back of Dean Moon's hot rod shop. He would also start the Carroll Shelby School of High Performance Driving at the Riverside race track (Shelby knew his name was one of his most valuable assets and he put it right up front on all his ventures) .  Shelby would run an ad in Sports Car Graphic magazine, offering to send information on the driving school for $1; legend has it Shelby carried around the big stacks of $1 bills this generated to pay for his also legendary bar tabs.

Enter Pete Brock,  a California kid who had grown up building hot rods. After a short, failed attempt at an engineering degree he would end up enrolled at the (now famous) Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Brock was an incredibly talented automotive designer; in 1957 while still a student GM would hire him into their styling department, where he would work on the design of the second generation Corvette. But as soon as he turned 21 and qualified for an SCCA racing license, Brock left GM to go racing in California, where he ran into Carroll Shelby, who promptly hired him to set up and run his new driving school.

AC Ace - photographed at the 2015 Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix

But all of this was just setting the stage for much bigger things. In 1961 Shelby learned that in England, Bristol Cars - a high end luxury car maker - had finally stopped building the hoary BMW-designed 6 cylinder engine that they were selling to several of the small boutique car makers in England, including tiny AC cars who were using the engine in their Ace roadster. Contrary to popular legend, AC would find a replacement 6 cylinder engine from Ford of England, but not before Shelby pitched AC on the idea of developing a version of the Ace to use an American V8. Shelby was thinking of using the small block Chevy, but he would find a more willing partner in Lee Iaccoca. Ford had just launched their Total Performance marketing strategy, but had no cars available or even in the development pipeline able to compete with Chevy's Corvette. What Ford did have was an all new small V8 of their own, developed for use in their forthcoming mid-size Fairlane model; supplying those to Shelby for his V8 roadster would give Ford instant credibility in the sporty car market and help build a solid reputation for the new engine. Shelby wheedled a $25,000 loan from Ford to set up shop and a deal to supply him with engines and transmissions.

In early 1962, AC would modify an Ace to mount the new Ford V8, using a stock 260 engine on loan from an English Ford dealership to work out the mounting points.  In February of 1962, AC shipped the car (minus engine) to California. Ford sent a warmed up 260 V8 and 4 speed transmission. Shelby and some guys at Dean Moon's shop spent a day stuffing the engine into the little car, after which Shelby and Moon headed off looking for Corvettes to street race. The stock 260 V8 was rated at 160 horsepower, but the "hi-po" version Ford supplied had the usual hot-rod tricks (higher compression, solid lifter camshaft, 4 barrel carburetor) to push that to somewhere close to 260 horsepower.

The little Ace weighed barely 2000 pounds (compared to a '62 Corvette at 3000 pounds) - 260 horsepower made the Ace a rocket. Shelby moved fast; within days he had shown the car to a magazine writer friend, and just a month later it would appear in sparkling yellow paint at the New York Auto Show, wearing the "Shelby Cobra" name. The new Cobra was the star of the show, and Shelby began taking orders from dealerships interested in selling the cars.

With AC supplying cars and Ford providing engines, Shelby would need a place to actually put the two together. At the time, Lance Reventlow, another wealthy racer trying his hand at building his own race cars (the Scarab), had just admitted defeat and was closing down his shop in Venice, California. Shelby would pick up the lease on the building, and pick up Reventlow's chief engineer Phil Remington as a bonus. Remington was another California hot rodder; he had lied about his age to join the Army during WWII, and had ended up as a flight engineer flying on a B-25 bomber in the Pacific. Remington understood engines and how to keep them running as only someone who had bet his life on that ability could; he was known as the kind of guy that could make anything with hand tools and scrap metal. And now Shelby had him to work the bugs out of the Cobra and prepare it as a race car.

One of the non-Ford dealers who signed on with Shelby was Pittsburgher Ed Hugus (you knew there had to be a Pittsburgh connection in here somewhere). Hugus was essentially an east-coast version of Carroll Shelby; he had come back from being a paratrooper in WWII and opened a European car dealership in Pittsburgh, which helped support his racing habit, including multiple drives at Le Mans.  When AC sent the first two Ace/Cobras destined for customers to the US, one went directly to the Hugus shop in Pittsburgh for final assembly (a few other early east-coast bound Cobras were probably finished there as well). Cobra CSX 2001, the first ever customer Cobra, was sold to a Pittsburgh doctor, who would return it a few months later, asking to trade it on a car with an actual heater! This legendary car was then bought by an amateur racer and shipped back across the Atlantic where it was prepared for racing and campaigned at various races throughout Europe for many years before ending up in the hands of a US collector today.

Back in California, Shelby was chasing his real dream of building a racing team around the new Cobra. Shelby had run a few races in late 1962 with the early Cobras, with up and coming driver Billy Krause at the wheel, including a trip to the Nassau Speed Week, only to have the car break in various ways. In 1963 Ford would build a 289 inch version of their new small V8, which was a literal bolt-in upgrade for the Cobra; in racing tune the new 289 was good for at least 350 horsepower.  The AC chassis had also benefited from 6 months of development by Phil Remington - it was becoming a serious competitor for the Corvettes and even the more powerful European marques.

However Mickey Thompson had lured Krause away to drive a Corvette in '63, putting the Shelby American team in need of drivers. Shelby would lure top Corvette driver Dave MacDonald and add successful  car-builder and club-racer Ken Miles, an Englishman transplanted to southern California, to his team. MacDonald was young and talented and had experience driving the powerful Corvette, Miles was grizzled and wily and had made a reputation driving small bore MGs and Porsches. Miles also knew the importance of physical condition on driving: he ran and exercised to stay in shape at a time when most drivers quickly developed the physique of a major-league first baseman. Despite being 18 years older, Miles gave up very little if anything to MacDonald on the race track and would do most of the development driving for the Cobra.  The two would finish first and second at their first race with Shelby in 1963 and frequently thereafter.

Even with the success of the Cobras in the 1963 season, Ford was hesitant to take them to Le Mans that summer. In the spring of 1963 Ford was secretly negotiating to buy Ferrari, and Ford's support of Shelby was a sticking point; there was no need to rub Enzo's nose in the fact that Ford was sponsoring a competing racing team  in Ferrari's own backyard (the deal would fall through anyhow). The reliability of the Cobra and Ford's new V8 were also largely unknown; Ford may have wanted to avoid an embarrassing first showing while Shelby was still working out the bugs.

But Shelby being Shelby, there were Cobras at Le Mans in 1963: AC would prepare two cars - one entered as an AC factory team, the other as a private entry paid for by Ed Hugus (who would co-drive). The Hugus car would break down about 10 hours into the race, but the AC car would finish 7th overall, behind 6 assorted Ferraris. The Cobras had plenty of power and reasonable handling, but its weak link was aerodynamics: even with a "Le Mans" hard-top the aging roadster's bodywork limited the Cobra's top speed too much for a fast track like La Sarthe.

After a year of experience racing the Cobra, in which Shelby had won the USRRC Manufacturer's Championship, Shelby set his sights on winning in Europe.  Shelby had a plan for 1964 - actually two plans - to address the limited top-speed of the roadster body. The merely crazy idea involved upping the horsepower ante by dropping a 427 inch Ford NASCAR motor into the Cobra; the really insane idea was to build a more aerodynamic coupe body for the standard Cobra roadster.

For all their success, Shelby's "engineering division" was made up of a couple of California hot-rodders and an aging English tank mechanic whose main job was driving the car. Ken Miles took on the 427 project, wedging a Holman & Moody NASCAR 427 into a Cobra roadster, and while the car showed promise the lightweight AC chassis was not up to the weight or the stresses of the big-block V8. Eventually Shelby would develop a new tube-frame Cobra roadster around the big-block, but it became clear that in the short term the focus should be on the new coupe body, using the tried and true Cobra chassis and small-block 289.

The first Cobra Daytona Coupe - also photographed at the Simeone Museum.

In 1964 aerodynamics was a black-art and the only experts had been quietly smuggled out of Germany at the end of WWII to work at American aircraft and missile companies. Engineering school dropout Pete Brock would come up with the design for the new body, going largely by instinct.  The design would adopt a Kamm-tail that reduced drag while keeping the car's overall length within the limits imposed by the AC chassis.  Brock didn't just draw the car and send it off to a coach builder to manufacture; he and a few of Shelby's technicians would build full size wooden forms and hammer out body panels much like the British craftsmen who were building Cobra bodies.

The new body - generally referred to as the Daytona Coupe - was surprisingly successful, pushing the car's top speed up to about 190mph and making it competitive with Ferrari's 250 GTO.  At the car's first outing at the Daytona Continental (a 2000km race) in February the car did well before a fire put it out of the race; at the Sebring 12 hours a month later the Coupe would win the GT class and come in 4th overall, (barely) behind a handful of Ferrari Prototype cars (two 275Ps and a new 330P), and ahead of several 250 GTOs. A number of Cobra roadsters helped fill out the top 10 finishers.

Ferrari had set a precedent with their limited production GTO, claiming it was simply a re-bodied version of the 250 SWB that had preceded it in order to homologate the car without producing the 100 copies required by the FIA to count as a GT car.  Shelby would exercise the same loophole to homologate the new coupe; with Ford's backing, he would have another body built in Italy and take the first two Daytonas racing in Europe for the '64 season.

Sadly Shelby driver Dave MacDonald would be killed at Indianapolis that May, causing Shelby to find a new driver; he would recruit already legendary Corvette driver Bob Bondurant. Bondurant had quite a bit of success with the Coupe that summer, including a first-in GT, 4th overall finish at Le Mans (again, beaten only by Ferarri Prototype cars).

At the same time Shelby was campaigning the Daytonas in Europe, Ford was supporting an English racing team run by Brit Alan Mann.  Interestingly, in conjunction with Holman&Moody (of stock car fame), Mann was running a bit of a skunkworks project for Ford: he had prepared two of the first Ford Mustangs for road racing - running them in many of the same events as the (much faster) Cobra coupes. Mann had already been running the Ford Falcon (a twin of the Mustang under the sheetmetal) before the Mustang's debut; in 1964 Mann was the expert at making the Mustang go fast.

Shelby was looking to win the FIA GT Manufacturer's Championship with the Daytona that year, and with one race left in the season at Monza (in Italy) he was within spitting distance of the necessary points to beat Ferrari, but Enzo was not about to be beaten on his home turf: Ferrari tried to have the Ferrari LM (a newer, faster Prototype car than the already aging GTO) classified as a GT car even though not enough had been built. The FIA balked, but under threat of the Ferrari team never racing at Monza again the race ended up not counting for Championship points - giving Ferrari the Championship in 1964. Shelby was not happy.

Shortly after Shelby got home to California he got a call from Ray Geddes at Ford: they wanted an SCCA legal version of the Mustang to compete in American club-racing (which had no class for 4 seater cars) and oh, by the way, it should be competitive with the Corvette. Having seen the Alan Mann Mustangs, Shelby knew there was no way to turn a production Mustang into a race car with just the modifications allowed by the SCCA; he would have to produce at least 100 "Shelby-ized" Mustangs to base the race car on. Shelby wasn't all that excited about the project, but he was relying on Ford for Cobra engines, and Cobra sales weren't exactly through the roof, so he agreed. Shelby American would need a bigger shop to turn the 100+ white Mustang fastbacks shipped from Ford into Shelby GT350s.

We need to rewind a bit again... When the deal to buy Ferrari had fallen through in 1963, Henry Ford II (aka The Deuce) wanted revenge, and not just a win in the GT class, but an outright win at Le Mans. Ford went out and bought the design for a new prototype racing car from Eric Broadley's Lola Cars in England. The new car was a totally modern design - a lightweight steel monocoque designed around a mid-engine V8 and a Colotti trans-axle out back, sitting low to the ground and fitted with swoopy fiberglass body work. The car would originally be known as the Ford GT, and the initial thinking was that it would run the all-aluminum 4.2l push rod V8 that Ford had developed for their attack on Indianapolis  in 1963 - a much modified version of Ford's new small block street V8. Responsibility for building the cars and organizing a race team were given to Shelby's old friend, John Wyer, who set up a shop in Slough, England.

On paper the Lola/Ford should have crushed the Ferrari 330Ps; in actuality that first year was an ugly time for John Wyer. The Indy V8 made plenty of power, but it had been designed for a 500 mile race - a mere warm-up at Le Mans where the winners would travel over 2500 miles in one shot. The Colotti trans-axle was the same part used by Ferrari, but it simply wasn't up to the torque of an engine with 40% more displacement than the 3-liter Ferrari V12s, and it broke often. And while the Lola body was low-drag, it was also low on down-force, making for erratic handling at 200mph speeds.

Being on the opposite side of the Atlantic - 6 timezones away from Dearborn - meant Wyer had limited support from Ford and their massive engineering resources, and from the many hot rod and specialty suppliers setting up shop in southern California.  Wyer was spread thin trying to run both a racing-team and a manufacturing operation, while sorting out a race car like nothing ever built before. Not surprisingly, in that first year the Ford GT had 10 starts and 10 Did-Not-Finish (DNF) results.

Henry II was losing patience, so after another disappointing outing at the Nassau Speedweek in November of 1964, Ford packed up the battered racing cars and shipped them to Shelby American. With less meddling and more help from Ford, Shelby's team - with Phil Remington and Ken Miles doing much of the work - quickly made the cars competitive.  The Indy-Ford motor was replaced with a race-spec Cobra 289, and Ford engineering produced a few heavy duty parts to reinforce the Colotti trans-axle. Miles would spend days driving the cars on the track to find the right combination of bodywork and chassis settings to make the car stable at Le Mans speed. After just 2 months of work, the Shelby-ized Ford GT, re-christened the GT40, would take 1st and 3rd overall at the Daytona Continental in February of 1965.

But the final piece of the puzzle was still to come.  Roy Lunn, one of the Ford engineers who had been working with John Wyer on the GT40 in England had just returned to Dearborn to set up KarKraft, a small shop intended to handle special development projects for Ford. Lunn knew that it wouldn't be long before the competition caught up to the performance of the small-block Ford (John Mecom had brought a Grand Sport Corvette to Nassau that fall that had outrun everything - including Cobras and Ferrari LMs). Lunn had already been thinking about how to improve on the GT40's power-to-weight, including building an all-aluminum GT40 chassis, but his ultimate plan was to replace the Ford small-block with their big 427 inch (7 liter) NASCAR engine - the only snag being the lack of a trans-axle able to handle the massive torque of the big-block. Not surprisingly, the first special project at KarKraft was to build a trans-axle around the internals of Ford's heavy duty 4-speed "top-loader" transmission.

The first GT40 "Mark IIs" with big-block power would arrive at Shelby American just in time to be packed up and shipped to France for the 1965 Le Mans, where they would join two small-block GT40s and two Cobra Daytonas under the Shelby banner.  Two other GT40s and three other Daytona Coupes were also entered by various teams. But while it was a miracle that KarKraft and Shelby had gotten the cars ready for LeMans, there was no overcoming the lack of preparation and development: by the 6 hour mark all of the GT40s and 4 of the Daytonas had DNF'd, a lone Daytona Coupe entered by AC Cars being the last Ford still running at the end of the race, in 8th place overall behind a number of Ferraris and Porsches. 1965 would be prove to be as bad for Shelby and the GT40 as 1964 had been for John Wyer; it would be still another year before Shelby and Henry Ford got their revenge on the "Old Man" in Maranello.

Which seems like a good place for both of us to take a break before I try to wrap this all up in part 2. Stay tuned...


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