That Cobra man

I must confess to never having been a car-racing fan. I’ve been to Watkins Glen, Lime Rock and other tracks, interviewed Paul Newman while he was still racing for Bob Sharp, and even driven a Saab at 160 miles per hour around Talladega racetrack in Alabama. But watching motor sports on TV leaves me cold. They don’t even look like they’re going fast, for goodness sakes.

Further, the commercialization of the sport has turned it into just another big-bucks commodity, complete with drivers who look like rock stars sporting their endorsements all over their jumpsuits. Who needs that?

In the 1950s and ’60s, before the money men took over, racing had some appeal. Men like Stirling Moss and Juan Fangio certainly gave all they had. And there were gutsy women on the track, too, like the great Denise McCluggage. The guy I really admired, though, was Carroll Shelby.

After a stint as a flying instructor in World War II, Texas-born Shelby had an inauspicious beginning in civilian life, variously running dump trucks and raising chickens. After his second batch of broilers died, Shelby drove his first local race in 1952 behind the wheel of a hot rod equipped with a flathead Ford V-8.

Initially showing up for races in his farm overalls, Shelby soon graduates to the big leagues when he teams up with Aston Martin in 1954. Two years after his first race, he’s placing at races in Europe and competing at the famous Le Mans. He was Sports Illustrated‘s driver of the year for 1957, and won Le Mans outright in 1959, co-driving an Aston Martin DBR1/300.

Heart problems knocked Shelby out of racing in 1960, but his career was really just beginning. He approached Britain’s AC Cars with an idea for a V-8-powered English sports car, and the Cobra was born. I lack space to tell the Cobra story here, but the cars were certainly inspiring to me as a high-school kid who put their posters on the wall.

Given all that, it was quite a kick to be able to interview Shelby, still going strong despite being 81 with both a heart and liver transplant. The scene was the New York Auto Show, where the new Ford Shelby Concept was on display. Like the revived GT-40, with which it shares a platform, the new Cobra instantly evokes its ancestor. The V-10-powered roadster offers 605 horsepower and, since the whole car weighs less than 3,000 pounds, it’s not surprising it can hit 60 mph in less than four seconds.

"We wanted to see if a new version of the Cobra would be accepted by the public," Shelby said. "We’re putting our business plan together, and we hope it will be produced, but you never put it in concrete until it’s in concrete."

I asked him if the frequently cited assertion that the Cobra name came to him in a dream was actually true. "Somebody made that up, but it’s a good story, isn’t it?" Shelby replied. "I’ve built more than 125 automobiles and the car makes the name, not the other way around." He added that today’s version is targeted at "baby boomers who didn’t get the first Cobra," with a price between $80,000 and $90,000.

We were talking next to the Ford Escape hybrid, and I asked Shelby what he thought about it. "I wrote an article in the early 1980s predicting that hybrid technology would be taking over in 20 years," he said. "I think it will be a big part of the industry, and maybe hydrogen-powered internal-combustion engines, too. I hope so, because we’d better do something about this mess we’re in, hadn’t we? I think anyone who isn’t an environmentalist today is like an ostrich with his head in the sand."

Carroll Shelby, still ahead of the curve.