ndnprince23
04-12-2009, 10:32 PM
This is pretty long, but it's a damn good read.....very interesting.....
I know it's usIMPORTS.....but some people on here have domestics as well....MUSTANG???
Snakes Spawned
BY JIM DONNELLY
The birth of the greatest name in American performance
It's more than history now--it's an established chapter in our national folklore, like John Henry or the telegrapher at Promontory Point tapping out D-O-N-E on that day in 1869. Unless you've spent your mechanically inclined days immersed in the mythos of, say, Rototillers or garbage disposals, you can probably recite from memory of how Carroll Shelby took a little-known British sports roadster, fitted it w/a Ford V8 (after 1st trying to finagle his engines from Chevrolet) & combined them to create one of the fastest, most fearsome cars of all time.
Shelby already was a world-class racer when he made his 1st attempts at building cars, & when the Cobra was created in the early '60s, it showed. From the 2nd Cobra ever built--almost--Shelby-American fielded full-up racing cars, campaigned them nationally &, w/practice & development, racked up impressive successes. These were the very 1st representations of the racing Cobra, w/Ford's 260 cu/in small-block V8, essentially the same carbureted engine that was installed in the Falcon Sprint, a real pocketknife in its own right.
Squeezed into the flyweight AC Ace chassis, the 1st production Cobra ripped off an unbelievable 4.2-second 0-60 time in its initial Road & Track test session. With professionals Billy Krause, Dave MacDonald & Ken Miles as factory drivers, the Cobras struck quickly & lethally.
All this happened prior to the appearance of the side-oiler 427, the Daytona coupe or even the enlarged 289 cu/in Ford small-block. Even in those early days, however, the foundation for the Cobra legend was already in place. At its core, obviously, was Shelby himself. So were the works shoes, & so was Phil Remington, a powerfully gifted fabricator from SoCal who hammered & welded on Lance Reventlow's Scarab team before joining Shelby; he later became a star of Ford's effort at Le Mans & at Dan Gurney's All-American Racers. Another cog in the Shelby American machine was Dave Friedman, also from SoCal, who came aboard early on as the team's official photographer.
There were others, too. "There were 3 people right from the start," Friedman recalls. "Deke Houlgate, the PR director; the designer Pete Brock, who was racing a Lotus 11 back then; & Carroll himself. I was an outside vendor at 1st, & I went to work for them full-time in March 1963. At that time, nobody had any idea what Shelby-American--& its cars--would eventually become. Back then, everybody just wanted to make sure they actually worked, & they didn't work well right in the very beginning."
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=c59e317210&view=att&th=1209d728f9e90dcf&attid=0.1&disp=emb&zw
"In March of 1963, the Cal Club ran a race at RIR, & this turned out to be the 1st race we won at Shelby-American, w/Dave MacDonald finishing 1st. Right here, in this photo, Ken Miles is leading in the white 260 Cobra, #98, w/Paul Reinhart 2nd in the 1963 Corvette Z06 & MacDonald following up in the red #198. There were really these 3 guys as the main contenders at the meet, which had 2 races on 2 days. Dave won both days, & Miles was 2nd both days. Dave told me later that he could hear Miles coming up behind him in both of the races, but never actually saw him."
http://cll.hemmings.com/story_image/97669-500-0.jpg
"Here is Dave MacDonald, en route to winning the 1st race for Shelby American at RIR in October 1962. Yes, he's very much sideways in the Cobra. Dave was always like this. I knew him quite well & considered him a friend. He worked in the Shelby American shop & I saw him every day. Dave was a California native & was a big star in California road racing. He went to Indianapolis, driving this (car) that Mickey Thompson had designed, & he was killed in the horrendous crash & fire on the 1st lap of the '64 race, along w/Eddie Sachs. If he had lived, Dave could have been one of the true greats of all time in racing. There's no question in my mind at all about that."
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=c59e317210&view=att&th=1209d728f9e90dcf&attid=0.3&disp=emb&zw
"This is the only known photograph of the very 1st Shelby Cobra being built. Nothing else, in terms of photos of that 1st car while under construction, has ever surfaced in the past 40-odd years. That was where Shelby 1st started out, & that's Shelby himself against the workbench in the background. He rented some space from Dean Moon at 1st, & then moved everything over to Lance Reventlow's old race shop in Venice (CA). When this car was there being built, Carroll still had some of Dean's guys there working on it. Shelby had it painted & repainted in several different colors by Dean Jeffries, the Hollywood custom-car stylist & painter, so that the people from the magazines would think that Shelby had more than one Cobra, which he didn't. Shelby still has that car."
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=c59e317210&view=att&th=1209d728f9e90dcf&attid=0.4&disp=emb&zw
"The L.A. Times G/P at RIR on 10/13/1962, was the 1st outing for the 260 Cobra at a race track. The organizers ran both production & modified cars in the race. Billy Krause, the great California sports car driver, qualified the car reasonably well, but at the start, he shot off like a scalded jackrabbit & left everybody way behind. Krause was probably 3/4 of a mile ahead of everybody else when a rear hub failed & put him out. After that, Phil Remington designed a new hub for the Cobra, & they never had another failure like that again, so maybe having it happen in the 1st race turned out to be a good thing."
http://cll.hemmings.com/story_image/97673-500-0.jpg
"In 1962, Shelby-American was based at 1042 Princeton Drive in Venice (CA). The buildings are no longer there. A developer bulldozed both of the shops & put in condos or something. They should have taken it & made it into a state historical landmark, what w/the Scarabs & the Cobras both having been built there. There's a lot of ghosts at that site, believe me. I guess that in Reventlow's case, he had been building his Scarabs, had his fun, took his 5-year tax loss & then ended up getting killed in a plane crash, back in 1972."
http://cll.hemmings.com/story_image/97676-500-0.jpg
"The very 1st pair of Shelby Cobra racing cars are pictured here in the pits at Nassau in December 1962. Billy Krause is here in the Shelby American team car, #98, while John Everly is behind the wheel of #106, the 1st Cobra customer racing car. Everly was a real club racer, a really nice guy, who bought the 1st customer 260 Cobra & raced it for quite a while. If I remember right, I think that Roger Penske won this race at Nassau in a Ferrari GTO. Krause started all the way in the back & before too long, he had worked himself up to challenge for the lead, but ran out of gas before the end of the race. At some point, I believe, Everly broke in the other car."
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=c59e317210&view=att&th=1209d728f9e90dcf&attid=0.7&disp=emb&zw
"Possibly, Shelby is wondering whether or not the car was going to work. This was the racing debut of the 260 Cobra, at the 3-hour endurance race that preceded the L.A. Times G/P at RIR in October 1962. I think that might be either Phil Remington or Don Pike in the driver's seat of the factory car. There was an awful lot of anticipation at this race, because not only was the Cobra making its debut, but so was the Corvette Z06. The XP on the side of the Cobra stood for Experimental Production, for just that race, because there weren't enough new Cobras that were homologated yet. There was also a lot of anticipation because everybody knew that the Cobras & the Z06s were coming, & everybody wanted to see these cars in action."
I know it's usIMPORTS.....but some people on here have domestics as well....MUSTANG???
Snakes Spawned
BY JIM DONNELLY
The birth of the greatest name in American performance
It's more than history now--it's an established chapter in our national folklore, like John Henry or the telegrapher at Promontory Point tapping out D-O-N-E on that day in 1869. Unless you've spent your mechanically inclined days immersed in the mythos of, say, Rototillers or garbage disposals, you can probably recite from memory of how Carroll Shelby took a little-known British sports roadster, fitted it w/a Ford V8 (after 1st trying to finagle his engines from Chevrolet) & combined them to create one of the fastest, most fearsome cars of all time.
Shelby already was a world-class racer when he made his 1st attempts at building cars, & when the Cobra was created in the early '60s, it showed. From the 2nd Cobra ever built--almost--Shelby-American fielded full-up racing cars, campaigned them nationally &, w/practice & development, racked up impressive successes. These were the very 1st representations of the racing Cobra, w/Ford's 260 cu/in small-block V8, essentially the same carbureted engine that was installed in the Falcon Sprint, a real pocketknife in its own right.
Squeezed into the flyweight AC Ace chassis, the 1st production Cobra ripped off an unbelievable 4.2-second 0-60 time in its initial Road & Track test session. With professionals Billy Krause, Dave MacDonald & Ken Miles as factory drivers, the Cobras struck quickly & lethally.
All this happened prior to the appearance of the side-oiler 427, the Daytona coupe or even the enlarged 289 cu/in Ford small-block. Even in those early days, however, the foundation for the Cobra legend was already in place. At its core, obviously, was Shelby himself. So were the works shoes, & so was Phil Remington, a powerfully gifted fabricator from SoCal who hammered & welded on Lance Reventlow's Scarab team before joining Shelby; he later became a star of Ford's effort at Le Mans & at Dan Gurney's All-American Racers. Another cog in the Shelby American machine was Dave Friedman, also from SoCal, who came aboard early on as the team's official photographer.
There were others, too. "There were 3 people right from the start," Friedman recalls. "Deke Houlgate, the PR director; the designer Pete Brock, who was racing a Lotus 11 back then; & Carroll himself. I was an outside vendor at 1st, & I went to work for them full-time in March 1963. At that time, nobody had any idea what Shelby-American--& its cars--would eventually become. Back then, everybody just wanted to make sure they actually worked, & they didn't work well right in the very beginning."
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=c59e317210&view=att&th=1209d728f9e90dcf&attid=0.1&disp=emb&zw
"In March of 1963, the Cal Club ran a race at RIR, & this turned out to be the 1st race we won at Shelby-American, w/Dave MacDonald finishing 1st. Right here, in this photo, Ken Miles is leading in the white 260 Cobra, #98, w/Paul Reinhart 2nd in the 1963 Corvette Z06 & MacDonald following up in the red #198. There were really these 3 guys as the main contenders at the meet, which had 2 races on 2 days. Dave won both days, & Miles was 2nd both days. Dave told me later that he could hear Miles coming up behind him in both of the races, but never actually saw him."
http://cll.hemmings.com/story_image/97669-500-0.jpg
"Here is Dave MacDonald, en route to winning the 1st race for Shelby American at RIR in October 1962. Yes, he's very much sideways in the Cobra. Dave was always like this. I knew him quite well & considered him a friend. He worked in the Shelby American shop & I saw him every day. Dave was a California native & was a big star in California road racing. He went to Indianapolis, driving this (car) that Mickey Thompson had designed, & he was killed in the horrendous crash & fire on the 1st lap of the '64 race, along w/Eddie Sachs. If he had lived, Dave could have been one of the true greats of all time in racing. There's no question in my mind at all about that."
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=c59e317210&view=att&th=1209d728f9e90dcf&attid=0.3&disp=emb&zw
"This is the only known photograph of the very 1st Shelby Cobra being built. Nothing else, in terms of photos of that 1st car while under construction, has ever surfaced in the past 40-odd years. That was where Shelby 1st started out, & that's Shelby himself against the workbench in the background. He rented some space from Dean Moon at 1st, & then moved everything over to Lance Reventlow's old race shop in Venice (CA). When this car was there being built, Carroll still had some of Dean's guys there working on it. Shelby had it painted & repainted in several different colors by Dean Jeffries, the Hollywood custom-car stylist & painter, so that the people from the magazines would think that Shelby had more than one Cobra, which he didn't. Shelby still has that car."
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=c59e317210&view=att&th=1209d728f9e90dcf&attid=0.4&disp=emb&zw
"The L.A. Times G/P at RIR on 10/13/1962, was the 1st outing for the 260 Cobra at a race track. The organizers ran both production & modified cars in the race. Billy Krause, the great California sports car driver, qualified the car reasonably well, but at the start, he shot off like a scalded jackrabbit & left everybody way behind. Krause was probably 3/4 of a mile ahead of everybody else when a rear hub failed & put him out. After that, Phil Remington designed a new hub for the Cobra, & they never had another failure like that again, so maybe having it happen in the 1st race turned out to be a good thing."
http://cll.hemmings.com/story_image/97673-500-0.jpg
"In 1962, Shelby-American was based at 1042 Princeton Drive in Venice (CA). The buildings are no longer there. A developer bulldozed both of the shops & put in condos or something. They should have taken it & made it into a state historical landmark, what w/the Scarabs & the Cobras both having been built there. There's a lot of ghosts at that site, believe me. I guess that in Reventlow's case, he had been building his Scarabs, had his fun, took his 5-year tax loss & then ended up getting killed in a plane crash, back in 1972."
http://cll.hemmings.com/story_image/97676-500-0.jpg
"The very 1st pair of Shelby Cobra racing cars are pictured here in the pits at Nassau in December 1962. Billy Krause is here in the Shelby American team car, #98, while John Everly is behind the wheel of #106, the 1st Cobra customer racing car. Everly was a real club racer, a really nice guy, who bought the 1st customer 260 Cobra & raced it for quite a while. If I remember right, I think that Roger Penske won this race at Nassau in a Ferrari GTO. Krause started all the way in the back & before too long, he had worked himself up to challenge for the lead, but ran out of gas before the end of the race. At some point, I believe, Everly broke in the other car."
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=c59e317210&view=att&th=1209d728f9e90dcf&attid=0.7&disp=emb&zw
"Possibly, Shelby is wondering whether or not the car was going to work. This was the racing debut of the 260 Cobra, at the 3-hour endurance race that preceded the L.A. Times G/P at RIR in October 1962. I think that might be either Phil Remington or Don Pike in the driver's seat of the factory car. There was an awful lot of anticipation at this race, because not only was the Cobra making its debut, but so was the Corvette Z06. The XP on the side of the Cobra stood for Experimental Production, for just that race, because there weren't enough new Cobras that were homologated yet. There was also a lot of anticipation because everybody knew that the Cobras & the Z06s were coming, & everybody wanted to see these cars in action."