Carroll Shelby & Edsel B. Ford II Photo – Ford Racing

The following statement is attributable to Edsel B. Ford II, member of the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company and great-grandson of Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company.


On Carroll Shelby’s passing late Thursday, May 10, 2012 due to complications from pneumonia…




“Today, we have lost a legend in Ford Motor Company’s history, and my family and I have lost a dear friend. Carroll Shelby is one of the most recognized names in performance car history, and he’s been successful at everything he’s done. Whether helping Ford dominate the 1960s racing scene or building some of the most famous Mustangs, his enthusiasm and passion for great automobiles over six decades has truly inspired everyone who worked with him. He was a great innovator whose legend at Ford never will be forgotten. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.”


Jamie Allison, Director, Ford Racing on the passing of Carroll Shelby
“In the history of our company there are a handful of men who have stamped their imprint on the heart and soul of what we do at Ford Racing and Carroll Shelby is definitely one of them. I’m just so fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet him and our thoughts and prayers go out to his family. We at Ford and his legions of fans will have a silent moment to reflect on what he’s done for the company. It’s personal for me and I’m sure it’s personal for many fans.”


Carroll Shelby, Ford Family for More Than Half a Century
Carroll Shelby was a member of the Ford family for the better part of 60 years, producing stunning performance vehicles from concepts to production models.


He once said his energy and passion for performance products were always strongest when he was working with Ford.


Shelby most recently collaborated with the company on the 2013 Ford Shelby GT500 Mustang, the most powerful production V8 in the world. Working with SVT engineers at Sebring and the Arizona Proving Grounds, at times he drove for more than eight hours – at the ripe old age of 88. He was having so much fun he didn’t want to stop.


In this 110th Anniversary of Ford Racing video, Shelby talks about his career working with Ford and winning Le Mans.




The legend begins
Carroll Shelby was nearly 30 years old before he entered his first car race – a quarter-mile drag meet in 1952. The hot rod he drove to the finish line that day was powered by a Ford V8.


Shelby’s first Ford derivatives were the legendary Cobras and Shelby Mustangs of the 1960s. He was heavily involved in the design and engineering of the Ford Shelby Cobra Concept car unveiled in 2004, and was  a key member of the dream team that built the 2005 Ford GT.


Carroll Shelby may have gotten a late start, but he was a winner from the beginning. Just two years into his driving career, Aston Martin racing manager John Wyer recruited him to co-drive a DB3 at Sebring. Within months, the chicken farmer from Texas was bumping elbows and trading paint with the likes of Juan Manuel Fangio, Phil Hill and Paul Frere. Driving an Aston Martin DBR1 with Roy Salvadori, he won Europe’s prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1959.


Early in 1962 Shelby drove his second Ford-powered race car. It was the first mockup for the Cobra, Shelby’s now-legendary marriage of a lightweight British roadster body with a small-block Ford V8. By January 1963 he had homologated the car under the FIA’s GT Group III class, and that month a Cobra won its first race, beating a field of Corvette Stingrays at Riverside California.

1965 Shelby Colbra by Performance

In January 1965 Ford hired Shelby to lend his expertise to the GT40 campaign. Three cars had run the 1964 24 Hours of Le Mans, but none finished. Shelby began installing the more reliable 7-liter stock car engine in what would come to be known as the GT40 Mark II. It proved considerably faster than the Mark I, and in just two seasons became a strong contender. In 1966 the GT40 began a domination of endurance car racing that would last for four years.


While Ford and Shelby took on Ferrari at Le Mans, at home they fought Corvette. The first effort was the legendary Shelby Cobra, a Ford-powered, Shelby-engineered derivative of the AC Ace. The car had a one-ton weight advantage over the Corvette.


Shelby Mustang
In August 1964 Ford had asked Carroll Shelby to develop a street-legal, high-performance Mustang to compete against Corvette in SCCA B-production road racing. By September, California-based Shelby-American had completed the first Mustang GT350.


The 1965 Shelby Mustang GT350 was a fastback production model with a functional scoop in its fiberglass hood and 306 horsepower from its 289-cubic-inch V8 – an increase of 35 horsepower over the stock engine. Suspension upgrades included a larger front stablizer bar, Koni shocks and rear traction bars, along with race-ready features. It sold for $4,000, and was instantly recognizable by its Wimbledon White paint and blue GT350 side stripes.


For 1966 the GT350 came in white, red, black, green and blue, and Hertz purchased nearly 1,000 special GT350H weekend “rent-a-racers.” In 1967 Shelby Mustangs sported unique fiberglass bodywork that extended the front end with an aggressive dual scoop and finished the trunk lid with an integrated spoiler.


But most important in 1967 was the new GT500, a big-block with 355 horsepower. More than 2,000 of those 428-cubic-inch Mustangs were delivered that first model year.


1968 was when the name “Cobra” was first officially used on a Shelby Mustang, and that year a convertible bodystyle became available as well. Although the Shelby Cobra GT350 was essentially unchanged, later GT500s were powered by the new Cobra Jet 428 engine and thus became GT500KR – for King of the Road.

1969-1970 Shelby Mustang

For 1969, the penultimate year of the Shelby Mustang, engine choices included the optional 351 Ram Air, and the bodywork incorporated a total of nine scoops – five on the hood, one at the front of each fender and one on each quarter panel. In 1970, with sales slowing, the final Shelby Mustangs built for 1969 were updated to 1970 spec and sold. The famed run had come to an end.


It would be more than 30 years before Ford and Shelby worked together again, and in March 2001 they reunited, with Shelby coming on board to consult on a new GT40 Concept. In March 2002 Ford green-lighted production of the Ford GT. Then, in April 2003 Shelby collaborated on a concept car that would pay homage to the original Shelby Cobra. The car stole the show the following year at NAIAS.


Ford stoked the passions of enthusiasts again in 2004 with the unveiling of the modern Ford Shelby GR-1 Concept at Pebble Beach. J Mays, Ford group vice president for Design, said Shelby’s input was reflected in the the car’s performance underpinnings.

2008 Shelby Mustang

In 2008, Carroll Shelby’s 85th birthday was marked by the first 2008 Ford Shelby GT500KR to roll off the production line. An exclusive run of only 1,000 units, this King of the Road was a 540-horsepower muscle car. Shelby, who was actively involved in developing it said, “I’m always looking to up the ante when it comes to performance, and bringing back the King of the Road Mustang is just what we need.”


Carroll Shelby’s last collaboration with Ford was on the 2013 Ford Shelby GT500, which produces 662 horsepower and 631 lb-ft of torque, making it the most powerful production V8 engine in the world. In January, Shelby’s one-of-one racetrack durability car was auctioned at Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale, AZ for $350,000.


Key moments in the history of Carroll Shelby and Ford Motor Company
1952 – Shelby enters first race at the wheel of a Ford-powered hot rod
1962 – Shelby tests his first Ford-powered AC260 Roadster – the car that would become the Shelby Cobra. Shelby-American begins operations in Venice, CA Cobra production begins
1964 – Ford asks Shelby to develop a high-performance Mustang derivative. First Shelby prototypes are built
1965 – Shelby GT350 is introduced. Ford hires Shelby-American to oversee GT40 program. Hertz begins buying GT350H versions for its “rent-a-racer” program
1966 – Ford GT40 Mark II wins Le Mans. First 1967 Shelby GT500s delivered
1967 – Ford and Shelby-American win Le Mans, again. 1968 Shelby Mustang convertibles debut
1968 – 1969 model year production begins
1969 – Shelby Mustang production ends
1970 – Ford and Shelby end their long-term racing agreement
2001 – Carroll Shelby is invited by Ford to consult on GT40 Concept
2002 – Ford green-lights production of Ford GT
2003 – Ford invites Shelby to collaborate on a concept car that pays homage to original Shelby Cobra
2004 – Ford Shelby Cobra Concept steals the show at NAIAS. Ford asks Shelby to consult on a follow-up concept. Shelby announces it will build limited-edition Shelby Ford Expedition. Ford unveils Shelby GR-1 Concept
2006 – Shelby GTH debuts at New York Auto Show
2007 – GT500 name debuts
2008 – First 2008 Ford Shelby GT500KR rolls off the line on Carroll Shelby’s 85th birthday. Partnering with Ford Racing, Shelby fields factory race team for the first time since 1969
2011 – Debut of 662-horsepower, 631-lb-ft 2013 Ford Shelby GT500, the most powerful production V8 engine in the world.
2012 – Ford Shelby GT500 sells at Barrett-Jackson for $350,000


More on Carroll Shelby’s career, in his own words, can be found in this series of videos 


Source: PCGCampbell for Ford Racing-Press Release

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Press Release

This weekend at Darlington Raceway, Denny Hamlin’s No. 11 car will sport a special paint scheme honoring Hall of Fame member Cale Yarborough. The Timmonsville, SC native won 55 races in a car numbered 11.


Yarborough also won 13 races in a car numbered 21 and fielded by the Wood Brothers of Stuart, VA.


Yarborough had just one victory in the series, now known as Sprint Cup – on the half-mile dirt track in Valdosta, GA – when he was hired by the Woods midway through the 1966 season.


He scored his first major victory the next year, when he sat on the pole and won at Atlanta. It wasn’t until 1968 that he began to deliver the kind of results that Ford executive Charlie Gray had in mind, when he convinced the Woods to put the relatively inexperienced Yarborough in their potent No. 21 Fords and Mercurys.


Yarborough won the Daytona 500 and the Firecracker 400 at Daytona. He won the spring race at Atlanta and the first Martinsville race.


The fifth of his six wins that season, in the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway; however, was a special one for both driver and team.


It was the first of five victories at this home track for Yarborough, and the first of eight at Darlington for the Wood Brothers.


Leonard Wood, the team’s crew chief in those days, recalled that Yarborough was sick heading into one of the most grueling races on the schedule.


“He had the flu or something,” Wood said. “You can look at his picture in the Winner’s Circle and tell that he was under the weather.”


While the driver wasn’t feeling up to par, his car was. He qualified on the outside pole and led the first 16 laps.


Wood said that; then and now, the secret to success at Darlington, is having a fast car from the time it’s unloaded.


“You set your wedge and handling like you think it ought to be.” Wood said. “If you didn’t hit it right on the money in the first practice, you wound up working for it.


“Most of the time if you weren’t right when you got there, you didn’t get it right; but that time we hit it right on the money, and he ran well all day.”


Yarborough led 169 of the 364 laps that day, but his biggest challenge came from a fellow South Carolinian who would go on to drive the No. 21 – David Pearson.

As was his style, Pearson, driving the Holman-Moody Ford, stalked Yarborough as the laps began to wind down. When he made his move at Lap 320, the two cars touched. Yarborough bounced off the guardrail while Pearson spun into the grass.


“It didn’t knock Cale out,” Wood said. “He kept on getting it.”


Even though the caution flag never flew, Pearson caught Yarborough again, but was unable to wrestle the lead from him.


In his post-race comments, as reported in Greg Fielden’s Forty Years of Stock Car Racing, Yarborough credited his victory to a decision by the Woods to switch brands of tires early in the race, even though it meant losing two laps.


“The tire change was the key to our victory,” he said.


Leonard Wood said changing tire brands in mid-race isn’t as radical as it sounds today.

“That was kind of common in those days,” he said. “If one set of tires was doing better than the other, you just switched.” 


Wood said when Yarborough was driving the No. 21, the hard-charging style he showed that day at Darlington was always evident.


“There was never a need to put the ‘Go’ sign on the pit board,” Wood said. “He ran hard all the time. He was a go-getter as far as giving it all he had every lap. He really wanted to win, and he was strong physically, and determined. Yarborough was driven to win and didn’t like losing at all. At Daytona in July of ’67, there was a rain delay late in the race. We were in fourth place, and I would have been happy if it had rained out; be he said, ‘Oh no, there are three more spots up there’ and he went out and won the thing on the restart.”


Wood said in the years since, Yarborough, who was named Ford’s Man of the Year in 1968, has remained close to his old team.


“He’s always been an A-Number-One friend,” Wood said. “He was when we had him as a driver. We never had any arguments, not one disagreement.”


Photos and story from Wood Brothers Racing

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NASCAR Press Release


First Southern 500 Featured 75 Cars, Many Driven To Track Then Home Again

NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series history began in Charlotte, NC on June 19, 1949 with Jim Roper’s victory in a 150-mile race over the 3/4-mile dirt Charlotte Speedway.


The foundations of the modern sport, however, were poured the following year with the opening of Darlington Raceway in South Carolina. The track’s 63rd running of the Bojangles’ Southern 500 is set for Saturday night on FOX at 7pm ET.


Before Harold Brasington’s then 1.25-mile track was built – a year-long process – asphalt race tracks were virtually unheard of in the southeastern United States. The Strictly Stock Series competed on paved ovals only twice pre-Darlington, at the 1/2-mile Dayton Speedway in Ohio although Daytona’s Beach & Road Course surface was a combination of pavement and sand.


Darlington, however, was the game-changer leading to construction of paved, banked superspeedways – tracks measuring a mile or longer – over the next decade in Daytona Beach, FL, Charlotte and Atlanta. 


More than 80 cars from all points of the compass turned out for the Sept 4, 1950 Southern 500, driven rather than towed in many cases from small Carolina towns a few miles from the track and more than 2,500 miles distant. Qualifying for the 75-car field took two weeks as Brasington mimicked events leading up to the Indianapolis 500.

1950 Johnny Mantz Southern 500 Winner

Johnny Mantz, a 31-year-old from Long Beach, CA, drove a six-cylinder Plymouth to a nine-lap victory over Fireball Roberts in a race that took more than six and a half hours to complete. Much of the race was run on the track’s flat apron because the banking was rough and abrasive and quickly wore tires down to the cords.


Mantz’s Plymouth, jointly owned by Hubert Westmoreland and Bill France Sr, was the only car in the field equipped with special Firestone racing tires that lasted all day. While his competitors were in the pits for tire changes, Mantz only had to stop periodically for fuel – leading to his enormous margin of victory. He averaged 75.25-mph – not much slower than Curtis Turner’s 82.034-mph pole speed.


Many of those competing in the first Southern 500 are deceased including top four finishers Mantz, Roberts, the season’s champion to be Bill Rexford and 1949 champion Red Byron.


Still living are Cotton Owens, now 87 and a NASCAR Hall of Fame nominee, who finished seventh in a Plymouth. Hershel McGiff, racing the same Oldsmobile 88 with which he’d won the year’s inaugural Carrera Pan American – Mexican Road Race – was eighth. McGiff competed in several NASCAR K&N Pro Series events in 2011 at the age of 84.


America was a far different place five years after the end of World War II. There was little infrastructure, especially in the south, no Interstate highways and not much in the way of hotels in such rural areas as Darlington, SC.


Gasoline cost 18 cents a gallon, a new car, which could be raced in the Southern 500 without modification, went for $1,510 and the average annual salary was $3,210. The price of a black and white television set was $249.95 but it was unlikely you’d find auto racing programming on the few available channels.

Legends of NASCAR Cotton Owens

Owens, whose crew was comprised with relatives and friends, had begun racing close to home with a Chrysler dragged from a wrecking yard. His friends included NASCAR Hall of Famer Walter “Bud” Moore. He “commuted” to the track each day – a three-hour drive – from his home in Union, SC.


McGiff met France and Turner at the Mexican race. “Bill invited me to come to Darlington,” said McGiff, who raced in California, Oregon and Washington. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have known about it.”


McGiff drove his Oldsmobile cross country from Portland, OR, a distance of more than 2,600 miles sharing driving duties with his owner/mechanic Ray Sundstrom. “I slept two or three nights on the county courthouse lawn and went into the bathroom to clean up,” said McGiff, then 22 years of age.


The race itself was spectacular – if only because so many cars were confined to a relatively small space. McGiff remembers the field being lined up and stretching all the way around to turns 3 and 4. “I can’t imagine how they scored them,” he said. “You could go 10 deep the track was so wide. We ran on the flat (apron). You could run on the top part (banking) and go faster but you wouldn’t run far.”


The race was an endurance contest as much in the pits as on the track.


McGiff had found three or four volunteers at a local gas station to service his car. Changing a tire required a heavy floor jack and a lug wrench – air guns and lightweight jacks came to stock car racing much later. Gas was dumped into the car through a funnel.


Mantz, meanwhile, kept up a consistent pace content to let the faster, eight-cylinder cars wear out their tires. McGiff changed 14 – at $15 a tire – “Then we’d go by him like he was standing still.” said McGiff, who completed 374 of the 400 laps and was paid $500.


And afterwards? “I got back in the car and drove home,” said McGiff. “I didn’t get any dents. There was so much room that if a guy wrecked in front of you, you could stop.” Today’s Darlington racing, where speeds exceed 180-mph, obviously is not your grandfather’s Southern 500.


Owens went on to win nine times as a driver and 38 races as an owner. NASCAR Hall of Famer David Pearson drove Owens’ No. 6 Dodge to the 1966 NASCAR Sprint Cup championship. “His hobby was his love, he got to do it as a living and we did it as a family,” said Debbie Davis, Owens’ daughter.


McGiff, named one of NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers in 1998, won four times and finished sixth in 1954 standings. Offered one of Carl Kiekhaefer’s potent Chrysler 300s for the 1955 season, McGiff instead chose to stay in Oregon to run the family’s lumber business.

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