Heart of a Gambler : Carroll Shelby Designs a Car to Pump Life Into American Racing

A heart transplant from a Las Vegas gambler has given Carroll Shelby a new lease on life, and at 68, the legendary racing guru from Texas and Bel-Air hopes to do the same for American sports car racing.

Shelby, with renewed vigor and the heartbeat of a 34-year-old, has designed and built a single-seat, open-cockpit car--the Shelby Can Am Sports Racer--to try to help young American drivers gain the experience to move into Indy car, GTP or Formula One racing without having to find a rich sponsor or be born to a wealthy family.

“Racing has reached the point where it is pricing the young driver, no matter his talent, out of the game,” Shelby said at his Can Am car production shop in Carson. “I designed the Can Am so that a young man--or woman--could drive in an amateur series for a reasonable price, and if they displayed sufficient talent and desire, could move into a professional class with the same equipment.”

The transformation comes from an engine change. For Sports Car Club of America amateur races, in which the Shelby Can Am was introduced as a separate class this season, a 250 horsepower V-6 Dodge furnishes the power. For professional races, a 500 horsepower engine can occupy the same spot.

“It’s so simple, I’m surprised someone else hadn’t thought of it sooner,” Shelby said.

That Shelby is around to think of it at all is surprising.

Last June, he lay near death in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, his heart functioning at only 15% of normal.

“I was at the point where I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without help,” he said. “I had been on the waiting list for a heart for nearly nine months and time was running out. I wore a beeper all that time, waiting for a call, just getting closer and closer to the end.”

On June 1, the call came. A 34-year-old man had collapsed of a brain hemorrhage at a crap table in a Las Vegas casino. His heart was available, and on June 9, at 2:15 a.m., the transplant operation was completed at Cedars-Sinai.

“The first time I walked by a crap table, I felt kind of funny,” Shelby jokes about it now. “The guy must have been a winner, though, because I sure am. I feel like I walked out of darkness into the daylight. I got a strong heart, and the doctors say that I have a real good tissue mix with his heart. You need that to keep the body from rejecting.”

Shelby had been plagued by heart problems since he was 10 and doctors detected a murmur. He outgrew that, but in January of 1960--at the peak of his racing career--he was stricken with severe chest pains.

“(Angina pain) got so bad that when I was driving my race car, I had to keep nitroglycerin pills under my tongue,” he said. “I won the USRRC (United States Road Racing Championship) that year, but when I had to use five nitro pills in the last race at Laguna Seca, I decided I ought to quit. I finished third in that race behind Stirling Moss and Jim Hall. I might have won it if I hadn’t had to pop those pills. Every time I slipped one under my tongue, it slowed me down.”

Such race-at-any-cost tactics were nothing new to Shelby.

There was the time he was to drive a Ferrari with Phil Hill at Sebring but had a broken elbow. Before the race, Shelby replaced his plaster cast with a lighter fiberglass one and had his right hand taped to the steering wheel. They finished second.

In a Governor’s Cup race in darkness in the Bahamas, Shelby had no lights, so he tucked in behind the Marquis Alfonso de Portago’s Ferrari in pitch-black conditions and tailgated at 100 m.p.h., swooping around the Marquis on the final lap to win.

Shelby didn’t do it, but it was his idea when an Allard he was driving caught fire in the pits in Argentina and he had no extinguisher.

He shouted to Dale Duncan, his co-driver, to jump out of the car and urinate on it. Duncan did, putting out the fire, and the car finished 10th, first its class.

Shelby was at Riverside International Raceway for the first race there--the Los Angeles Cup in September, 1957--but he crashed in practice going into Turn 6 in what was the worst accident of his racing career.

“There was a lot of sand on the track, and when my left wheels got off the pavement I didn’t realize it,” he recalled. “When I put the brakes on I went straight into the wall.”

Doctors had to fuse several of his vertebrae and took 300 stitches to remake his face.

Less than two months later, Shelby was back at Riverside in a Maserati and won an SCCA national championship race.

Heart problems continued to follow him after his retirement. In 1973, he had surgery to repair a three-vessel coronary artery disease, then five years later needed reoperative bypass grafting.

So how does he feel now with his new heart?

“I may get back in the car and do some racing myself, if I can get the docs to give me an OK,” he answered as a Texas-sized grin. “I’ve done a lot of my own testing in the Can Am at the Chrysler track in Arizona, but I might go racing to get a better feel of the car.”

He is 68 and last drove in a race 31 years ago.

He needed the heart of a gambler to keep on living, but he didn’t need it to be a gambler. Carroll Shelby never has been reluctant to turn up the next card.

“I’ve got $2 million in the Can Am out of my own pocket, but I want to see it go,” he said. “It’s more than I wanted to put into it when we started the idea three years ago, but you know how costs escalate.

“One thing that bothers me now is the price tag. I’d planned to sell them for $30,000, but now it’s up around $42,000. That’s too expensive for what I wanted, but it’s still a bargain when you look at it over the long haul. It’s a good little car, as close to bullet-proof as you can get, and by keeping the specs the same and the engines sealed, the Can Am series can’t become a technological game. Nobody can buy some trick high-dollar pieces to get to the front.

“Instead of having to buy a new model each year, the way you do in most series, you can keep on racing the Can Am, and when you’re finished, you can sell it because it’s not going to be obsolete.”

SCCA regions, including the North Hollywood-based Cal Club, introduced the car into their amateur championship program this year, with a national champion to be determined Oct. 11-13 at Road Atlanta.

Costa Dunias, SCCA vice president in charge of club racing, said there are about 40 Can Am cars racing in national events.

“The response has been gratifying,” Dunias said. “The more familiar the drivers become with the car, the more enthusiastic they are. In our last race at Phoenix, the Can Ams provided one of the most exciting races of the weekend.”

A professional series is planned for 1992.

“The difference in the two engines is about 50 m.p.h.,” Shelby said. “The Dodge V-6 will get up to 150 or 160 m.p.h., and with the big engine the same car should hit close to 200.

“With a year or two in the pro series under his belt, a good race driver should be ready to move up to the higher levels. This series can be a showcase for his talent.

“If there’s one thing I hope to get out of the project, it’s a young American driver in Formula One. I know that Michael Andretti and maybe Al Unser Jr. will probably make the move from Indy cars in the next year or two--Michael for sure--but there is plenty of room for other talented young Americans in that series. You take a close look at Formula One. There are only five or six really great drivers. The others are mostly rich kids who buy a ride or who have connections to get in a car.”

Shelby knows what it’s like to be a poor kid from the Texas oil fields trying to make his mark in racing. There were days early in his career when the striped bib overalls that he wore racing brought him as much attention as his driving successes.

He loves to tell how the bib overalls got their start.

“I was back home in Texas, working on a chicken farm, when I remembered I was supposed to be at the Eagle Mountain Naval Air Station out near Ft. Worth for a race. It was real hot that day, so I didn’t bother to change. The overalls were cool and comfortable. When I got to the track I kept them on. I won the race and when they attracted a lot of attention, I decided to wear them all the time.”

Shelby, who hadn’t driven a race car until he was 29, won three national sports car championships and had one fantastic season in 1957, winning 19 consecutive races. That got him into Formula One, where he drove for Maserati in 1958 and Aston Martin in 1959. He also won the 24 Hours of LeMans in 1959 in an Aston Martin with Roy Salvadori, the Englishman with the Italian name.

His retirement in 1960 was only as a race driver. After moving to California, he started the Shelby School of High Performance at Riverside--the first race car driving school in the country--and opened a Goodyear tire distributorship. His first driving instructor was Peter Brock, a choice that later proved to be fortuitous.

Shelby’s next gamble was to design, build and distribute an American sports car that could challenge Ferrari for the FIA world manufacturers’ championship for grand touring cars.

The result was the Shelby Cobra, a name he said came to him in a dream.

Brock, who had been a wunderkind in the General Motors’ Sting Ray project before he became a racing school instructor, was Shelby’s choice to design the first Cobra. Today, Brock is back with Shelby again as chief designer of the 1991 Can Am car.

The Cobra made its debut in 1962 with a Ford engine mated to a British AC body, but by 1963 Shelby was producing his own line of Cobras from his garage in Venice. The new sports car was still struggling to gain factory support when Shelby entered two cars, driven by Dave MacDonald and Ken Miles, in a race around the Dodger Stadium parking lot in Chavez Ravine.

“McDonald and Miles ran 1-2 and beat the big Corvettes, and after that, Ford kicked in with some more money that saved the day,” Shelby said. “Goodyear had been financing our team up until then, and when Ford got committed, we started rolling.”

Shelby’s dream came to fruition two years later when his Cobras beat Ferrari for the world manufacturers’ championship. His cars won seven races and clinched the championship when Bob Bondurant and Jo Schlesser won their class in the Rheims 12-hour race on July 4, an appropriate date for America’s only such success.

“We proved back then that an American car could beat the world,” Shelby said. “Now I want to prove that an American driver can beat the world. And my little training car is the way to get started.”

Shelby had put racing aside by 1970 and spent most of the next six or seven years in Africa, running hunting companies in Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and the Central Africa Republic. He also was expanding his U.S. business base, marketing his own chili mix--since sold to Kraft--as well as establishing a cattle ranch near his family home in Pittsburg, Tex., and a wheel manufacturing plant in the same building with his Goodyear tire distributorship.

“I’ve got cattle on 4,000 acres about 100 miles east of Dallas, but I’ve also got another 65-acre ranch where I raise American miniature horses,” he said. “They can’t stand over 34 inches high to be a legal breed. I started out with two of them as pets and wound up with 250. I also raise miniature goats and sheep for retarded children. They are wonderful for kids like that, and it pulls at your heart to see those poor kids hug and kiss those little animals. I don’t sell them, I just raise them for retarded children’s homes.”

Shelby also is involved in the Viper sports car program for Chrysler. He is on the executive committee that is developing the 400-horsepower car for limited production next year. He will drive a prototype Viper as the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 on May 26.

“The Can Am and the Viper, those are my main interests now,” Shelby said. “I like to keep a hands-on relationship with both of them. Other than that, I plan to spend most of my time with my grandchildren and my cars.”

Hands-on, for a man like Carroll Shelby, however, could mean hands on the steering wheel of a 200 m.p.h. race car.