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ories of what it was like to work there
and participate in Shelby American’s
international championship racing ef-
fort. For anyone who cares about this
little nook of automobile racing his-
tory, this is treasure. So many of these
guys have either passed on or have
reached an age where getting to one of
these meetings is physically difficult.
This year marks is the 50th An-
niversary of the Shelby GT350 Mus-
tang, the car that won the SCCA
B-Production National Championship.
The event centered around it. So much
has been written about this I’ll say
only a few lesser known words about
the origin of the car. In 1965 Lee Ia-
cocca, a Ford executive, father of the
Mustang, tried to get the SCCA to ac-
cept it for sports car racing. The SCCA
turned him down because it had a
back seat. The SCCA classified it a
sedan, not a sports car. As such it did
not meet their criteria for sports car
road racing.
Witness to the event, Peter Brock,
chief designer at Shelby American at
the time, explained at the banquet
that Lee Iacocca called Carroll Shelby
to ask what he could do about it.
Shelby already had a relationship
with Ford, a reputation as a world
class race driver, a race team manager,
and the man whose idea was to put a
Ford V8 into a British sports car. Pre-
viously powered by a 6 cylinder AC
The SHELBY AMERICAN
Fall 2015 325