101 / 134
because of their noise requirement.
Down south, the number of tracks
wasn’t what it is today. The handful of
road circuits still in operation were
oversubscribed. Getting a weekend
date would be pretty near impossible.
The Cobra Owner’s Club held two
open track weekends every year at
Willow Springs. The last thing we
wanted to do was to try to sweet-talk
them out of one of their dates, which
they used as a profit generator for
their region. Even if we could squeeze
a date from Willow Springs, itself,
three Cobra/Shelby open tracks a year
at the same track would be one too
many. So, we looked away from the
west coast and the northeast. We had
just been into the deep south so we
didn’t want to go in that direction.
Suddenly the midwest wasn’t looking
that bad.
SAAC did not exist in a vacuum.
We had been intently observing vin-
tage racing since the club began, and
members had been actively participat-
ing in it for ten years. Vintage racing
was a way to step back in time, an op-
portunity to see Cobras, GT350s and
GT40s racing against their traditional
opposition – Corvettes, Ferraris,
Porsches and Jaguars – as well as
each other. SAAC members were vin-
tage racers and they went to vintage
events as spectators. We sensed an
overlap and we thought that a conven-
tion at Road America, dovetailing with
their annual summer speed spectacu-
lar, also known as the Brian Redman
International Challenge, would work.
The SHELBY AMERICAN
342 Fall 2015