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Noted photographer and enthusiast Winston Goodfellow fulfills a long-awaited mission, a personal trek to discover what makes the Shelby brand tick. From Carroll Shelby’s early racing endeavors, farmer overalls and all, to today’s power-packed and customized machines, what follows is a rare walk-through of Shelby American.
For the past 30 years, I was convinced that Modena, Italy, had an automotive culture unlike any other. Since the 1920s, it’s been a mecca of speed – home to Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini and countless small constructors, fabricators, engineers, coachbuilders and dreamers. But a conversation with Ford’s Group Vice President and Chief Creative Officer J. Mays at 2008’s Los Angeles Auto Show started me on a trek that would forever alter that belief. Mays knew I recently had purchased a new Shelby GT, and he talked passionately about Edsel Ford having reunited Shelby and Ford in 2001 after the two were apart three decades.
“That was a very important moment,” Mays said. “Quite a few people inside Ford didn’t quite understand what Shelby meant to Ford. Shelby is a brand that is legendary beyond anyone’s imagination. Movies will be made some day.”
With those words ringing in my ears, I delved into Shelby history, soon discovering that a yeasty Modenese-type environment existed in southern California during the days of Shelby American. This made me wonder if that creative air or something else caused Carroll Shelby, a former Le Mans winner and two-time Sports Illustrated “Driver of the Year,” to settle on southern California as a location to make his cars.
As the idea of a Shelby “archaeological dig” emerged, a more vexing question coalesced: was the car sitting in my garage the real deal, something infused with true Shelby DNA? Or had I and many others succumbed to a slick marketing campaign by the folks at Shelby and Ford?
Several months later, after three road trips and several thousand miles, numerous interviews and a stint in an early Shelby, I had an answer.
Ground Zero
When Carroll Shelby retired from competition in December 1960, the last thing he imagined anyone would say about his life – let alone a top executive at Ford – was “movies would be made some day.” He was a 37-year-old race car driver with a bad heart and no money, but he had a long-burning ambition: to combine the lithe looks and light weight of Europe’s finest sports cars with the power of an American V8.
That desire was born while Shelby raced in the 1950s. “All the time I was driving,” he told me, particularly noting his stint with Aston Martin, “I was trying to see if I could build my own car some day. This was the time when Colin Chapman and Eric Broadley were getting going, and the cottage industry was starting in England. I thought people didn’t have to have a lot of capital to build their own car.”
Shelby says it was shortly after his 1959 Le Mans victory with Aston that he realized “Texas was backward as far as sports cars and sports-car racing were concerned. I knew if I moved to California, Bob Petersen had a publication, and he was a good friend of mine. The hot rodders were there and Lance Reventlow had built a car that was competitive.”
In 1960, the Los Angeles basin became his home, and Carroll soon set up shop in the back of hot rodder Dean Moon’s facility in Santa Fe Springs, a sleepy little town some 20 miles from the coast. Shelby started a high-performance driving school at Riverside Raceway and then became a Goodyear racing-tire distributor.
Carroll also acted as a consulting editor for Sports Car Graphic. At the time, SCG’s editor was John Christy, a part-time racer and former Shelby driving school graduate who in the early 1980s authored an often-overlooked gem of a book called Carroll Shelby’s Racing Cobras. “Part of (Carroll’s) deal with Sports Car Graphic was a small, partial-column ad for the driving school,” Christy noted. “The return address was an apparently prestigious location on Hollywood Boulevard, and the ad pulled well out of proportion to its size.”
Shelby visited the mail drop every Thursday, added up the $1 bills people sent in for a brochure, then headed to the Sports Car Graphic offices. “There developed a comfortable routine,” Christy continued. “Following a short editorial conference, the participants would adjourn to the Hollywood Inn steakhouse and dine off the week’s take at the mail drop.”
The Cobra flashpoint, what Christy dubbed “The Plan,” occurred over the inn’s memorable steak sandwiches and martinis. All the SCG staff knew of Carroll’s dream to make a sports car, and on one Thursday morning prior to Shelby’s visit, the magazine received two press releases. The first stated Ford’s 221 V8 was being phased out and the 260 and 289 V8 production would increase. The other noted England’s Bristol Aeroplane Company was ceasing production of the engine it supplied to AC Cars for the AC Bristol roadster.
The group discussed the Ford news in the office and then headed to the Hollywood Inn. According to Christy, after “the initial martini, the semi-business talk, the second drink,” AC’s engine predicament came up and Carroll suddenly became very quiet. “A week later, Shelby was in Detroit, en route to England. ‘The Plan’ had gone into action.”
Indeed it had. In February1962, the first Cobra arrived at Dean Moon’s shop. A 260 V8 and 4-speed transmission were installed that day; the AC logo was removed from the bare aluminum bodywork, and the car fired up for the first time.
Christy was the first journalist to try Carroll’s contraption. He hunted for Corvettes on the freeway with no success and then headed to the undulating, serpentine roads in nearby Griffith Park. “We spent a day playing with the car and can safely say it is one of the most impressive production sports cars we’ve ever driven,” Christy later reported in SCG’s May 1962 issue. “Its acceleration [is] explosive and at least equal to that of the better-running hot Corvettes and (Ferrari) berlinettas that we’ve driven.”
With proof of concept in hand, Shelby needed to get that first Cobra prepared for its introduction at the New York Auto Show. He had Dean Jeffries, a local coachbuilder and painter whose shop was between Griffith Park and Santa Fe Springs, paint the car. The debut was a resounding success, and Shelby returned to California with a multitude of orders.
More Sites, Obscure and Not
Dean Moon’s shop wasn’t set up for series production, so Shelby found proper space in the coastal town of Venice at 1042 Princeton Dr., where the IRS was shutting down Reventlow’s Scarab operation. Shelby moved in, inheriting a number of benches, tools and a gifted technician, Phil Remington.
As production began, that October the Cobra created quite a stir at its first race. The Los Angeles Times Grand Prix was becoming one of the richest purses in racing, and a lone Cobra opened up a half-lap lead over the more established Corvettes before retiring.
Things then came fast and furious to the nascent operation. In February 1963, a Cobra won its first race; several months later Shelby American clinched the SCCA-A Production and USRRC championships. The midengine King Cobra sprang onto the competition scene, and the prototype Cobra Daytona coupe was under construction.
Press coverage was rampant, orders arrived at a constant clip, and the song “Hey Little Cobra” climbed the charts. Shelby American and its Cobra were known across the country and Princeton Drive couldn’t handle all the activity, so early on Shelby took over another building “across the corner” on Carter Street.
For 1964, Shelby American set its sights much higher: an FIA world championship. After a Cobra Daytona coupe won its class at Sebring, Shelby American invaded Europe, constantly outclassing the more expensive and unreliable Ford GT40s. Dearborn soon noticed who finished races and who won another SCCA and USRRC championship, so they came calling in a big way. For 1965, would Shelby prepare a GT40 and run the program, and could it turn America’s best-selling car, the recently released Mustang, into a race winner?
By now, the world was enamored with the southern California upstart, so much so that the prestigious annual Automobile Year put a Cobra competing at Sicily’s famed Targa Florio on the cover. The Venice operation was literally bursting at the seams, necessitating another move. Space was found fewer than five miles away on the outskirts of the Los Angeles Airport, and by June 1965, Shelby American had a new 12-plus acre home at 6501 West Imperial Hwy.
Shelby orchestrated the GT40’s first overall victory that year, and the Cobras and Daytona coupes captured the FIA GT crown. The 427 Cobra entered production, as did the new GT350 Mustang that won the SCCA Production B title. In 1966, Shelby-prepared GT40s won Daytona, Sebring and Le Mans; the 427 Cobra remained the quickest thing on the street. The GT350 won another SCCA crown, and its production numbers more than quadrupled. And as if the GT350 weren’t fast enough, Shelby worked closely with Los Angeles-based Paxton Products on an optional supercharger.
More success and even greater production numbers came in 1967. A Shelby American GT40 won Le Mans, a Shelby-prepped Mustang won the Trans Am title, and the Shelby GT350 received a new look and a more powerful sibling, the GT500. Production of Shelby Mustangs increased 40-plus percent, and the Paxton supercharger remained on option. Don Burns Ford in Long Beach felt the standard GT500 wasn’t potent enough, so it dropped a Le Mans-spec 427 in one to create the 170mph GT500 Super Snake.
That August everything screeched to a halt. A long-term lease hadn’t been secured on the Imperial Highway facility, and the airport wanted the property back. The ensuing scramble saw production of 1968’s GT350 and GT500 move to a suburb of Detroit, and Carroll opened Shelby Racing Company at 4320 190th St. in Torrance, seven miles away from Imperial Highway.
With Ford’s withdrawal from endurance racing and the production cars’ move back to Michigan, Carroll had a possible Cobra successor with the midengine Lone Star, but it remained a one-off. In May 1969, a Mustang scored the Shelby team’s last victory in Trans Am at Lime Rock.
In February 1970, Ford and Shelby ended their long-term racing agreement and Carroll closed the doors to Shelby Racing Company. Because safety and insurance rates were becoming the auto industry’s watchwords, displacement and horsepower numbers diminished as rapidly as the power of the EPA and DOT increased. October 1973’s oil embargo was the final nail in the coffin of the auto industry’s dying lust for performance. The Shelby legacy, along with southern California’s speed scene, slowly faded into history.
The Archeological Dig
The above textual snapshot does little to convey the magic of the Shelby experience. “It was the type of job and atmosphere that I couldn’t wait to get to in the morning,” recalled Bruce Burness, a fabricator and engine mechanic, in Remembering the Shelby Years 1962-1969. “We worked as many as six months at a time from eight in the morning to midnight, and that wasn’t as bad as some of the mechanics had it. With the [Dayton] coupe and the Cooper projects [the King Cobras], we just kept going. It was a very profound experience.”
Overcoming the strong adversity existing in the beginning made the adventure more profound. “There was no respect at all for sports cars,” said Pete Brock, Shelby’s first employee and the designer of the Cobra Daytona coupe. Rather, in southern California, racing meant “going to Indianapolis. It wasn’t until the USRC series came in ’63 when we competed against GM and Duntov … it was beating GM that really sparked it, that [made people] realize ‘You know, this is a pretty important thing.’”
Such vivid recollections had me wondering if all that remained were indeed memories. Were any Shelby American buildings still standing? What about Don Burns Ford, Dean Jeffries’ or Dean Moon’s shop?
More digging made it clear I needed a guide to accelerate my learning curve. That’s when native southern Californian Steve Beck entered the picture. He described himself as “old Shelby to the bone,” apt considering he’d purchased the 1965 GT350 #258 in the mid-1970s for $900.
We met at his BMW repair shop, where his GT350 was parked next to a friend’s ’66. Tucked in a back building was a real treasure: an early Cobra, the proper 260 V8 still intact and the car still in the hands of its original owner.
I soon pulled out my Shelby address list, and the closest one was in Venice. We set off, his GT350 leading my Shelby. Twenty minutes later we found Princeton Drive by turning off a six-lane boulevard, going one block down a small innocuous street until it dead ended, then turning right. Princeton is one block long, the northern side densely lined by multistory parking lots and condominiums. It’s a world apart from the open fields, the handful of single- and two-story buildings, and the smattering of homes that period photos portray.
Halfway down Princeton on the left, wedged between some condos, were a couple of two-story brick buildings. Carroll’s old facility still exists and, save an add-on to the front entrance, looks much as it did in 1963. We pulled up in front of the brick façades and out came several books and period magazine reprints for verification. Then I noticed a hand-painted “1040 Princeton” address sign just above Beck’s car; Steve said it originally was done by famed southern California pinstriper Von Dutch, then just another journeyman craftsman looking to pay the bills.
We moved to the back, where a parking lot was dwarfed by more condominiums. With the two Shelbys parked there, the place was so atmospheric in the soft afternoon light I couldn’t help but wonder, if someone came here late at night and listened closely when all was quiet, would he hear the ghostly bellow of 289 V8s being run flat-out on the bench?
There is good reason for the historic pull at the location. When the sports car “stigma” had worn off, Shelby and crew unknowingly created a magical environment in which to work. People from around the world gravitated there, John Morton’s journey from Illinois not being as long as some others. He had long dreamt of racing, and for him and others, days at Shelby American often stretched well into the night.
“I would come in after dinner,” Morton said, “when the rest – those employees that were of any value – came back to work. They had something going on they had to get finished, so I would just come back and watch them. It was either that or go to a movie or something. And I would rather be [at the shop].”
Carroll easily recalled Morton returning to the shop. “He would come back,” Shelby laughed, “and we would find him in the shop sitting in a Cobra before he ever drove one, going ‘Vrrrrrmmm, vrrrrrmmm!’ shifting gears.”
With Princeton Drive discovered, where was Carter Street and that facility? This was the middle of the block, so how could there be anything “on the other corner” as referenced in Shelby books? What was the address that would help us find it?
The answer to this last question lay in former company photographer Dave Friedman’s book Shelby Cobra, The Shelby American Original Archives 1962-1965. Close examination of some photos yielded a “3221” on a glass door, but where was Carter? As we returned down the small street that took us to Princeton Drive, Beck noticed a gated apartment complex. On the wall was “3221 Carter Street.”
It’s too bad part of Shelby history has been bulldozed. “It was the thing that paid the nut,” Carroll said, the production of road cars accomplished in a manner that must have looked like organized chaos to the layman’s eye. Engines, chassis, the parts department and paint booth resided in corners of the building, with the cars constructed in the center.
“It was amazing so many were built [there],” Friedman observed in Shelby Cobra. “To any outsider who saw this unique assembly line, it couldn’t possibly work. But it did work – and it worked well.”
The facility also played an inadvertent role in Mustang history. Shelby recalls Ford personnel visiting several times, trying to determine a name for his organization’s upcoming Mustang. “Six of them came out one day,” Carroll said. Frustrated that something as simple as a model designation hadn’t yet been determined, “I said to one of the mechanics, ‘I want you to tell me how far it is over to the Carter Street building.’ He looked at me kind of funny, and these guys looked at him,” but the employee dutifully obeyed his boss.
“He came back,” Carroll continued, “and says, ‘347 steps.’ I said, ‘Fine. We’ll call it the GT350.’ Now you guys get on an airplane and go back to Detroit.”
The sprawling West Imperial Highway facility where the GT350 and much more were produced still exists on the outskirts of the Los Angeles airport. It’s easily visible from the multilane thoroughfare and is used by Thai Airlines. Employees flooded out at the sight of the two Shelbys, drawn to the ’65 as if by instinct, only to be stunned when learning Beck’s car was made there more than 40 years ago.
Like the Venice facilities, Imperial Highway has a bountiful, colorful history. Bernie Kretzschmar was 22 when he joined Shelby, starting at Imperial Highway just as the move was in high gear. “I thought I was going to be working on Cobras,” Kretzschmar said. “They had just moved to the airport and wanted us to work on the project nobody else wanted to work on. So we dragged these [Mustang] bodies inside and made race cars out of them.
“What we did was make the R-Model Mustangs lighter and lower and lower. We threw some negative camber at the cars and all of a sudden we were beating the Corvettes in the turns. We were the lowliest guys [in the shop] until we started winning races.”
The boom times were now in full force at Shelby. “They were hiring people every month,” Kretzschmar said. “By 1966, they were building all those Hertz cars. Everything was going on. We all worked day and night on the cars and traveled all over the country.”
The next stop, 190th Street in Torrance, has suffered a fate similar to Carter Street. Today, 190th Street is several lanes wide with homes and businesses on both sides. It took us a bit to find “4320”; not one remnant of Shelby Racing Company exists: 4320 is a modern ministorage facility.
That building won’t be missed like Carter Street. After the ’67 Le Mans victory, Ford’s appetite for racing waned, as did Carroll’s. He was worn out from the constant travel, the juggling of multiple balls and personalities. “In 1967,” he recalled, “I said, ‘I have won the world championship … there is no sense in anybody killing themselves at this rate.’ As far as Trans Am and all that, I [told Ford], ‘I’ve done everything there is to do and I don’t care any more about racing and I am not going to kill myself. I want to live life, do the things I want to do.’”
He set up a parts company at the Torrance facility and let the Trans Am effort basically run itself. In 1968, Carroll went to Africa with a friend and became so enamored with the expansive continent that for the next 12 years it was his primary residence.
But Carroll didn’t abandon southern California altogether. He eventually moved to Gardena, where he still has a large facility. Appointments are needed for access, and Carroll keeps a number of his personal cars there. It’s also home to the Carroll Shelby Children’s Foundation and the Carroll Shelby Engine Company, which makes high-horsepower, aluminum V8s.
Behind those nondescript walls is an expansive warehouse where numerous collector cars reside, most reflecting Carroll’s wide-ranging career. Inside are Cobras old and new (yes, they still make them); a Sunbeam Tiger that Shelby developed for the Rootes Group; Shelby Mustangs from the 1960s; several Dodges from the 1980s; three Series I’s from the 1990s; and a large assortment of current Shelby Mustangs, including several prototypes. Another area houses the engine company, and a third has numerous items associated with his Children’s Foundation.
Digging Deeper
With the mainstays of Shelby history discovered, it was time to unearth historic obscurity. Detective work revealed that in the 1960s, Don Burns Ford resided at 2055 Long Beach Blvd. in Long Beach, not quite 20 miles south of Imperial Highway. Steve and I parted company, and I followed a stint on Interstate 405 with a long drive down Long Beach Boulevard. As I got closer to that address, there was nary a car dealership in sight; three drive-bys made it clear all is long gone. The exact address no longer exists; the block has been sectioned in half, and a Social Security Administration office and discount shoe store reside where that one-off Shelby was made.
It’s much the same with Paxton Products. Its facility at 929 Olympic Blvd. in Santa Monica was some 10 miles north of Shelby’s factory. Today it is a single-story brick building, a picture frame shop, on a corner lot right next to a Highway 10 off-ramp.
It was time to find Ground Zero, the site of the former Hollywood Inn and the meal where “The Plan” came together. Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue are exactly what one would expect of Tinseltown today: new high-rises mingled with classic old L.A. architecture, the sidewalks lined with Hollywood stars and shops with trinkets. The exact address of the Hollywood Inn remained elusive, so I asked a number of tour guides waiting for tourists. Even a couple old-timers were stumped, though I knew I was close.
Next up was Griffith Park, the site of that first-ever road test that appeared in Sports Car Graphic. Nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains between Los Angeles, West Hollywood and Burbank, its 4,200 acres make it America’s largest municipal park with wilderness areas. It’s easy to see why Christy went there: challenging roads with sharp corners and moderate straights sinuously weave up and down the picturesque hills, the thousand-foot elevation changes perfect for testing suspension, steering and brakes.
Armed with a copy of Christy’s road test, I scoured the countryside to find something matching the photos. This proved futile, so I commandeered park ranger Joe Pineta to see if anything in the photos looked familiar. He, too, struck out, noting erosion likely washed away the most noticeable landmarks.
Fewer than two miles southwest of Griffith Park is Highway 101. Cahuenga Boulevard runs parallel to the freeway, and here I found Dean Jeffries’ “Automotive Styling” shop. A parking lot and chain-link fence surround it, the latter punctuated by an imposing sign informing gawkers to go away unless they have “real business.”
Calling a phone number on the sign, I explained my archeological quest to the young male voice that answered, that I was searching for the shop where the first Cobra was painted. A trim older man came and opened the gate. Without my knowing it, it was Dean Jeffries who had answered the phone. He was the only one there and was an absolute delight: the next 90 minutes, we talked southern California history, the auto industry, how Modena and southern California were so similar in the 1960s, and Shelby.
“I basically knew Carroll by his name and reputation,” Jeffries said. “He was crawling up the ladder but had no bucks at all. He got [the Cobra] going good, so now he wanted to get it promoted.”
That’s when Shelby approached Jeffries. “The body was extremely rough,” Jeffries said. “I just straightened out the dinks and donks and the curves where they welded. Afterwards, Shelby asked, ‘What color are you going to do it?’ I said, ‘It’s your car. If you want something bright, let’s do it in yellow.’” Jeffries whipped up a vibrant custom mix even though “Shelby didn’t have no (sic) money. So I [told him not to] worry about it. ‘We’ll catch it when you go back to New York and see if this thing works out for you.’”
Shelby never forgot Jeffries’ generosity. Carroll later gave the master craftsman a hopped-up 289 with Weber carburetors for the Mantaray, Jeffries’ show-car masterpiece. It’s there in Jeffries’ shop, and he related the story as he looked down on the low-slung front end punctuated by its potent, Weber-crowned engine.
Twenty miles to the southeast in Santa Fe Springs I found Dean Moon’s shop on a busy multilane thoroughfare in the middle of a bustling neighborhood. The famed “Moon eyes” greeted me as I pulled into the facility. I spoke with an employee named Bob about my quest, and he led me to the back. As we walked, I saw several roll-up doors on the left. “This is where the car was built,” Bob said, pointing at the last bay. The quarters were a bit cramped, with two Moon employees there packing boxes.
Directly across from the open door is a larger storage facility. “That’s where Shelby kept the Goodyear tires,” Bob commented.
The creative energy that still exists in that place four decades later was palatable, as surely it was then, when no one knew what fame lay ahead, which made the adventure’s starting point all the more poignant and remarkable. “I never realized at the time just what I was working on,” noted Roy Gammell, Dean Moon’s chief mechanic, who installed the 260 V8 in that first car, in Remembering the Shelby Years 1962-1969. “When we were trying to make that first car run in the back of our shop, who could’ve known what the Cobra would become?”
On to Vegas
Since the mid-1990s, Shelby American has been located in Las Vegas. Today it resides in several buildings in the sprawling Las Vegas Motor Speedway complex about 15 miles north of the “Las Vegas Strip.”
Carroll frequents the operation on a weekly basis and stays in constant contact by phone. “I think the secret to any company is having people that you really have confidence in and turning it over and letting them do what they think ought to be done,” he said. “Once in a while if I think they are getting in trouble on something, I give them my ideas on what I think might straighten the problem out.
“If you get down to the DNA of business, it is nothing except solving problems.”
A core group of employees are his main “problem solvers.” One is Gary Davis, who many feel is the heart and soul of Shelby today. Davis is a modest but very talented barrel-chested man with a mischievous sense of humor. Carroll affectionately calls him “a cowboy that was a hot rodder.”
His wife’s job transfer from Nebraska brought them to Las Vegas in 1997. Shortly after settling down, Davis walked into the Shelby facility to inquire about a job. “They had just moved in and there wasn’t even a secretary,” he said. Within several months of being hired, he was running the Cobra production line. Today he splits his time between the production facility and the true inner sanctum of Shelby, the two mod shops where prototyping and troubleshooting are done and where Shelby and Mustang owners can send their cars for custom work.
“If you have the resources I don’t think anything is impossible,” Davis said. “When we first started the Hertz [Shelby Mustang] program, we had five lifts, maybe six. You can go out in this shop, the production facility, and the one across the street [the mod shops] and see what we have done in the last three to four years. ” (In 2007, Shelby produced nearly 7,000 cars.)
“It is a whole team that makes this thing work, whether you are the guy that keeps the restrooms clean or the guy who puts the supercharger on the Super Snake. Everybody makes it work.”
Another long-time Vegas employee is Gary Patterson. His business card reads “Vice President of Operations,” but he would rather be on the nearby racetrack testing and developing Shelby cars, or going pedal-to-the-metal between the shops in a golf cart that resembles one of the four 1966 GT350 convertibles. Filled with an infectious, effervescent energy, his love for speed is so great that he laughingly stated, “There is no such thing as too much horsepower unless you start to black out while wearing a pressure suit!”
Patterson still owns his first car, a rare, 4-speed ’69 Mustang Cobra Jet. “When people speak of the 1950s and ’60s being the good old days in terms of performance, I have to disagree,” he observed. “Today you can get a car that is much faster, handles and brakes better, gets better gas mileage and is much easier to live with.” His personal commuter is a 725hp GT500 Super Snake.
Overseeing everything is company president Amy Boylan. She grew up in a Chevy household where her father had a lifelong, running weekend argument with her Ford-loving uncle. Like Carroll, she is strong-willed, perceptive and remains intensely focused on properly growing the business.
“I’ve been very lucky in life,” Boylan said. “I’ve had three really great careers that people would kill for.” (She managed teams in the video gaming industry, Mattel and now Shelby). “It’s clear she relishes the last because “Carroll inspires the rest of us to be better. Every day he has 100 ideas. And every day he says, ‘I know you are busy, and I am not asking you to do this, but …’ He inspires us to look at things differently.”
Like Davis, Boylan talks of camaraderie and how “special and important the brand is.” But it is the intangibles that speak loudest when determining a real deal-no deal DNA assessment. Not just Patterson but every executive – and most of their wives – own Shelbys, and some more than one. In casual conversation, several people mentioned how they don’t look at the time clock. During my week in the mod shop (see sidebar), several technicians spoke about the mega-horsepower car they are building at home, a trait Kretzschmar says was common with Shelby employees in the 1960s.
Just as important, Shelby cars still win championships. They may not be chasing Ferrari and an endurance crown these days, but Shelby Mustangs made their mark first in the SCCA (Sports Car Club of America), then Trans Am. When I mentioned to Gary Patterson that “old school Shelby” Steve Beck feels all that’s left for Shelby to do “is validate the cars through proof of competition,” Patterson responded, “That’s happened. Customers in Shelby GTs won the 2007 and 2008 SCCA championships, and are undefeated in 2009.”
Four decades later, things indeed have come full circle. Fittingly, the man who started it all summarizes it best: “Shelby is a small company that I never wanted to get large,” Carroll said. “It has the same kind of passion today with different employees than it had in the 1960s. It’s different people, with the same passion.
“Our passion is trying to build something in a business that a thousand people have tried and very few have ever succeeded in … to build something nobody else can build in a short period of time.”
SIDEBAR:
A Week in the Shelby Mod Shop
One of Shelby’s key departments goes by a simple moniker: “The mod shop.” These two generally off-limits facilities house prototyping, engineering and custom work on client cars.
In September, I spent a week there as my car underwent major modifications. Shelby wanted to start a post-title 6-speed conversion program (the stock Shelby GT comes with a 5-speed), and my car served as the program’s test mule.
I decided to have them do more: shave weight where possible and increase horsepower, braking and cornering capabilities. To accomplish the first two items and make the engine rev more freely, I supplied a Centerforce lightweight flywheel, clutch and pressure plate. We also used an aluminum driveshaft and installed a 3.73 ring-and-pinion from Ford Racing Performance Parts. A Shelby Kicker stereo replaced the original; it saved 30 pounds and sounded much better!
We also upgraded the suspension and brakes. Because my car is my daily driver and Shelby has a wide range of upgrades, Gary Patterson and Davis steered me away from components oriented for track use. On went the Shelby Pro-Plus brake kit (larger aluminum six-piston calipers and large two-piece rotors), and a Watts link was installed in back. A set of Shelby Forged Alloy wheels gave the car an aggressive stance.
Last to go on was a bit of “cosmetic jewelry.” The Shelby parts catalog offers many items, but I prefer restraint to excessive bling. Sequential blinker lights and a billet fuel door were installed in back, billet hood pins up front. The interior received a similar number of accents.
Underhood enhancements included different fuse box cover, billet engine caps, and an aluminum-strut tower brace. Shelby offered to supercharge the car, but I want to stay normally aspirated to save weight. A 50-plus horsepower boost with Ford Racing Performance Parts cams and heads will come at a later date.
It took the mod-shop magicians four days to do everything, and their attention to detail and competence was a joy to behold. Any time an impediment occurred, within two to three minutes the problem was diagnosed, and two minutes later they were back on track.
While I could have done some of this work myself, particularly the cosmetic upgrades, there is something special about having it done at Shelby. In this day and age, when you have to write a six-figure check to get a custom-built car, one done to your specifications, Shelby’s mod-shop program can accomplish it for a fraction of the price.
Read more about Shelby Archaeology | Volume 49 No. 4
