For Shelby, return to Ford is like a victory lap
By Bill Vlasic / The Detroit News
Charles V. Tines / The Detroit News
GARDENA, Calif. -- The cavernous garage went dead silent as the team from Ford Motor Co. gathered around the vehicle hidden under a silk tarp.
Then Carroll Shelby, clad in black from head to toe, walked up slowly, savoring the moment he had thought about for more than 30 years.
And when Ford design chief J Mays whisked the cover off the sleek, one-of-a-kind, 2004 Ford Shelby Cobra supercar on Dec. 15, Shelby was home again.
“This is what I have been looking forward to for a long, long time,” Shelby said in his East Texas drawl. “As the NASCAR boys would say, this ... is ... awesome.”
Tonight, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Shelby and Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr. will unveil the new Cobra concept car to the world’s automotive media.
But as impressive as the 600-horsepower, silver-and-gray Cobra is on stage, the real star will be the 80-year-old Shelby, the biggest name in American auto racing in the 1960s and a Ford icon for the ages.
He ran the Ford race team that conquered Ferrari at the legendary 24 hours of Le Mans, turned timid Mustangs into souped-up muscle cars, and created the lightweight, high-performance Cobra, perhaps the most influential sports car in U.S. history.
It’s been 35 years since Shelby and Ford bitterly parted ways, ending one of the most storied partnerships the auto industry has ever seen.
But the hard-driving Shelby, the one-time “Super Texan” of motorsports, is back where he belongs — at Ford.
Ford patriarch Henry Ford II tapped Shelby to lead Ford to victory on the racetrack in the 1960s.
A generation later, it was his son, Edsel Ford II, who brought Shelby back to the automaker as a special consultant on future products.
The peace was made in the summer of 2001, at the annual Concours d’Elegance classic car show at Pebble Beach in northern California.
“I said to Carroll, ‘we’ve got to put all this stuff behind us,’ ” Edsel Ford told The Detroit News recently. “It was very important to me personally that we put everything aside and looked to the future.”
Since last spring, Shelby has met regularly with the designers and engineers working on “Project Daisy,” Ford’s top-secret effort to create a modern, 21st century version of the famed Cobra.
The stakes were sky-high. If anything were to punctuate Ford’s corporate turnaround, it would be a brand-new Cobra. A misstep, Ford executives knew, would be disastrous.
But with Shelby on board, the Ford team felt it could do no wrong.
“He’d tell us, it’s not about winning beauty contests,” said Richard Hutting, the lead designer on the project. “It’s about uncompromised performance.”
When Ford brought the finished product to the sprawling headquarters of Carroll Shelby International outside Los Angeles last month, the circle was complete.
Shelby, the prodigal son who once sued Ford for $30 million, had returned to the fold.
“I’ll bet you boys,” he said with a craggy smile, “that we’ve got a hit on our hands.”
Swaggering confidence
One by one, the six Ford GT-40s dropped out of the 1965 French endurance race at Le Mans with mechanical problems. With each successive breakdown, Henry Ford II’s mood grew darker.
Several years before, he had tried to buy the Italian carmaker Ferrari to give Ford the cachet of a championship race team. But when the deal fizzled, Henry Ford II had turned to Shelby.
Despite the flop in 1965, Shelby’s swaggering confidence as head of the Ford race program was hardly shaken. “We were so close to getting it right,” he said. “I knew it was going to happen.”
And given Shelby’s remarkable track record, who could doubt him?
A dirt-poor, former chicken farmer from Leesburg, Texas, Shelby had enjoyed a meteoric career as a race driver in the 1950s. Twice named Sports Illustrated’s “Driver of the Year,” Shelby became only the second American to win at Le Mans when he co-drove an Aston Martin to victory in 1959.
The triumph took on near-mythic proportions when Shelby later revealed that he popped nitroglycerin pills throughout the race to ease searing chest pains from a heart condition.
“You ever take nitroglycerin?” he said. “It just blows the top of your head off. But it takes the pain out of your chest when you’ve got angina.”
Heart problems forced Shelby to retire from racing, and he started his own sportscar operation, Shelby-American, in a small shop in Southern California.
With a $25,000 stake from Ford in 1962, Shelby developed the first Cobra, a pocket-rocket roadster capable of zero-to-60 in just under four seconds.
But while Shelby’s Cobras and Daytona Coupes tore up the U.S. racing circuit, Henry Ford II was dead-set on winning Le Mans, the most prestigious race in Europe.
“I think we were doing everything we could to win at Le Mans,” Edsel Ford said. “We had great cars and great drivers. My father wanted to win badly.”
After the embarrassment of the 1965 race, Henry Ford II summoned Shelby and two associates to his office. Without a word, the imperial Ford chairman handed them each a name tag that read: “Ford Wins Le Mans in 1966.”
“Henry said, ‘If you boys would like to have a job next June, those tags better come true,’ ” Shelby said.
On June 20, 1966, Henry Ford II and a crowd of 250,000 spectators watched as a trio of Ford GT-40 Mark IIs crossed the finish line first, second and third at Le Mans.
Mighty Ferrari had been vanquished, and Ford stood atop the auto racing world. For Shelby, the victory brought relief more than anything.
“I’m flying home on Monday, and I’m going to go hide for a while where no Ford man or no Frenchman can find me,” he joked.
But by then, the gruff, 6-foot Texan in the black cowboy hat could hardly fade into the background at Ford.
With the backing of Ford division boss Lee Iacocca, Shelby was turning sedate Mustangs into scorching GT350 fastbacks. His 427 Cobras set the standard for street-legal sports cars. Performance ruled at Ford, and “Ol’ Shel” embodied the American love affair with horsepower.
“What Carroll did for Mustang in the 1960s will never be repeated,” Edsel Ford said. “We were ensconced with Carroll. It was unique.”
But Shelby was still an outsider at Ford, and vulnerable to the shifting politics in the Glass House. Ford’s new president, Bunkie Knudsen, wanted to bring the high-performance program in-house.
“Iacocca couldn’t protect me anymore,” Shelby said. “I couldn’t get anything done.”
Moreover, new federal guidelines on safety and emissions had stalled muscle car mania. By 1970, Shelby “saw the handwriting on the wall.” The relationship with Ford had run its course.
Shelby packed up and moved to Africa, spending the next decade wandering the continent, hunting big game and financing safaris.
“There was nothing left for me to build in Detroit,” he said. “There was no sense trying to make a racehorse out of a mule.”
Ford becomes the enemy
A call from his old pal Iacocca, by then the chief executive of Chrysler Corp., brought Shelby back to the United States in 1981. He began customizing dull Dodges, injecting performance and laying the groundwork for the sports car that ultimately became the Viper.
Ford was the enemy now. In 1986, Shelby sued Ford for $30 million for alleged trademark infringement when it put the GT350 name on a 20th anniversary edition of the Mustang. The legal battle raged for nearly five years before the suit was settled out of court.
His racing associates from the glory days saw the toll the fight with Ford took on Shelby.
“You know those championships that Ford won in the 1960s didn’t just happen,” said Bernie Kretzschmar, a former Shelby-American race mechanic. “Carroll made it all happen.”
Moreover, Shelby was slowly dying. Two heart-bypass operations in the 1970s failed to correct a hereditary condition. By 1990, his heart function had shrunk to a frightening 14 percent.
“My doctor decided I better have a heart transplant,” he said. “Soon.”
And in typically dramatic, Shelby fashion, he got his new heart from a 38-year-old gambler who dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage in a Las Vegas casino. Less than a year later, Shelby was driving the Dodge Viper pace car at the Indianapolis 500.
Shelby left Chrysler when Iacocca retired in 1992, contenting himself with raising exotic animals on his Texas farm and building Cobras out of parts made by inmates at a Nevada state prison.
But there was always a gnawing sense that he had another chapter left in his automotive career. The seeds of his return to Ford were planted by two of the automaker’s top engineers — John Coletti and Chris Theodore.
Coletti and Theodore harbored a dream of building a new Ford GT, a modern re-issue of the car that won Le Mans. When Ford CEO Jacques Nasser gave the project the green light, they reached out to Shelby.
“The Shelby name is still pure magic,” Theodore said. “It seemed natural for him to come back to Ford.”
The deal was struck over dinner at Pebble Beach in 2001. Edsel Ford, who spent a summer as a teen-ager working in Shelby’s race shop, pitched the idea personally.
“This is not some ceremonial thing,” Edsel Ford said. “We want to build a real GT, and we want your personal imprint on it.”
Shelby wasn’t sure at first about the overture.
“You know, for 35 years nobody gave a damn about Le Mans and what we accomplished,” he said. “But hell, when Edsel came and said they want to build a real sports car, well, that’s what I do.”
He advised the GT team on technical issues, but his involvement ratcheted up when the Cobra project got under way last March.
“He’s still full of piss and vinegar,” said Mays, the Ford design chief. “The thing is, nobody knows what makes a Cobra better than Carroll.”
At one point, Shelby thought the new Cobra’s front end came off as too flush, too streamlined, and lacking the wide-mouth, menacing look of the original.
“If I’m honest, I’m not sure the front end looks as much like a Cobra as it should,” Shelby told Mays.
Changes were made. The final version evokes the raw, performance-first Cobra heritage in a modern package. For his part, Shelby was more impressed with what Ford did under the hood.
“It’s just amazing that you can put that much engine into this wheelbase,” he told the design team. “Good job ... good, good job.”
Ford executives insist the Cobra is only a concept for now, but hardly discourage the notion that it will eventually go into production.
“We showed the GT as a concept, and we built it,” Mays said. “We showed the Mustang, and we built it. We’re showing the Cobra, and you can take it from there.”
For Shelby, the return to Ford is like taking a long-awaited victory lap.
“You know, I don’t kid myself that I’m going to have a big impact on what Ford does with these cars,” he said. “But it feels real good to be back.”
He calls himself an “old man,” and complains about the 30 medications he takes daily to control his blood pressure and bolster his immune system. But he still drives too fast, laughs a little too loud, and enjoys nothing more than being Carroll Shelby.
The day before he saw the finished Cobra, Shelby and his wife, Cleo, drove down from their hilltop home in Los Angeles to the annual Christmas party of the Orange County Cobra Club. When he walked into the restaurant packed with Cobra lovers, the room erupted into a standing ovation.
“He may act like he’s just one of the guys, but he’s our living legend,” said John Marshall, a retired engineer who owns a Cobra and a GT350. “He’s our hero. He’s done it all.”
Tonight, at Cobo Center, the legend is rekindled at Ford with a new Cobra, but the same old Shelby.
“He’s come home again, and that’s pretty fine,” Edsel Ford said. “He has come home, and he belongs here. He belongs at Ford.”
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