Original subtitles

And Shelby rides again, a tall man from Texas

on a long night they drive, in a solitary high-speed

world of sun, broken only by routine stops to refuel.

24 hours is a long time, so it's a lot of luck.

The first pains I had in my chest, and I knew that something was wrong.

This is Le Mans, the biggest race on the planet, the most grueling race on Earth.

And Shelby has this condition that's a secret, even from

his team, that he could literally die at any moment.

Melina returns to the race.

I was forced to drive at Nitroglycerin Field.

When I would have the pain in my chest, I'd pop

one of them and slow down for a couple of laps.

As we get deeper into the 24-hour race, Shelby's heart condition is getting worse.

If the danger of the race doesn't do him in, his own heart might.

I was raised as a Southern Baptist.

Boy, I wasn't allowed to drink a Coca-Cola.

I was only allowed to drink water and milk on Sunday.

My father was a rural mail carrier that drove pretty fast.

And I remember when I was three years old,

I'd stand up and I'd just whip it in the head.

And I would say, let's go faster, Dad.

Let's go faster, Dad.

I've been interested in racing all my life.

When I was very small, my father used to carry

me to all the races he was interested in.

He was a great driver.

The only automobile racing we had were on the half-mile dirt tracks.

That was back during the Depression.

He was encouraged in this by his early life.

And he said he always enjoyed that speed.

I think he liked to go fast.

It was something that was on the edge, and he liked to be on the edge.

I got my driver's license at 14 years old.

The first thing I'd do is take my dad's 34 Dodge out

and get caught by the cop for driving 85 miles an hour.

Shelby grew up during the Great Depression.

And so he was used to life being tough.

But when he gets to be a teenager, the world

faces the biggest challenge that it ever has.

World War II had begun.

After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, he enlisted.

Young and fearless, he wanted to go fight the Nazis.

As far as his involvement with World War II, he was

a member of the Army Air Corps back in World War II.

He was training other pilots.

Carroll loved speed.

And whether it's in a car or an airplane, he just loved speed.

He loved flying as much as he loved racing.

He was born loving anything that went fast.

The Army also saw that he was a pretty good leader.

The Army recognized Shelby's greatest skills.

And utilized both of them.

After World War II was over, Carroll married his

high school sweetheart Jean and started a family.

This was life changing in more ways than one.

For the first time in his life, Carroll Shelby raced a car.

I had a high school friend named Ed Wilkins.

We built his old car with a Maytag washing machine

engine when we were in junior high school together.

And the first race car I ever drove in my life in an organized race was his MG.

It was in Norman, Oklahoma.

It was in a little MGTC.

I won that race.

And I went to another race in Oklahoma and drove a Jaguar.

And won that race.

And a friend of mine had an Allard with a Cadillac engine.

And I started driving his car and won three or four races in it.

I think he realized then there was something to it.

He didn't make the money back then that you could make money.

He could make racing cars today, obviously.

It was not very lucrative from a salary perspective.

But he was good at it.

I don't think my dad ever had a real job.

It was just one entrepreneurial aspect after another.

He got in the dump truck business, gravel trucks.

And then the last thing he did was the chicken farm.

I was vaccinating my chickens and my wife called me

and said, You're supposed to be in Fort Worth, Texas.

The race starts in an hour and a half.

I jumped in my pickup truck.

I didn't have time to change.

I got to Fort Worth just in time to start the race.

I won it in these overalls and they put pictures

of me on the front page of the Fort Worth Press.

I thought, hey, this is pretty good.

Chicken overalls was a win to start with, but he realized it gave him a brand.

He then continued to do that and it built his persona.

And it didn't take but about another year or so for a couple of other rich guys that

had cars to call him up and say, Hey, we want you to drive our car.

His progression was very astounding, how fast he happened.

But that was due to his aggressiveness.

He could sell anything in the world.

He sold his racing to whoever could afford it.

A four and a half liter Ferrari is the entry of Gordy Guyberson.

Carroll Shelby is the driver.

Shelby's winning on the track was equaled by success.

A success on the farm.

His first batch of chickens had debted him nearly $5,000.

A tidy sum for that day.

He thought he was on the road to riches.

I was sticking a needle in these chickens.

Keep from getting Newcastle's disease.

All the chickens died eventually and I went broke.

Shelby lost 20,000 birds over a two day period.

He was instantly bankrupt.

There was probably one or two little survivors poking their heads.

But not a going business at that point.

They were all dead.

Growing up in East Texas as a kid.

Very poor circumstances.

Living through the depression.

He realized the world turns upside down

every day on somebody that was on top of it.

He didn't really know what he was going to do from day in and day out.

Particularly after the chicken business went under.

That was a big shift for him.

And he was struggling to find something else to do.

I think he had learned at that point in time

that he wasn't going to work for somebody else.

That wasn't really his personality.

He needed to find something that he could do on his own.

I'd always wanted to be a racing driver.

I was 29 years old and I said to hell with it.

I'm going out and do that.

Racing came naturally to Shelby.

In 1953 he raced nine times.

He won five races and was second twice.

Number 20 takes the curve on the inside and leaves the others behind.

That's Carroll Shelby.

And that bit of driving sends him to the front.

My dad never made much money racing.

And he knew that was the way it was going to be.

It was lean.

Nobody thought back then of themselves as being poor.

You just didn't have any money that week.

One time he brought home a pickup truck full of

canned beans that we lived on for a long time.

But when he started racing he found out he was good.

So that's when he decided that he would make a name for himself.

And then use that name to go develop other things.

Shelby wanted a parlay winning on the track into a bankable enterprise off the track.

And by 1954 it was paying off.

He was attracting the interest of the biggest players in the world.

He wound up in 1954 going over to Europe for the first time.

And raced with Aston Martin at Le Mans.

He started winning races and he really made a name for himself.

There was never really a question of could he win the race.

It was like well if he didn't win then the car must have broke.

And when they said you can go to Argentina.

I mean I think he turned heaven and earth to

figure out how to get a plane ticket down there.

Then he came back and he went to Mexico.

The Mexican road race in 1954 I was driving an Austin Healey.

Panamericana was probably the greatest road race there's ever been.

I started at the Guatemalan border and wound up in Juarez.

It was a couple of thousand miles and nobody could learn the course completely.

This race paid over $117,000.

With a big chunk of that going to the winner.

Shelby knew a win here would take care of his family for years.

The Carrera Panamericana had to offer huge prize money.

Because it was one of the most dangerous races in the world.

Nine drivers were killed the previous year.

Actually I was going along pretty good.

I was keeping up with the Ferraris.

And ahead of all the Lincolns in this little four cylinder Austin Healey.

And screwed up.

The car flipped over.

Cars that could not withstand sudden stops.

Fatalities would happen.

No seat belts at that point in time so he was thrown out of the car.

It's so hard the hickory handle, the knock off

handle broke my elbow and chopped up a little bit.

Racing was easily the most dangerous sport in the world at that time.

Shelby knew the danger of the sport.

He'd lost many friends already.

But racing was in his blood.

The sport killed a lot of drivers.

For far too many years.

Every year you would accept maybe one in four drivers to have a huge accident.

And some of them to die.

The Grand Prix circuit, I think they lost half of the

stars of the racing here in the United States that year.

And it was not uncommon for us to lose four or five drivers a year back in the fifties.

Fire is racing's worst enemy.

But you gotta keep going.

I hope like Hicks some of that stuff don't happen to you.

The one group of people who just accepted it

as part of the job were the drivers themselves.

But it didn't scare you enough to stop driving?

No, I won the next race at Riverside.

After breaking his arm, he used to drive with the gas on

and tape his arm to the wheel so he could have a good grip.

That shows his true grit.

He'd have the broken arm and still continue.

The starter unfurls the checkered flag.

And at the finish, it's Carroll Shelby blazing

past the winner of the Torrey Pines feature.

Carroll Shelby pushes his Ferrari and is showing the way.

Ten laps remaining, the drivers increase the tempo

and push their cars to the limit of man and machine.

He drove big 4.9 Ferraris.

And he drove giant 5.7 Maseratis.

And he drove the bird cages.

And he won and he won and he won.

And he wore his bib overalls and he was a showman.

There's an article in one of the London papers that talked

about the 10 gallon hat man coming over to challenge the stars.

And here was this big man with his Stetsna hat on.

And he looked every inch.

The big man in the desert, hunting out the baddies.

And everybody was impressed with the way he drove.

To win, you've got to have the perfect mental attitude every time.

When you go to a race, if you're not mentally up for

it, you're not going to win no matter what car you have.

From 1955 to 1957, Shelby drove in 81 races.

He came in first place over half the time.

He won Sports Illustrated's Driver of the Year award twice.

As a driver, he was considered one of the best to ever compete.

He's the most underestimated winning driver, both in

terms of European fans and American fans, in my view.

He's the most underrated driver.

Shelby raced all over the world, winning wherever he went.

But racing in Europe for him meant something different.

He was studying the cars.

The reason I wanted to go to Europe was because I wanted to learn how Ferrari,

Maserati, Aston Martin, all those teams built their cars.

And ran a little automobile company.

Carroll Shelby made two trips to Ferrari in the mid-1950s, essentially as a customer.

Shelby and a partner started a business with the idea of importing the most

successful European sports cars of that time.

So of course he wanted to include Ferraris, which

had dominated the global racing scene for a decade.

Both times, Enzo Ferrari treated Shelby like dirt.

I think Carroll watched Enzo Ferrari pretty closely.

And I think he learned a lot from that.

He may not have particularly got on with Enzo.

When it came to Ferraris, though, Dad was never a big thing.

Enzo Ferrari was never a big thing.

Enzo wanted nothing to do with him.

I don't think he liked the cowboy hat and overalls and stuff.

He didn't understand that.

Enzo didn't.

So Carroll Shelby told Ferrari that one day he'd come back and kick his ass.

Shelby wouldn't have to wait that long to go to battle with Ferrari.

At the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans, the biggest race in the world,

Shelby's driving an Aston Martin.

And he's battling with Ferrari for the outright lead in the race.

And it was during the night, Dad just methodically started moving up.

And he certainly wasn't the fastest on the track.

Just plugging along, kind of like a tortoise in the hair.

Shelby now drives Aston No.

5 through the essence.

And with eight hours still to go, Ferrari No.

14 leads Aston Martin No.

5 by three laps.

Shelby is battling with Ferrari in the greatest,

most grueling 24-hour race in the world.

And he's about to score the biggest victory of his life.

As he speeds his green Aston Martin around the eight and a half mile circuit,

his heart is starting to fail.

The pain is excruciating.

I knew that I had hereditary problems.

And my father died at 46 years old with it.

So I figured there was nothing that could be done.

The pain grew so great, Shelby would sometimes double over in agony.

The only relief was temporary and came in the form of nitroglycerin pills,

which he'd replace under his tongue as he drove.

By doing this, he was somehow able to continue racing for hours on end.

Shelby and Salvadori kept the pressure on Ferrari.

And as the race wore on, the usually reliable Ferrari started to break down.

And the Aston Martin was closing in.

Whilst it will stand, Shelby brings the

Aston onto the same lap as the sick Ferrari.

And now the Ferrari's race is run.

Jean de Vienne brings his crippled car into the pits to retire.

Now the winner falls in to be submerged beneath a

seething mass, eager to acclaim a resounding victory.

A victory as richly deserved as it was long awaited.

To do what Shelby did, be part of a two-man team, race 24 hours with a heart

condition and come out on top on the world's biggest stage in racing.

This is a feat that will never be duplicated.

It was probably the peak of his career.

Finally his doctor told him, you can't keep racing cars, it's going to kill you.

Shelby tried to keep racing in 1960, but he realized he needed to stop for good.

Race driving wasn't very profitable back then.

And I didn't have any way to make a living.

I'd had a very unfortunate divorce.

I started all over with not a dime.

A race car driver that retires with heart

problems, he's very quickly forgotten about.

With his racing career over, Shelby had already been planning his next endeavor.

Carroll was trying several things.

He didn't know for sure what he was going to do in his life.

But one of the things that he could do was he

thought he would start this school for race drivers.

And I became his first paid employee, you know, at the driving school.

Most people who enjoy motor racing find the more they

learn about it, the more interesting the sport is to them.

I don't know anybody any more qualified to pass along

some of these fundamentals than our own Pete Brock.

So, Carroll asked me to run his driving school out at Riverside.

During the off time, I started working for Carroll on a secondary business.

In 1960, doctor told me I had five years to live, maybe.

I figured, so what?

I might as well try to build a car that I dreamed of.

The

second, I could race under American colors and

maybe pride the old established names a little bit.

Because the Corvettes were winning everything.

And I said, Carroll is never going to help it.

He said, yes it is.

Corvettes were the prominent car in racing at that point.

And Shelby definitely, he definitely wanted to beat the Corvettes.

There's no doubt about it.

He knew if he wanted to make a name for himself as a

car manufacturer, he had to build a Corvette killer.

Carroll was an entrepreneur at heart.

He just did what he wanted to do and he woke up every morning with ideas.

He had always dreamed about, even when he was in Europe the first time, a European

lightweight chassis with a light American V8 in it.

Ray Brock with Peterson Publications came to me and said, Ford has a new small block

V8 and you might put something together with them.

And I also knew that AC had lost their deal.

A deal with Bristol Engine.

Carroll went over to AC and went in there with his great ability to sell things and

said, Ford Motor Company is behind me and we're going to build all these sports cars.

And would you guys supply us a couple of chassis for nothing?

Shelby was a great character.

He wasn't overburdened with a great deal of honesty.

One of the nicknames we had for him was Billy Saul Estes.

My dad used to call him Billy Saul after Billy Saul

Estes, a guy that sold a bunch of stuff he didn't have.

Billy Saul Estes was another Texan who managed to sell

non-existent tanks of fertilizer to the government.

And he made a lot of money doing that.

Carroll Shelby shows up to Ford Motor Company and knocks on the door and gets a

meeting with Lee Iacocca who was running sales and marketing for us at the time.

I went to Lee Iacocca and said, if you loan me $25,000

I'll build you a car that will blow the Corvette off.

That's all it'll cost you.

Says to Lee, listen, I've got these chassis and bodies from AC Cobra over in

England and I want to put a Ford engine in them

and I want to go race them all over the world.

I didn't have any money, but Ford didn't know that and AC cars didn't know that.

He knew how to connect with people and he used that to his advantage.

Between whipsawing both of them, I wound up with

a chassis and four or five engines from Ford.

And he was still talking as they pushed him out the door.

And finally Iacocca said, just get that guy out of here, give him a couple of

engines and some money and let's see what he can do.

I wanted to build my own car.

The only people in America that could do it at the time were the hot rodders.

And it started here in California.

Shelby was smart to move to California and tap into all the

hot rodders, the fabricators, the mechanics, the welders.

The painters.

Everybody had a race car in their garage or a hot rod or something at home.

You didn't want a car just like everyone else's.

So you wanted to customize your car.

You wanted to change the wheels or put an extra carburetor on it.

Across the country, people were hot rodding their

cars to make them go faster, to make them look cooler.

Young people were literally marching in their towns,

demanding that their towns build them drag streets.

He's on it and in the three quarters, he's really

coming on and in the traps with a top time of 170.45.

Miles per hour.

The epicenter was right in Southern California.

Lance Reventlo had put a group of people together in California that had built a

car that looked like it might be successful.

The first American car that really competed

against the Ferraris and the European cars.

So I decided that I had to come out here.

I got a couple of engines sent out to Dean Moon's

shop in Los Angeles and we started working on them.

The AC chassis had also arrived in Southern California.

The public relations manager for Carol asked me to come down Dean Moon's in Santa

Fe Springs and take some pictures of a car being built.

I walked in the shop and I go, what the hell is this?

Nobody knew if it was run or not.

The chief engine member for Dean Moon built the engine, got it running.

We started putting whatever carburetor manifold on

it and got the engine up to about 265 horsepower.

Carol took it for a spin.

And said, where's the Corvette?

I like driving the Cobra Roadster very much.

It sort of flaunted all the rules.

It was still light.

Good brakes on it.

And the engine had a broad range of torque.

And they were just a lot of fun to drive.

Across the county in Venice, Lance Reventlo and his

Scarab racing team were moving in the opposite direction.

While the car was competitive, Reventlo had had his fill of the high cost of racing.

If you look at the core of the Shelby American team,

they were the team from Lance Reventlo's Scarab effort.

And Carol took it over when Reventlo quit racing.

And some of the people just stayed with the building.

Out of that came the best guy that I ever ran into, Phil Remington.

I don't think there was anybody that could do what Phil could do.

Remington is one of the few figures in racing who's become

a legend who's not a race car driver or constructor.

Well, the guy was a fabricating engineering genius, self-taught.

He had the ability when something broke on the cars, he could build a fix or weld a

fix, a machine, a fabricator, right then and there.

The guy was just amazing.

He had seven ideas and he only needed one, but they were all pretty good.

And he taught a lot of people.

He taught the young guys how to do all this stuff and fabricate and everything else.

And the guys who worked under him can't say enough about him.

We all looked up to Remington.

We all learned from Remington.

Oh my gosh, the guy's amazing.

To build up the financial strength of his company, Carol wanted to create the

impression that Shelby American was bigger than it really was.

There's a slight problem.

Shelby only has one Cobra.

Carol was a salesman.

He could bend the truth a little bit in order to get done what needed to get done.

During that whole time, he's building a relationship with Motor Trend,

Car and Driver, Road and Track.

And so when his car was completed, he had them all lined up to go test it.

To seem like there were more Cobras than just one, Shelby had his only car painted

a different color each time a different member of the press came to test it.

So one would have a yellow car, one would have a blue car, one would have a red car.

And oh God, we got an exclusive.

So every magazine would think he got something special.

Shelby was really in the right place at the right time.

He had all of these young people, these hot rodders who

knew how to make cars go fast, who knew how to fabricate.

And he had Phil Remington who was this technical genius.

All of that together, you had an amazing company.

It was really a very interesting time.

We had a lot of spirit around the place.

You gotta realize we're a very small group.

We're like about eight guys total.

We had Frenchmen, we had a Swiss, we had

Japanese, New Zealand, and Australian guys there.

And all these guys worked together amazingly well.

They were all little bit of road racers, hot rodders.

It was a great shop to work in.

It was like one big family, abusing each other.

There was a lot of nicknames down there, yeah.

But we hired a shop foreman named Carol Smith.

Scattershit was his nickname.

Ken Miles called me.

He called him the hawk.

And some people called him side-by, you know,

because he talked out of the side of his mouth.

It was a good day for Ford.

I'm very happy for Ford.

I'm very sorry that things went down.

You really had to listen close to understand what he was saying.

Gordon Chance was Ricky Nelson because he looked just like Ricky Nelson.

Ricky Nelson, the teenage tuner.

And isn't this all funny?

Well, Remington, he was twitchy.

His nickname was SDP, Super Twitch Phil.

That stayed with him that bit.

We were a ragtag bunch of crazy guys, kind of out of control.

I remember they had a cage, like an aquarium with a live cobra in it.

And a real cobra snake.

He always had fireworks.

Charlie did.

So he'd throw fireworks from time to time.

They put him in the engine room and fire him in a pipe there.

The guy's working on the engines and shit like that.

And it was really echoing in there.

Ferrari was contentious.

He pitted people against each other.

It was not a happy place to work.

At Shelby America, Carroll Shelby was a team leader.

He was a team builder just through his personality.

It was a happy place to work.

Being an employee at Shelby's back then, in the

beginning, it was like working almost in a hobby shop.

It's the kind of job that even though it was

good, hard work, you wanted to go to work.

Carroll would come down through the shop and he would give you a compliment.

That's a nice welcome.

You felt so appreciative.

It made you want to, you know, work harder.

And even do better.

Guys would come back after dinner and I'd come back with them.

I wasn't getting overtime.

I wasn't even working.

I just came back to watch.

He knew how to connect with people.

All kinds of different people.

It really didn't matter what your background was or what your profession was.

If he liked you, you could do no wrong.

And if you did your job, you could do no wrong.

If he didn't like you, watch out.

Watch out.

In less than 10 months, Shelby created his vision.

A car that would be the envy of everyone on the

street and possibly one that could win on the track.

But Shelby knew in order to sell these cars, he had to beat the Corvettes.

The Corvette was the car to beat and that was our primary challenge with the Cobra.

This Corvette was developed by Chevrolet engineers, headed by Zora Arkas-Dunthoff,

internationally known designer and racing driver.

It had the first head-to-head competition at Riverside.

Obviously all the top West Coast Corvette drivers were there, including Bob

Bondurant, Dick Goldstrand, and Dave McDonald.

And Billy Crouse shows up in the first Cobra.

Billy Crouse, one of the top, top road racers at that time.

Very, very race-savvy.

There were no competitive cars to the Corvettes at that time to speak of.

Until the Cobras got going.

The first time we showed up at Riverside with the Cobra, nobody knew what to think.

After a few laps, they figured it out pretty quick.

McDonald and I were up toward the front.

I knew I had to beat him to win.

So I wanted to measure the Cobra against the Corvette,

knowing he was going to drive the heck out of the Corvette.

I didn't have to guess if he was trying or not, because I knew he was.

Crouse, he went out and led immediately.

And it showed that the car was way, way ahead of whatever Corvette was doing.

As soon as it appears at Riverside in its first race, it dominates the Corvette.

Makes it look second-rate.

Actually, I was surprised how easy it was to beat the Corvette with the Cobra.

It was at least a half a lap ahead.

Come out of turn nine, which is a banked turn, all of a sudden it went boom.

Then the wheel and tire passed me.

I said, this is not good.

And the Cobra was handily leading the race and broke a stub axle.

And the Stingray won.

But everyone knows that the Cobra is going to dominate thereafter.

The other drivers pretty much avoided me afterwards.

They were jealous.

I mean, what else can I say?

My dad was so impressed with that Cobra.

So quick, so light.

Much lighter than the Stingray.

And he knew the riding was on the wall from that race.

Shelby didn't win the race.

But he proved that the Cobra was going to dominate the Corvette.

It was a recognition that Carroll, along with Ford, had found something special.

We had our first true competitor in the racing car business in a while.

And like Carroll Shelby, the driver, Shelby Cobra started to win.

We were running 35, 40 hours on the cars without even overhauling them now.

Which is phenomenal.

That's even better than Ferrari is.

They've been reputed to be the most reliable cars.

And I think we even got them beat on that now.

So I'm not worried one bit about the 500 miles.

In fact, I wish it were a thousand.

Carroll Shelby and his Cobras win the Manufacturers' Championship.

Cobra creator Carroll Shelby has risen from the dead.

The alliance is ambitious.

We won the Drivers' Championship, the Manufacturers' Championship,

and of course the USRC Championship.

He was doing really what he wanted to do.

Beat the Ferraris, the Corvettes, the Porsches, and everyone else.

When we were able to run with him and actually

beat him, it was a huge accomplishment.

And it meant a great deal to Shelby, to Ford Motor Company.

Henry Ford II, chairman of the Ford Motor Company, knew the value of winning races.

But his desire was to win at the highest level.

That meant competing and winning at the biggest

race in the world, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

You need to understand the magnitude of winning Le Mans during this period.

It made celebrities out of the drivers who won and the manufacturer.

Major manufacturers get in long-distance racing

because it's an arduous race and it enhances the brand.

I mean, if Ford can win at Le Mans reliably,

that says something about the engineering.

There was a marketing arm of each auto company that's obsessed

with auto racing as a marketing technique to sell cars.

They would say, when on Sunday, sell on Monday.

We didn't have that performance component of our brand that customers wanted.

Ford had the Galaxy, Ford had the Thunderbird, but

when it came to a plausible race car, Ford had nothing.

Henry isn't about to race, sees a Ferrari win, and says, we need those red cars.

The solution to win Le Mans quickly was to simply purchase Shelby's rival, Ferrari.

Since Shelby's win at an Aston Martin in 1959, Ferrari

had dominated, winning every 24-hour contest since then.

For speed and endurance, Ferrari was without equal.

There was a lot of effort put into making this deal a reality.

Try to accommodate your desires as best we can.

My father thought that this was going to be a done deal.

Ford Motor Company was going to walk away with an incredible brand.

Ferrari said, no, I don't want to sell it.

Enzo Ferrari was playing Henry Ford II so that he

could get a sweeter deal from an Italian company, Fiat.

A deal which he would eventually take.

My father was extremely disappointed.

That's when he decided, all right, we're going to beat you.

And we're going to beat you at your own game, in your backyard.

Ford began construction on a race car with an unlimited budget.

The GT40 was being designed for two reasons.

Win Le Mans and humble Ferrari.

Shelby had not forgotten about his vendetta with Enzo Ferrari.

And he wanted to take him on at Le Mans.

But he knew he didn't have the car.

No matter how good it was for short track racing,

it was not going to be a suitable car for Europe.

Because it simply didn't have the top speed.

We wanted to go international racing.

And the old 289 Cobra was about a year old.

It was as aerodynamic as a shoebox.

The tracks we ran on in this country didn't run over 150, 55 miles an hour anyway.

So it didn't run up to 155 miles an hour and just stopped.

It was like pushing a brick through the air.

Shelby knew that Cobra did not have the aerodynamics to

blast 200 miles an hour down the Mulsanne Strait at Le Mans.

We knew that we had to do something as far as body style was concerned.

So I had a young man named Pete Brock that had worked at General Motors.

And I said, Pete, do you think we could build a streamlined version of the Cobra?

I said, we can design a completely new body for the existing Cobra chassis.

And I think that we can make them go faster.

But I said, it may not look like anything you've ever seen before.

And he said, oh hell, I don't care what it looks like.

Is it going to go fast?

And I said, I believe it will.

The actual idea for this shape of a body had been a long time.

It was developed in the late 1930s in Germany

by a guy named Reinhard Koenigs von Faschenfeld.

The idea for it has never been really tried in modern competition.

Extending the length, cutting it off, and fooling the air that was flowing over

the back of a car into thinking that it was going to go that far.

It might look so different that there would be a lot of resistance for it.

And I knew that because I knew what the history was.

Builders at that time, including BMW, they'd had focus groups.

And the cars looked so strange that everybody rejected them.

So the idea went away.

World War II comes along.

All of that information was lost.

But when I was at General Motors, I found in

their library a technical paper on their studies.

And it showed what the aerodynamic improvements were on it.

And I couldn't read all the German, but I could understand

the numbers on the coefficient of drag improvement.

These ideas could be applied to the Cobra.

I presented the idea to the crew because they were going to have to build the car.

All the enthusiasm I'd had stopped completely because I showed people what I

thought the car would look like with a

strange looking car with a chopped off tail.

And... the main resistance came back.

It came from Phil Remington, who was our

chief engineer, and the guy who was my idol.

This is the greatest fabricator, race car builder in the world.

And I thought, well, boy, if I get Phil behind

this deal, you know, it's going to be a slam dunk.

I mean, he thought it was a stupid looking car and it wouldn't work.

And of course, all the guys in the shop followed

him and said, we don't want to work on it either.

I mean, everyone was abusing him, saying it wasn't going to work and this and that.

Especially the upper echelon.

When I looked at the Pete Brock coupe, I thought, you know,

that thing's going to be 200, maybe 300 pounds heavier.

And it's going to bog down the engine.

And I don't expect it to be a big success.

But he had Shelby on his side and that's all it really meant.

So I didn't really know anything about aerodynamics.

It looked pretty good to me.

Aeroneutronics, the Ford defense company, had some really

good PhDs and some people that understood aerodynamics.

They came up and looked at it and said, hey, that thing ain't going to work.

Told us if we extend the tail out about three

feet to a point, that we'd be much better off.

Common acceptance of what aerodynamic efficiency

was, was to have this teardrop shaped automobile.

But it really wasn't very efficient.

That created turbulence all over the body.

Fortunately, our top driver, Ken Miles, he had seen what the

Germans had done and knew that they were on to something.

And he convinced Carol that we should go ahead with the project.

So he said, OK, go ahead and do it.

I said, OK, what's our budget?

He says, well, we don't have any money.

He said, you can have Skip Hudson's old crashed car.

The body was damaged, but the chassis was still OK.

Brock had his opportunity, but what he didn't have was time.

Shelby American wasn't just racing.

It was producing Cobras for street cars.

It was for street use, and demand was high.

Shelby gave Brock a drop-dead date to finish the car.

We had a 90-day window to build this car from the first sketch

to the completed running car to get it ready for Daytona.

Took a jigsaw and just cut out all those patterns

and then put it together like a big ice cube tray.

And made the buck so we could really see what the car looked like full size.

As it started taking shape, though, people started believing in the car.

Once the car started going well, they all dived in and everybody

contributed something to make the car right.

Bill Remington and Ken Miles and John Olson and Don Allen,

they all put together a chassis and we built the first body.

It looked kind of funny with that chopped-off tail,

and everybody didn't think it would do that well.

We got the car done and took it out to Riverside.

Pete Brock had defied everyone with his design and now was the moment to see if it

would succeed or fail because the stopwatch doesn't lie.

It was 25 miles an hour faster down the back

straightaway at Riverside than a regular Cobra.

Right out of the box, the car was three and a

half seconds faster than anything we'd ever run.

Ken was amazed how fast that car was going.

It ran pretty well.

It would run 170 miles an hour down the straight on 350 horsepower.

Paints didn't put a stripe on it.

It was an incredible design that Pete had come up with it.

Carol said, let's get this thing back to the

shop and we'll try to get it ready for Daytona.

Shelby named the car for the race he was preparing it for, the Daytona Continental.

So since that day, it's always been known as the Cobra Daytona.

We'll make it happen.

When we got down to Daytona, Carol had assigned

Bob Holbert and Dave McDonald to drive the car.

The main competition against the Cobra was the Ferrari 250 GTO.

An American car challenging them was unusual and certainly put some feathers

the wrong way in the European racing elite.

Enzo Ferrari and his team knew very little about

the new American race car with the strange body.

But they were about to find out.

When the race started, the Daytona Coupe and the Ferrari were battling for the lead.

Holbert goes out.

He's running against the Ferraris.

And he comes back in after a couple laps.

He says, this is too easy.

He says, I can run off and lead these guys easily.

After 110 laps, the Daytona Coupe had built a 10-minute lead on the entire field.

The Ferrari continued to lose ground.

At that point, we did some testing on fuel.

The car was 25% more efficient than the roadsters.

For endurance racing, the fuel economy was even more important.

Because if we could go three more laps each time

Ferrari pitted, that's the way you'd win the race.

The Daytona Coupe was so much faster than anything there.

It was just incredible.

There was nothing there that could even go near us.

By the seventh hour of the race down there, we were so far out in front,

there wasn't any question we had the race won.

They came in for a pit stop.

Put the fueler in.

It burst out the other side.

It laid out the vent cap and ran down and caught on fire.

There was a point there it looked like the car was going to explode.

One of our boys from New Zealand was absolutely engulfed in flame.

We're trying to put Olsen out.

Meanwhile, he's screaming, you know, I dropped my wallet.

So we got his wallet for him.

And Carol was so angry with the whole situation.

And he said, we're done.

And the mechanics were saying, Carol, we can get the wiring fixed.

It doesn't matter.

We'll lose all these laps.

But the car is so fast.

We can get out and win the race.

Shelby puts his foot down and retires the car.

So the car didn't win it.

But we did set the lap record on it.

And then we went to Sebring.

Shelby's Cobras led by the number 10 Daytona Coupe

caused a stir as they moved through inspection.

The reaction after Daytona was rather mixed because obviously we'd shown great

speed, but the car had also proven pretty vulnerable.

It had blown up.

The reigning Ferraris.

They dominate the prototype class with two 4-liter and two 3-liter cars.

They'd been champions of the world already since 62.

And we're already into the beginning of 64.

They'd won everything all through 63.

So they were very, very confident.

I mean, the Ferrari factory team had pretty much ruled the race forever.

When you think of Ferrari and what Ferrari means, you would think that the founder of

that company would be extraordinarily wealthy.

But he never was.

Because every lira was always spent on racing.

Carroll Shelby had already decided what he thought about Enzo Ferrari.

I never saw anybody in an equal race car that

I didn't figure that I could hold my own with.

It'd be great for motor racing if American cars could beat the Ferrari's once.

They've broken on five earlier than they've ever jumped the gun before.

Kinski gets away just in front of Holborn.

The race died.

And we just went away with it.

We're just killing the Ferraris and the Porsches.

And not just GT cars, but prototypes as well.

It didn't take long for people to understand

that the car was going to be really, really fast.

It was an absolutely amazing group of guys from Venice, California,

who'd come down and beat all those high-end manufacturers.

Carroll Shelby with the Ferrari GTOs, taking the

Manufacturers' Championship lead at the same time.

Holborn and McDonald led the GT winners.

By the time that Holborn and Davy won at

Sebring, I think Ferrari would have some concern.

We dominated.

That's when we decided to go to Europe, when we

saw that we could beat the GTO in a 12-hour race.

This was also now starting to be very

personal between Ferrari and Carroll Shelby.

I mean, all the American guys wanted to go to Indy.

That was their goal.

Carroll's goal was to go back and beat Ferrari's ass, because he'd been insulted

by Enzo Ferrari at one time, and he wanted to go back and show what Americans can do.

And he held a press conference, and he looked people in the eye,

and he said, this is a quote, Ferrari's ass is mine.

We knew that we had a car that would beat Ferrari.

So we scraped a little money together with a little help from

Castrol, and our sales of the Cobra were making a little money.

So we put it together on a very scrimpy budget and went to Europe.

Of all the races in the world, there was none bigger than Le Mans.

To win Le Mans, it meant that you were the best.

Since its inception in 1908, no race was more prized or coveted.

For an automotive manufacturer, it proves their

endurance more than any other race can possibly do.

Commercially, it is the most important race

to win in the world for a car manufacturer.

Win Le Mans.

The whole planet knows.

There was a tremendous amount of publicity for the fact

that Ford Motor Company was going to enter the Le Mans race.

It had taken nearly 14 months, but Ford's entry, the GT40, was ready to

race at Le Mans and ready to put an end to Ferrari's dominance at this race.

Millions of dollars had been devoted to this project.

It was getting tremendous, tremendous

publicity, you know, with the Ford PR campaign.

The style of the GT40 was really representing a big change in motor racing.

My father was surprised about the car.

I'm not sure if people had... seen a car that was so low.

It was clearly a very dynamic design.

Although Shelby was using a Ford engine, that's where the relationship stopped.

All Ford ever cared about was their entry, the GT40.

Nobody was looking at the Cobra.

And we've got two Daytonas in the GT class.

In sports car racing, there's always been a class structure.

At the top of the totem pole is the prototype class.

Anything went.

And you could build as many as you wanted of them.

Or as few as you wanted.

You could just build one car and it would just be a prototype.

And the next class down was typically the GT class.

And that's a so-called production-based class.

The GT class has a lot of value for a manufacturer

because it's based on the cars they sell on the street.

The stage is set for a war of speed.

The Ferrari P-Series versus the Ford GT40.

The Shelby American Daytona Coupe versus the Ferrari 250 GTO.

Each manufacturer had put everything they had into their cars.

Le Mans always had hundreds of thousands of spectators.

But this year, it was overflowing.

Ford's debut at Le Mans drew millions of eyes to that race around the world.

The Le Mans 24-hour race at last.

And three gleaming Ford GTs are present.

At 4 p.m., the starter drops his flag and runs for safety.

In the opening laps, the GT40 is furiously fast.

There's a helicopter camera car following it.

Its top speed is incredible.

The cars were fast.

Richie Guenther was particularly quick and was challenging the Ferrari, which was

really his job because he was the lead car.

Richie Guenther has taken the lead on the second

lap in the white Ford with the blue stripe.

The American racing colors are in front at Le Mans.

Do you recognize him?

Have you got anything up your sleeve that you can sort of pull out a little bit more?

I can pull out 15 seconds, but I know you wanted it.

We're trying to finish 24 hours.

You mean they won't let you pull out the 15 seconds?

In the GT class, both Cobras are outpacing the Ferrari GTO,

as well as staying with the Ford and Ferrari prototypes.

Shelby American's first showing is going strong.

Until an improper starting of a dead battery

leads to the disqualification of car number six.

Only one Cobra remains.

The race is followed by Dan Gurney and Bob Bondurant.

Losing one of the coupes is a serious blow to Shelby and the team.

It seriously hinders their ability to win the race.

Ford's first casualty is Richard Atwood from Britain.

We'd done maybe two or three hours into the race, and I

saw some flames starting to lick up into the engine bay.

It was burning fairly well when I got out.

There was a woof underneath the bonnet.

It's known as the Grand Prix of endurance.

And I think that this is the thing.

It's a great endurance on the driver and on the car.

And this is a combination that I think wears

out a lot of people and a lot of vehicles.

And this is, I'm afraid, what's going to happen now.

We're starting 55 cars.

I don't think more than 15 or 20 are going to finish.

During the 11th hour of the race, troubles brew for Ford.

Richie Ginther's GT40 is retired.

13 hours into the race, Bill Hill goes also.

By morning, with every GT40 broken and out of the race, the

Ford execs were forced to pay attention to the Daytona coupe.

It was now winning the entire race in both classes.

The Daytona could genuinely beat Ferrari.

And when you had long straightaways, we had just blown Ferrari off the wheels.

It wasn't even close.

I don't think that the European racing world

was expecting much of a challenge from America.

And they thought that they probably had the grandfather

rights to dominance at these prestigious events like Le Mans.

And then the first place car all pulled off.

Here is a car that's been having a good deal of trouble during the night.

The John Surtees Lorenzo Bandini car.

In and out once more and back on the course.

There he goes.

I was thinking, are we going to win overall?

We were leading there for a little while overall

and there wasn't anything that could beat us.

They were competing against one of the lead Ferraris.

And they run those guys into the ground.

We got in a rock through the oil cooler in the front.

And it had a little pit hole and it was spitting oil out all over everything.

So they had to drive it really gently.

The thing ran the last four or five hours at 300 degrees.

It never missed a lick.

Amazing.

The Oil League prevented the Daytona Coupe from winning Le Mans outright.

But Shelby and his team still won the GT class, beating Ferraris.

For the first time in history, an American car had won at Le Mans.

Carroll obviously was very pleased.

On the other hand, his eye was on the goal.

And that goal was to win the championship.

Until we achieved that goal, he wasn't about to celebrate early.

The first time that they raced at Le Mans, cars didn't finish.

The GT40, for a number of mechanical reasons, they weren't strong enough.

So once again, Ferrari wins Le Mans in 1964, first, second and third.

Henry Ford, the second, is not pleased.

He wanted somebody who had demonstrated that ability to win.

Ford has always known, and the whole industry has always

known, that Shelby is the guy who can get it done.

Carroll Shelby had won Le Mans as a driver.

Had won Le Mans as a manufacturer with the Daytona Coupe.

And it was after 1964 that he brought in Carroll Shelby to help develop the cars.

Here's something else that we're excited about.

It's this new Ford GT.

It was designed and built by Ford engineers as kind of a laboratory on

wheels, to test new ideas and prove Ford's capabilities in open competition.

We've been given the job of testing this new car and racing internationally.

The biggest concern for them was, was the endurance.

These 12-hour and 24-hour races are, you know, demanding beyond reason.

Carroll Shelby knew the task for them.

I can remember when the two GT40s actually came into our shop.

They still had wire wheels on them and they were

overheating, and so Phil went to work on that.

Phil Remington was pretty much responsible

for all of our successes in racing over there.

In spite of his reluctance to build a Daytona, he was

still, I think, the most critical guy in the team.

When Shelby got the cars, the first thing we did was put Halibrand mags on it.

Bigger tires.

And so that put more stress on it.

But they even had problems with the suspension, even

before they put the bigger tires and wheels on it.

Changed the suspension geometry.

They changed the engine.

A lot of the subsystems, braking subsystems, everything was redesigned.

Not only did Ford entrust Shelby and his team with redesigning the failed GT40,

Ford also had an additional product that needed Shelby's attention.

When Carroll was successful with the Cobra, Ford came to him and asked about

doing something to the Mustang that they had just introduced.

That was the start of the GT350.

The Mustang, when it was first conceived by Lee Iacocca and everyone else at Ford

and my grandfather, it was really just a way

to get younger customers into the showroom.

It was almost sort of a house.

It was a housewife's car in 64.

A beautiful day.

A Mustang day.

Ford Mustang.

Practical enough for this family of five, yet beautiful enough to be honored with

the Tiffany Gold Medal for Excellence in American Design.

And then, you know, along comes Carroll Shelby.

Mustang was very, very popular, but it was a secretary's car.

A little six-cylinder engine, and they wanted to put a V8 in it.

They wanted a sportier version that had wider

appeal, especially to the performance enthusiasts.

And I thought, man, you can't make a mule outrun a racehorse.

The Mustangs were a real transformation.

And that was when the shop became really super overcrowded.

And they realized they had to do something to get a better shop.

They moved from that small shop at Princess Street, and they moved to the airport.

I got an explanation And I'm on my way There's

no hesitation I don't know how Shelby slept.

He had his tire division going.

He had the race shop going.

He had the assembly line going.

He had a parts division shipping parts all over the world.

There was 250 people working there.

It just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

The guys on the assembly line were 17, 18, 19 years old.

The guys in the parts department were 18, 19, 20 years old.

The guys in the race shop, half the guys were in their 20s.

The oldest guy there was Shelby.

He was 40.

At this point, Shelby felt he could do no wrong.

From the evolution of the Cobra to the Daytona Coupe, to taking over the GT40

program, his rise from broke retired driver to auto CEO was meteoric.

And Shelby was good at making sure everybody knew about it.

Carroll Shelby was a promoting, promoting genius.

He took his assets and made the world know about them.

We got tickled because he always had a photographer there to take pictures.

And Carroll Shelby's picture was to be in

the front page of any paper anywhere he was.

Every little movement Every little thing you do Is it slight of hand that commands

my heart to love you He was to do something noteworthy

and his press agent was to get it in the paper.

So that Carroll Shelby's legend moved on.

In Carroll's case, if another mechanic had their picture in the paper and Carroll's

wasn't, that mechanic could lose his job over it.

It was there to promote Carroll Shelby.

Few people realized, back when all this was

happening, Ford had taken over Shelby American.

Ford in California is represented by these sleek racing cars.

They're the products of Shelby American Incorporated.

Builders of the world champion Ford Cobra and the Mustang GT350 sports car.

It became a division of Ford Motor Company.

And so the other side of it was, he was a factory team.

He was their boy.

They owned him.

I was having to build Mustangs, having to build Cobras,

having to try to straighten the Ford GT program out.

It was too much for me.

The whole atmosphere changed.

It went from a cool race shop to a, you know, to a corporate entity.

It got a little bit more sterile when we moved to

the airport, because now there were more rules.

It was just a different environment.

It was so big.

We went from 10,000 square feet to probably like 40,000 square feet.

So things got spread out, and you weren't as

close to the guys that you worked with before.

Shelby American was experiencing growing pains.

It was no longer a little shop filled with bad-ass car guys and hot rodders.

It was a professional operation.

The quality of the work continued to be unmatched,

starting with the reimagining of Ford's Mustang.

This GT350 is a racing version of Ford's Mustang 2 Plus 2.

We set the cars up for racing by installing special components,

racing shocks and so on.

We converted the Mustang Fastback into race cars.

The bodies came from the factory.

We put lighter aprons and plexiglass windows, made the cars lighter.

We modified the engine and also welded in override

traction bars to make the suspension stronger.

In the assembly line, they built those GT350s that were strictly for the street,

and we sold them to the customers for $5,900.

And then in the other hangar, they built our

models, and they were strictly for the track.

The Mustangs really weren't a big deal until they started racing them.

That really put the Mustang on the map.

They shipped over more rally cars and race cars to enter events in Europe in 64.

And the Tour de France, they won the event first and second.

It was an important victory, the Tour de France for the Mustangs,

because they had at that point not won anything in America.

The victory proved to Ford brass that this former

secretary's car, the Mustang, could be fast.

It could be a winner on the track.

But Shelby had ambitions elsewhere, and he made that clear.

I don't give a shit about the Tour de France, anyway.

It means a lot to a lot of people over there, but

it wasn't as high on my priority list as Daytona...

Zebra...

Le Mans...

And at the end of 1964, Carroll Shelby really wanted just one thing.

He wanted to beat Ferrari.

Ferrari for the World Manufacturers' Championship.

With one race left at Monza, the Daytona was

going to win the Manufacturers' Championship.

Beating Ferrari the way Shelby had always promised he would.

Ferrari had just a couple of points more than we did.

So it all came down to the last race at Monza.

And by then, we had four cars.

So we were going to go to Monza with four Daytona coupes.

We would have absolutely crushed Ferrari.

Enzo Ferrari seized the writing on the wall.

There's no way he's going to let that happen.

Ferrari protested the fact that he wasn't allowed to run the cars he wanted.

And eventually, the race itself was cancelled.

So no points can be awarded, and the Cobra can't win.

Ferrari wins again.

So Ferrari won 1964 by politics, not by being the fastest car.

For Shelby, the 1965 season was looking to be

the most stressful thing he had ever faced.

The Cobra and the GT40 are both competing in the same endurance races.

Ford executives are putting tons of pressure on

Shelby to make sure his focus is on the GT40.

Two months before Daytona, the car is not even close to ready.

Ken Miles was the test driver, really.

He basically tested and developed most all the cars.

He was an engineer prior to going to Shelby's

and prior to opening his own business.

Ken Miles drove it at first.

He didn't like it at all.

I hopped in it and I drove it, and it didn't handle great.

It was not as aerodynamic as it needed to be.

Remington made new bodywork for it.

They adjusted the ride heights and suspension,

changed the shocks on it and stiffened it up.

Then we put a stronger motor on it so it could go quicker.

Each time that it worked out, it got better, and better, and better.

We have high hopes for all these cars this year.

We hope that by racing with Ford, we can make this an American year.

Very soon now, we'll be racing these cars against the best competition in the world.

The Ford GT, after running experimentally last year, now begins its first full

racing season with its American debut at the Daytona Continental.

43 cars.

29 from Europe and 14 from America will start

the 2,000-kilometer Daytona Continental.

So the GT40s show up at Daytona in 1965.

Shelby's had less than two months to turn these cars into winners.

The cars move up tight behind the pace car for the running start.

Number 77 Ferrari, the fastest qualifier on the inside.

Number 72 Ford GT, the second fastest qualifier on the outside.

And the race is on.

At the beginning of the race, Bob Bondurant in the GT40 flies by Surtees in a Ferrari.

Bob Bondurant sips into the first turn, opening up number 72 Ford GT.

By the time we got to turn two, I was doing 200 miles an hour,

and I pulled Surtees' 18 car lengths.

My car felt great.

I was like, yes!

We fixed it, and it worked.

With all the changes that Remington made, they got the car moving very quickly.

This race was the first race that GT40s finished.

The last lap.

The Americans have won.

They've overthrown the Ferraris.

This was a magnificent win for Shelby, and you could say that this victory,

maybe even more than his Le Mans win as a driver,

this is really the win that puts him on the map.

Not only had the GT40 won, Shelby American Cars took the top four spots.

With the Daytona Coupe taking first and second in the GT class.

The next race for the factory team was at Sebring.

With the GT40 and four Cobras running strong,

Shelby is delighted with how the team is performing.

It's

the worst value ever recorded at Sebring.

You take a tire off and change it, and if you

didn't grab it, it literally would float away.

It's the worst value ever recorded at Sebring.

Phil came in, and he's up to his waist in water,

because he couldn't drain out the coupe fast enough.

He was trying to get out of the car, and Shelby's going, God damn it,

he's staring and he's pushing him on the shoulder.

And I'd gotten a wheel hammer and a giant ice pick, and

I'm smashing holes in the floor, to drain the water out.

Meanwhile, Phil's screaming, because he thinks I'm going to hit him in the balls

or something, so I'm with the hammer, because I'm right

between his legs with the hammer and the ice pick.

And he's yelling, watch it, you're going to castrate me.

So he's trying to get out, and Shelby's pushing him back in, saying, God damn it,

Phil, get back in the car, he's not going to hit you, or it hurts.

A funny pit stop, that one.

Suddenly, the 12-hour Sebring Grand Prix of Endurance is over.

Number 11 Ford GT is first in the Grand Touring prototype class.

If we're successful at Daytona, and we're successful at Sebring,

my family and I, I will be there in June.

By the time Ford is getting its cars ready to ship to France, suddenly, people are

starting to describe Ferrari as an underdog.

Ford is expected to win.

This is the year of Ford's great challenge, an American

invasion on the supremacy of the Italian giants.

The pre-race drama had centered on the strongest ever challenge from Americans.

They declared their intention to beat Ferrari.

In 1965, it was starting to get really serious.

Shelby had won a year earlier in the GT class with the Daytona

Coupe, but Ferrari had still won overall with the prototype.

Prototypes are the cars that compete for victory overall at Le Mans.

And that's all anyone really cares about, is who wins the race overall.

Henry Ford II even made the trip to Le Mans for

the first time to watch his GT40s make history.

The car worked fantastic.

I was third fastest qualifier.

Ford debuted the GT40 in 1970.

In 1964, there's a huge audience.

But now, in 1965, there's even bigger audience.

For the first time at Le Mans, an American car is actually favored to win.

Chris Amon's first away in the Ford 7-Liter, followed

by Bob Bondurant, Bruce McLaren, and Surtees.

At the S's, the 7-Liter Ford GTs are pulling away from the works Ferraris,

and the leading Ford sets a blistering pace.

Bruce McLaren in one of the 427s and Chris Amon in the second.

By the time they're at the end of them

straight, the Ferraris aren't even in sight.

Ford had really built some good engines.

And somebody at Ford decided to replace them just before Le Mans.

The night before the race, the heads of Ford's special vehicles unit ordered

Shelby to replace his engines with engines prepared by the Ford factory.

They wanted to be able to tell Henry Ford II that they had won Le Mans with Ford

factory engines, not the ones from Shelby American.

But now the McLaren Miles Ford is in gearbox trouble.

Already the Ferrari grip on the race tightened.

What happened was they got some new head bolts, and they

didn't check them out, and all the head bolts stretched.

By midnight, with the race only one third through,

the Ford Challenge had been shattered by Ferrari.

All the cars broke.

Ford made the decision to tell Shelby to take them all out and put in Ford engines.

It didn't work out.

That was a disastrous race.

If I had not have changed an engine, I would have won.

Again, the Fords broke.

They made simple engineering mistakes.

And Ferrari didn't.

Only one Ferrari prototype finished the race.

But that was enough to win it.

And Ferrari also won the GT class.

And they finished 1-2-3 overall.

Not even Shelby's Daytona coupes managed to finish the race.

The press called it murder, Italian style.

It was the second year for my grandfather of utter disappointment.

And I'm sure he probably questioned in his mind whether this was all worth it.

Henry Ford and Edsel were at Le Mans.

They looked around at their father and said, is that the best we can do?

Ford Motor Company bring 200 people to Le Mans and fall on our face like that?

Ford with millions and millions of dollars

going down the tube again start to look bad.

This was humiliating.

And Henry Ford II was pissed.

Despite the GT40's disastrous performance at

the 24 Hours of Le Mans, not everything is lost.

Shelby American actually has the Cobra Daytona coupe in

a position to win the World Manufacturer's Championship.

If the car can win at the 12 Hours of Le Mans.

All of our Daytonas were given to the Alan Mann racing team in England to run them.

My father got the Daytona Cobras because Shelby at that time had a lot on his plate.

The race at Reims started in darkness.

And soon enough the team of Bondurant and Schlesser and

the Cobra Daytona coupe were winning the race handily.

No one could keep up with them.

And anyone that tried found themselves destroying their car in the process.

The Ferraris were just outgunned by Shelby's engineers.

The steering and Brock's design.

They were my co-driver.

We both wanted to win that championship.

We were running nice and strong across the finish line, and we knew we just won the

race and won the World Manufacturer's Championship.

First time any American ever won it.

That was the last time any American ever won it.

Schlesser and Bondurant had carried out Carroll Shelby's mission.

They beat Ferrari's ass on his own turf.

And they did it with six races left in the season.

Shelby crushed Ferrari.

That's the one race, that championship that Carroll Shelby wanted the most.

He was so proud when we won the World Manufactured Championship.

That was a big deal because that was basically a hot-rodded Cobra.

That was a 289 passenger car motor.

It was a home-built car.

And they won the World Championship.

Carroll Shelby finally met his promise to whip Ferrari's arse.

And he loved it ever afterwards.

When we won it in 1965, it was probably the greatest day of my life up until that time.

Ferrari personally took it very hard when Shelby beat him in the Daytona.

And Reims is the capital of Champagne.

So we celebrated immensely.

But there was little celebrating going on back in Los Angeles.

Henry IV's dissatisfaction at Le Mans had reverberations

that were shaking the foundation of Shelby American.

The decree comes down from Henry.

Put that ship to the side and start getting these GT40s done and do it right now.

And that crushed Peter, clearly.

The Daytona coupe was no longer needed.

And neither were its workers.

Definitely they got rid of a lot of people.

When I came back, a lot of the crew were missing.

They were gone.

I mean, they just weren't there anymore.

Anyone who was working on the Daytona coupe kind of got their walking papers.

Jack Balch had said, you know, we don't need you anymore.

And I thought, well, they can't do that to me.

I'll go over everybody's head and talk to Carroll.

He just looked at me, said sorry, and kept walking.

When I got back from Europe, there was a total stranger in my office there.

And I could see that there was, you know, not much future for me in there.

Shelby didn't really fire me.

But, you know, it was obvious that they didn't need me around there anymore.

And there was one more casualty that no one could have foreseen.

My father had five remaining Daytona Cobras at the end of the 65 season.

And had no way of getting them back to Shelby, really.

And Shelby wasn't interested and said, dump them in the North Sea.

After we won the World Championship, we didn't even

think they were worth hauling back from Europe.

We were through.

And Carroll said, they're not worth the freight to ship back.

If you would, just put them on a barge, take a customs guy

out with you, and just dump them in the English Channel.

Because I'm not willing to pay the freight on them.

Once something was done, that was history for him.

He's looking for the next thing that's happening.

And Alan Mann couldn't bring himself to dump them in the English Channel.

And so my father shipped them back to Shelby at his own expense.

The cars were loaded up as deck freight, exposed to the weather and condition,

and shipped back to California.

He didn't like it.

But he was ready to move on to something else.

Henry Ford II was not the chairman or the president of Ford Motor Company.

He was the emperor.

He really wanted to win races.

But he didn't care about second place at all.

If you called him up and said, well, we got second,

you might as well not have even finished the race.

I was with Don Fry and Leo Beebe when he called

us in, and he had the name tag made in 65.

But it says Ford wins Le Mans in 66.

You want a job next June, don't you?

Henry Ford had given him a business card that Henry

had written on the back of it, you better win.

There was a big Ford meeting in 1965 about how they were going to win Le Mans.

And it was decided that certain teams would have certain responsibilities,

and they would all prepare cars independently and run them at the events.

Ford decided to expand its operation.

So instead of just having Shelby American, they also hired Pullman and Moody,

who was already running their stock car operation, and Allen Mann Racing,

which had just won the GT championship with the Cobra Daytona Coupe.

The vice to win was tightening around Shelby.

Not only was his job on the line, Ford had added

two other teams to put even more pressure on him.

So this competition all along, not just Ford-Ferrari, it's Ford within Ford.

Everyone worked extra hard, extra testing, to make everything really work.

If the engine blew, they just lost their job.

We knew we had some brake issues.

A heavier car, you just have to understand

that, you know, it's not going to stop as easy.

Especially Le Mans, because of the Mulsanne Strait, so you got 3.

2 miles and the brakes would go from 1200 degrees to zero, every single lap.

I don't think they had the material that would

withstand, you know, that repeated cycle.

Kinetic energy at the end of that 3.5 mile straight was so high from the brake

temperatures and so forth, that the brakes would have probably

lasted two or three hours and that would have been all.

Phil Remington figured out how to make a quick

change brake setup on a Shelby American, the GT40.

Changed the discs and the calipers and the whole braking system on it.

The fact that we could change the brakes in one minute was the key.

Racing for the flag in the 24-hour Daytona Continental.

Ford had five GT40 Mark IIs in the running, led by Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby,

and Dan Gurney and Jerry Grant.

Miles takes the lead in pushing the last Ferrari threat.

For the first time, Ford wins 1-2-3 at Daytona.

This is the 12 hours of Sebring.

Can the Fords win two in a row?

And can Ferrari come back after a rather dismal start at the beginning of this year?

It's neck and neck now.

Mark, Miles, Gurney, tossing up the cover with

a blanket as they roar through the webster.

The GT40s and the P-Series Ferraris battled each other all race.

Now they're giving it an inch.

So with nightfall on, it's Ford, Ford, Ford.

Sebring is another 1-2-3 finish for the Ford GT40s.

All that's left is Le Mans.

You'll probably see the surround as a

competitor at Le Mans for a long time to come.

What I'm talking about is a real threat where it's taken us about three or four

years to get on to the type of racing here and the type of race that this particular

race is, which is the only one like it in the world.

My brother and I, in 1966 summer, were in Europe.

And Dad invited us to Le Mans.

We were not under the impression of the pressure he was under.

If he had lost, he was going to be in trouble.

Shelby knew he had to stay ahead of the other GT40 teams.

And then there was Ferrari, who would do anything to win.

I learned that Enzo Ferrari wanted to beat me.

So I went down, and met him.

And he said, would you like to run with us?

I said, yeah, I would.

Ferrari had stolen Shelby's world champion driver right out from under him.

66 was a great year for the GT40.

We won Daytona 1-2-3, we won Sebring 1-2-3.

I went to Le Mans with him in 1966.

He had a smile on his face the minute we got on the airplane.

I mean, he was really excited.

He was going over to beat the Europeans on their own turf.

Even though I'd say they were the odds-on favorite, they

had a history of failing at Le Mans the past two years.

And in fact, they'd never had a car finish at Le Mans.

We had a strategy.

And we thought the only way we would beat the Fords would be if we could go along

and from the very start of the race, we could drive it like a Grand Prix.

Because the drivers in the Fords were all racers.

And they wouldn't just hold back.

They would have a go.

And there was some possibility that we might be able to break the Fords.

Gurney were the rabbits.

So their job was to go out and break the Ferraris.

When the race started, Ken Miles didn't get his door closed correctly.

But he got a terrible start.

And I thought, oh, this ended right from the beginning.

Ken Miles, he was the ultimate long-distance racer.

He could go very quickly if he had to.

Race, race, race.

His deal was competition.

He just loved to compete.

The next 20 laps or so was just incredible.

Ken was falling ass.

I mean, he was just going so quick.

He wasn't backing off or anything.

It was his job to break the Ferraris.

The Mark II driven by Ken Miles and Dennis Holm is leading, but it has been a battle

all along between car number one and car number three, Dan Gurney and Ken Miles.

And the Ferrari being driven by Rodriguez and Ginther.

Dan Gurney's car died about the eleventh hour.

Ken was still really hauling ass.

I mean, he was just doing a great job.

We're still running away with the race.

Ferraris are dropping out.

Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon, they were running

several laps back, but still running really strong.

A few hours from the finish, it looked like the car wasn't going to break anyway.

Ken was going to win the race easy.

Miles is now in first place, and he's lapping at amazing

speeds, faster than they told him he should be going.

Miles is one Daytona.

Miles is one Seabrook.

So if Ken Miles wins Le Mans, it would be the Triple Crown.

No driver had won the three premier long-distance endurance races of the year.

The word came down, presumably from my grandfather,

that he wanted this one, two, three finish.

A lot of it was people saying that Miles

wins again, and Ford wanted Ford wins again.

Henry Ford told Carroll, he said, you've got to slow him down.

He's leaning on the pit, we're waiting for his stint on the drive.

And that's when he first told me they want me to back off.

They've talked to the Le Mans officials, saying that we can do a dead heat,

which still meant that Ken had to slow down to let Bruce catch up, which he did.

Ford won one, two, three.

And Henry Ford was so happy he beat Ferrari.

It was a relief for a lot of people because this was

a Herculean effort to make this program a success.

I felt wonderful about us winning one, two, and three.

If our people at Shelby American hadn't developed a way to change

the rotors in 20 seconds, we would have never won the race.

We would have never blown a Ferrari zone.

That quick-change brake system was a huge joke.

And that would never have come out of corporate.

They would have never allowed it.

It was a shop, of course, but that's motor racing, you know?

One day, you lose it.

When it came to the finish, it was actually considered a dead heat.

But when Ken came up the pit lanes ahead in the circle, they kept waving him off,

yelling in French, and we didn't know what was going on.

And then the FIA got involved and said, well, just so you know...

If there is a dead heat across the finishing line, the car that started

farthest back on the starting line must have covered the greatest distance.

So number two becomes the winner.

There wasn't going to be a one, two, three finish.

Bruce was going to win.

Come on!

We made a horrible decision with Ken Miles in

saying the three cars come over exactly together.

It was good politically for Ford, so I couldn't argue with it.

Besides that, I work for Ford, and I'm not going to go against Henry Ford.

Ken ended up getting cheated out of it.

Yeah, it broke his heart.

I wish Ken Miles had won it because he earned the win of the race.

I've always felt guilty about that.

But you can't change history.

That's what happened, and we don't have to live.

When they win the race, Henry Ford is asked, well, what happens now?

Henry Ford says, well, we're going to come back next year and do it again.

At the latter part of 66, Carroll Shelby, Phil Remington, and the Shelby experts

were making a faster, quicker Mark II B.

So my grandfather was determined to make sure that

people knew that this was not some kind of fluke.

And so development of the cars that continued in 66, the J car, was a

prototype that they had used this kind of honeycomb pattern.

So they sent it out to testing.

The car was being tested by Ken Miles.

The car broke.

He was doing 180 miles an hour.

It careened wildly.

It was unsurvivable.

They pointed to where he was laying in the dirt.

And then I could see it was in pretty bad shape.

And then I started to go over there, and they said, don't go.

I've never had a loss that hit me as hard as when we lost Ken.

Not only a friend, but he was a good engineer.

He was a good tester.

He was a good driver.

As good a race driver as I ever knew.

And I can't say what a void I felt when we lost him.

The loss of Miles was difficult to bear, but

losing Shelby, that would destroy the company.

It was 1966.

This was six years after Shelby was told by

doctors he only had five years left to live.

Jesus Christ, they told you you weren't going to live five years in 1960,

and every five years is a new pill or a new operation.

He, in my opinion, knew more than a lot of his doctors.

At his bedside, there's stacks of medical journals, and he would read those things

voraciously, looking for something that could help cure whatever ailment he had.

The doctor said, you had 40 heart attacks.

I used to get an angina attack.

I'd just sit down and rest for five minutes.

And he says, you were having a heart attack.

Oh, those are probably 40.

40 times.

And I'm going to walk in a chemical depository.

At this point, Shelby had routinely cheated death, which was good news for

Ford Motor Company because they needed him now more than ever.

In 1967, when the season began at Daytona, Ford

showed up with a full array of upgraded Mark IIs.

Ferrari wanted revenge after 66.

And he brought like six cars.

But Ferrari came to me and said, Mario, the P3 has lost.

You can improve the P3.

When you win, many times, you are led to a wrong

assessment of the factors that determined the victory.

When you lose, you always see very clearly.

So, by losing, you learn to build new cars.

Ferrari shows up with the P3, a brand new car.

It's called the 330 P4.

It's just beautiful.

It looks stunning.

It's got a new engine that's derived from their Formula 1 engine.

And it just kicks ass.

It's easy to think of the GT40 as being the iconic car of the time.

But the Ferraris that were racing against them were, in

their own way, the most sophisticated sports cars ever built.

This was going to be a real showdown and a real race.

Ford had all these entries, and they were all big blocks.

They started coming in one after the other with broken transmissions.

Only one out of six GT40s finished at Daytona in 1967.

Ferrari won the 24 Hours of Daytona with a one, two, three.

Early in the career, they had not been as durable as the opposition.

This was the first time that Ford had ever been slower than the opposition.

They had a lot of power.

They had a lot of traction.

Something needed to be done.

And it wasn't clear how to make the Mk2 decidedly faster in a short period of time.

We had a pile of crap.

One of them killed Ken Miles out at Riverside.

They really needed a lot of development.

And we jumped in and did in about three months.

But it had taken Ford a couple of years to screw up back there.

Shelby and his team had to come up with a solution quickly.

There was no wind tunnel at the LAX shop, but there was one in Dearborn.

Shelby knew what he had to do.

Phil Remington returned to Dearborn with two of his chief fabricators.

And they took the first J car chassis and they took it into the wind tunnel and they

started literally cutting away at the bodywork

to try to improve the aerodynamics of the car.

They came up with a shape that was so dramatically different

than the J car that they dubbed the new car the Mk4.

And they went out and tested that and it proved to

be faster right out of the box than the existing Mk2.

It was decided to race the Mk4 at Sebring and if it did well at Sebring,

they would go ahead and take that to Le Mans.

After Daytona, Enzo Ferrari's P4s were so dominant,

he didn't even bother sending them to Sebring.

The competition would be between the old GT40 Mk2B and the brand-new Mk4.

By the S's, the Fords have gobbled up the quick-starting

outfit and McLaren has assumed command with point second.

We go out there and we're running 7 to 10 seconds a lap faster.

By nightfall, the redesigned GT40 Mk4 is a full 12 laps ahead of the Ford Mk2.

We raced to the Sebring the first time and won.

And Mk4 became the envy of the competition.

It's race week, and along with nearly every gendarme in the

south of France comes the world's finest racing machinery.

It would be the first time that the Mk4 and

the P4 would face each other on the racetrack.

Ferrari has three of their factory P4s in the top 10, and they finished 1,

2, 3 in the only other 24-hour race of the season at Daytona.

The candy-colored Fords are the fastest with six of the top 10 starting positions.

And as the race progressed, the Fords took the lead.

The Ferraris were not too far behind.

They were the fastest racing cars in the world.

Now, from the air, we see Gurney quickly

accelerating to become the leader on the 48th lap.

Foyt begins his two-hour stint behind the wheel, his first appearance in competition

at Le Mans, and with only 10 practice laps under his belt.

A.J.

Foyt, the rookie everyone was worrying about, has charged into a seven-lap beat.

Fifteen cars have already dropped out, trying to keep up with the bright red Ford.

Foyt was ecstatic about the Mark IV's performance,

but they kept a watchful eye on Shelby.

Mr. Foyt had his sergeants with him, but they would come through every two or

three hours, and that happened all night long.

I was in the pit performing at the pit stop.

I turned around to duck right on the other side of

the car and I bashed into this one guy standing there.

I said, move out of the way.

I went to Al Dowd, our team manager.

I said, can you get all these fuckers out of the pits?

I said, this great big guy down there, I bashed straight into him.

What's he doing standing in that pit?

Turns out it was Henry Ford.

And I thought, oh my God, what have I done?

So I went and apologized, and he says, don't worry, son.

He says, it's okay.

I shouldn't have been there.

I shouldn't have been your way.

Roger McCluskey and Joe Schlesser, both in Mark II's,

complete a five-car team of Fords that are leading the way.

At 3.30 in the morning, the whole complexion of the race changes when

Andretti spins his car, bounces off the wall, and stops in the middle of the track.

Seconds later, McCluskey and Joe Schlesser spin out, trying to avoid Andretti.

No one is injured, but all three cars must be retired.

Ferrari hadn't given up, and Ford did everything

they could to help Ferrari stay in the race.

They lost three cars in one accident.

There was only one Ford left, and that happened to be ours.

Two factory Ferraris are in hot pursuit, now in second and third position.

Less than four hours to go, Dan Gurney drives the number

one Ford for his last shift before turning it over to A.J.

Voigt, waiting in the pits, who is scheduled to finish the race.

The Ferraris begin to pick up the pace, hoping

to push the leading Ford into a breakdown.

The Ford was about three miles an hour faster than the Ferrari.

Even though he was in the draft, I could walk

away from him down straightaway a little bit.

Ferrari were always fairly close to the pace, but never close enough.

It was the steamroller again.

Ford won.

There's the checkered flag.

And Gurney climbs atop the Ford.

An

effort from tyres to drivers to car.

Gurney did a beautiful job of not showing Foyt how fast the car would go.

And Foyt did a fabulous job in driving within his

limits, realising that 24 hours is a long time.

Taking care of the engine, taking care of the gearbox.

Ford went on to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans again in 1968.

And again in 1969.

Only two mates ever won.

Ford won Le Mans in the 1960s.

Ferrari won the first half.

Ford won the second half.

In 1968 and 1969, the GT40 won Le Mans without any factory support from Ford.

Or Carroll Shelby.

By the end of the 1967 season, Henry Ford II had achieved what he set out to do.

Dominate Le Mans and dominate Ferrari.

Racing hadn't had the effect in terms of sales that he had hoped for.

Which made it easier to terminate the racing

programme and everything that was related to it.

They shut Shelby down in August of 1967.

And when the shutdown came, Ford just shut his operation off.

They just closed it.

So by late 1967, Dad didn't have any production cars there.

I was out of business at Ford.

It's almost surreal because there was no real activity going on in the shop.

He really wasn't doing that much at all.

And then seemingly out of nowhere, a new opportunity shows up for Shelby.

The Sports Car Club of America is gaining notoriety.

Major manufacturers are now fielding teams.

Porsche.

Triumph.

Datsun.

Toyota.

They were all in.

Unfortunately, Shelby was a little late to the game.

He had a connection at the Toyota factory team.

The only problem was, Toyota had already signed on with his former employee,

Peter Brock.

Peter got the job of running the Toyota factory.

The Toyota GTs.

Shelby got the deal out from under him.

So Shelby became the Toyota team with the 2000 GT.

I was really pretty upset that he had gotten the Toyota

program after they had originally given it to me.

After he'd been rejected by the American Datsun, Peter approached Datsun Japan

because he wanted to beat Shelby's Toyotas.

I ended up running against Shelby.

The competition was so stiff on the West Coast.

With the Triumph team and the Porsche team and our team, that Shelby didn't really

have a chance of getting too many points or winning anything on the West Coast.

He tried to streak off to Stuttgart, Arkansas or someplace else to pick up some

cherry picking points in a region that wasn't too strong.

My guys in his shop would call me and say, we're going to Stuttgart.

And we'd load up and go to Stuttgart to race against

him to make sure that he didn't get any points.

He won pretty much every race that we ran.

Shelby didn't qualify for the national championships in his first year.

And Toyota was so embarrassed they quit racing.

And then we went on to win all the championships with the Datsuns.

For Shelby, the racing business had given him so much.

But now all it did was take.

Abandoned by Ford.

Humiliated by his old employee, Pete Brock.

And having achieved everything he ever wanted to, Shelby knew what he always knew.

And that was when to move on.

After we'd won Le Mans.

After we'd won the world championship.

I lost all interest.

There weren't any interesting cars you could build.

It just got to be too much.

We were ready to fold our tent.

That little company had a heart and soul that no

company that I've ever known or seen around racing had.

It was something that nobody was paid a lot of money.

Nobody gave a shit how many hours they worked.

Just get it done.

There'll never be another little company like that.

With Ford losing interest in racing.

And the entire industry focused on emissions

and safety at the expense of performance.

Shelby decided to withdraw completely from racing for the next decade.

The automobile industry was putting all kinds of demands on safety.

Dad wasn't wild about taking a Cobra and

running it into a wall to see what it would do.

Kind of took the fun out of the game for him.

You had to fool with environmental problems, emissions

and so forth that we had to clean the environment up.

But there was nothing to do.

Performance went away.

We were introduced to abysmal 70s.

Shelby's frustration with government interference in the

auto business made him want to take a break from racing.

This gave him time to pursue other ambitions.

Harold had a propensity for women and he liked to be married for some reason.

We don't know exactly how many times he was married,

but it was probably north of seven and south of ten.

Every time my brother and I went out to California and

went into his house, there was somebody else new there.

And they were all knockouts.

I was the photographer.

At one of his weddings that he denied ever took place.

He married an old girl in Nassau.

Every time I mentioned it, he said, Dave, I never married her.

But I said, Carol, you want to see the pictures?

I think Carol was married between five and seven times.

It was probably more than that.

At least the ladies thought they married him, if that tells you anything.

He took her to a friend of his, the Justice of Peace of San Diego.

He wanted a Justice of Peace.

But she still got a divorce.

Nobody knows how many times she was really married.

When he and Ford split up in the late 60s, he didn't look back.

He was going on to his next project.

As an entrepreneur, he got into many different businesses.

He started the Carol Shelby Chili Company along with the International Chili Society.

I had 200,000 acres of rocks down in West Texas that I'd bought.

So I needed to sell it, and I didn't know what to do with it.

I went to a friend of mine who was in the PR business in Dallas.

And he says, we're going to have the first world championship chili cook-off.

It was only meant to be a one-time event.

And lo and behold, it took off.

And it's gotten so big.

There's chili cook-offs all over the United States.

He was just able to take an idea and promote it and make it work.

Shelby had left the automobile business behind.

But the automobile business had not forgotten about Carol Shelby.

So in 1982, an old friend comes calling.

I, Koka, decided he needed to jazz up Chrysler a little.

In the early 1980s, Chrysler was desperate for a performance product.

I, Koka, called me one day and says, hey, I need some help.

We put this thing together and we sold 8,000 of those things the first year.

The innovations that Shelby was making under our leadership and I, Koka's

leadership at Chrysler were boosting the company's bottom line.

Shelby and I, Koka were working on what would become

Chrysler's most exciting performance vehicle ever.

But halfway through the design of the car, Shelby's old nemesis caught up with him.

His heart was failing, and this time for good.

When he was with Chrysler, his health was going down pretty fast.

And his doctor said he needed a new heart if he was going to continue on much longer.

It finally got so bad in about 1986.

That I have to sleep sitting up in bed with my lungs filling up.

And I was told that I'd have to have a transplant if I was to survive.

With that inappropriate donor, this was a man who was coming to grips

with the fact that he was probably about to die.

And here comes a 34-year-old in Vegas somewhere that falls over with an aneurysm.

He's brain dead.

My coordinator, she came in and said, Shelby?

I think we might have found you a heart.

There'll never be words that are any sweeter than that.

So, dad gets a 34-year-old heart.

Not a 60-year-old, not a 70-year-old.

A 34-year-old gives him a new heart.

And it really just gave him a new lease on life.

And it allowed him to want to go function and

succeed at some other projects that he had in mind.

We're coming out with a very interesting car

called a Viper that I just drove last week.

I can tell you for sure that it's a worthy successor

to the Cobra, and it's a hell of an automobile.

I think the name Viper was Chrysler's version of Cobra, you know, a snake.

Shelby was healthy again, and he brought to the Viper the same enthusiasm which he

used decades earlier to charm the world with the first vehicle he ever sold.

Chrysler's homage to Shelby was a hit, and a fitting

end to his reunion with his old friend Lee Iacocca.

Back to his old self, Carroll set out to do something he'd never done before.

Carroll began to dream of building another original car.

He really wanted to produce a car that had the same

kind of impact that the Cobra did back in the day.

And I think one that he could look at and say, I made this.

It didn't come from another company.

We produced this.

No one was designing and building their own car

from the ground up as an independent company.

And so he started designing the Series 1 in the early 90s.

We just put down some designs.

He got a deal with Oldsmobile, so he used their engine.

I went on to build the best sport car they ever built out in Las Vegas.

It's a beautiful car.

It really is.

It cost him a lot more money than he made out of it.

It's a good example of Carroll putting everything he has into a project.

Which he's done, I think, throughout his life.

In true Shelby fashion, Carroll put everything he had into the Series 1.

Unfortunately, as can often happen when you leverage everything that you have

towards a particular business, he faced some struggles that nearly wiped him out.

Carroll had survived the pursuit of a dream that would prove costly.

Luck was in the cards for Carroll.

He would have the opportunity to end his career the way he started it.

By returning to Ford.

Edsel Ford was instrumental in that, quite frankly.

He'd known Carroll since the 60s, and they were close.

My father decided that I should work for a summer.

So he said to me, you know, Edsel, you've got to figure out where you want to work.

I said, I want to work for Carroll Shelby.

He hired my dad as like an intern for the summer,

because I think my grandfather probably made him.

But my dad loved it, and I think in many ways,

Carroll was like a father figure to my dad.

I reached out to Carroll, and I said, you

know, we've got to get you back in the family.

In 1962, he had to come with them and sell them the ideas.

And he had spent his lifetime coming to and selling his ideas.

To have somebody come to him and say, you've got the name, you've got some of

the expertise, really kind of put up half a step in his walk.

I never dreamed that I'd still be in the business

and working with Ford again at 82 years old.

And I couldn't be happier.

Ford was introducing in 05 and 06 the new Ford GT, which

was again a retro view of the GT40 back from the 60s.

And so, you know, Carroll was there for the introduction of that, and then shortly

thereafter followed the new Shelby Mustang that Ford produced in 2007.

Millions of car fans were psyched to see the Shelby logo on Ford cars again.

He came back, and I kept on asking him, are you happy?

Are you happy with where you are today?

And he always said, oh, yes.

He said, this is where I always wanted to be, Edsel.

It was always meant to be that Carroll Shelby would

always be somehow connected with Ford Motor Company.

Always.

I couldn't be happier than to be with Ford and know

that I'm going to be there the rest of my life.

In the last year of his life, he said, I want to drive

down to the lake and the timberland one more time.

And he said, I want to drive.

It's important that I drive.

The lake that he had built, a 30-acre lake.

But he drove all the way around that lake and all the way around the property.

And he got to see a 1,000-acre property and a 30-acre lake.

Going back to the house, he said, this is probably

the last time I'll drive down here to the lake.

Every American kid who grew up loving cars lost a giant today.

And for some of us hardcore car guys, he was a hero.

His name was Carroll Shelby.

I really enjoy it.

I loved Carroll Shelby.

I really did.

He was a magical person, just magical.

This guy is such an icon, such a hero to so many people.

I think he appreciated the good things that

happened to him, but they weren't given to him.

He sure worked at it, and I admired that a lot.

He could bounce back from almost anything.

I saw him do that over and over and over again.

And if he had a bad race, it was the same thing.

He'd put it behind him.

You know, you had a bad play, but that's okay.

The next play's gonna work.

Well, I think when you say Shelby, I think he'd think of the Cobra.

That car was so dominant.

Mainly because it was built from a bunch of hot

rodders into a world championship winning car.

I feel privileged that I was there when it started.

He has always given everybody else credit.

And he's never, ever tried to take credit for something.

And when he came to the shop, he was a father and a friend and a fun guy.

And inspiration.

He provided the vision on how things could be done.

And Ford said, yeah, we trust you, go do it.

I just think it's fantastic that the Shelby name continues to move forward.

Especially with the Ford brand.

I know that that was one of Carroll's biggest wishes before he passed away.

They appreciate the brand and the man more than that.

Come out of a little bitty Leesburg, Texas.

Son of a rural mail carrier.

And be a powerhouse in a huge industry.

That's how I'd like to think of my dad from now on.

But I want to be known as someone who's a man.

Someone that loved what I did.

That loved my family.

I think the most important thing in life is never give up.

And never forget how thankful you should be.