At Ford, the Cobra king strikes again
Ever the tall Texan, automotive icon Carroll Shelby continues to cast a long shadow over the American car business.
At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit last week, Shelby, 81, joined Ford Motor Co. Chairman and Chief Executive William Clay Ford Jr. onstage in a 605-horsepower Shelby Cobra concept car, a re-creation of the famous Ford-powered Cobra sports cars of the 1960s.
Reunited with Ford after decades, Shelby was part of the team that brought the Cobra concept to life in just nine months. The car was named Best in Show by AutoWeek magazine.
On the same stage, Ford unveiled the production version of the Ford GT, a high-tech homage to the mid-engine GT40 race cars that won three consecutive 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance races (1966-68) with Shelby in command of the team.
Also onstage was the redesigned 2005 Mustang, whose hunkered-down stance, spoiler and racing stripes recall the lurid aggression of the 1960s-era Shelby Mustang GT350 and GT500.
Meanwhile, Shelby Automobiles, based in Las Vegas, is importing aluminum bodies from AC Holdings in Britain. The original Shelby Cobras, first built in 1962 and now highly prized collectibles, combined AC chassis and bodies with Ford power plants.
For Shelby fans, it’s deja vu all over again.
Anybody who needs a primer on the life and very strange times of Carroll Shelby -- the man, the racer, the cagey entrepreneur, the chili-selling huckster -- can visit the Petersen Automotive Museum’s “Carroll Shelby: Life in the Fast Lane” exhibition in Los Angeles through March 28. For his part, Shelby is not ready to be put in a glass case.
“I took the [new] Cobra out to Irwindale last month and put a couple hundred laps on it,” said Shelby, who retired from racing at 38 because of heart disease (he has a transplanted heart donated by a 38-year-old gambler and a kidney donated by his son). “It was the first car I’ve ever taken out to test that was practically perfect right out of the box.”
Shelby, who said, “I’m no engineer, I’m not nothing,” nonetheless put his stamp on the Cobra concept vehicle, which Ford executives are considering for production. The all-aluminum concept car, built with many of the same mechanical systems as the $139,000 GT, is powered by a new 427-cubic-inch (6.4-liter) V-10 engine linked to a rear-mounted six-speed transmission. This transaxle configuration, used in powerful sports cars such as the Chevrolet Corvette and Ferrari 575 Modena, helps the car achieve better weight distribution by balancing the engine in the front against the transmission in the rear.
Another advantage of a rear transaxle is that, unlike with the original Shelby Cobra, the transmission doesn’t crowd into the car’s cockpit with foot wells requiring the pedals to be angled away from the driver.
“One day I said, ‘I’m tired of sports cars where you sit with your feet at 40 degrees,’ ” Shelby said. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do a transaxle?’ ”
Another time, Shelby said, he visited the Ford Design California studio in Valencia, where the Cobra was being built. There, he offered simply, “It doesn’t look enough like a Cobra.” The V-10 engine’s height was interfering with the slope of the hood.
After a brief huddle among Chris Theodore, vice president of advanced product creation, chief designer Richard Hutting, Special Vehicle Team chief John Coletti and J Mays, Ford vice president in charge of design, changes were approved.
The engineers moved some things around, and “the next week, it looked like a Cobra,” Shelby said.
His return to the Ford fold suggests many possibilities, including using the Shelby name as a designer label for the company’s high-performance cars or a line of performance aftermarket products. However, sources inside the company caution that it is too early to tell whether anything will come of the relationship beyond the Cobra concept.
Shelby is only too happy to stoke expectations: “I think they will build it. Much of the tooling is already amortized.”
The man with the heart of a gambler has never been unwilling to place a bet and let it ride.
