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he Cobra is both an albatross
around Carroll Shelby’s neck and
an eagle on his shoulder. It is an eagle
because as a sports car, the Cobra has
become an American icon. It sprang
from the imagination of one man – it
was not designed by a committee. It
initially raced against the new
Corvette Sting Ray, where it was the
underdog. It quickly established itself
as a dark horse that overcame the best
sports car that the General Motors
monolith could devise. The competi-
tion Cobras were developed and pre-
pared by a tight-knit group of
California hot rodders, British and
New Zealand race car fabricators, for-
mer USAC mechanics and dry lakes
racers. Once the cars began consis-
tently beating Corvettes in this coun-
try, the Cobra Team put Ferrari in its
cross-hairs. That meant traveling to
Europe, and within three years the
Cobra emerged as the World Cham-
pion. It was like a Hollywood movie,
except that it was all true.
The Cobra is also an albatross
around Carroll Shelby’s neck because
everything he has done since the
Cobra is measured against that car.
Fifty years later it is still a credible
high performance sports car capable of
holding its own against any other pro-
duction car you can name. It appears
on just about every “Top 100,” “Top 25”
or “Top 10” list of the Most [
fill in the
blank
] “Important,” ...”Influential,”
...”Celebrated,” ...“Desirable” sports
cars of the past 50 years. The Cobra is
a very high bar to scale. Even for Car-
roll Shelby.
The genesis of the Shelby Series 1
was not a direct line from the original
Cobra. Shelby sensed the decline of
the performance car as the shank end
of the 1960s approached. Federally
mandated safety and emission regula-
tions and increased insurance costs
conspired against 400-horsepower
muscle cars. Shelby began stepping
out of the picture as the 1969 models
appeared. The Cobra roadster was al-
ready history and by 1968, the “Cobra
III” – a prototype for the “next gener-
ation” Cobra which came to be called
the Lone Star – dead-ended with only
one example produced.
Shelby correctly interpreted the
signs of increasing governmental reg-
ulation and diminishing performance.
He spent the 1970s dabbling in com-
mercial real estate in the U.S. and run-
ning a safari company in the Central
African Republic. However, the politi-
cal climate in that country was chang-
ing rapidly, so Shelby divested his
interests there and returned to the
U.S. In 1983 he got a call from Lee Ia-
cocca, who asked him to help provide
some performance sizzle for the ailing
Chrysler company by jazzing up some
of the 4-cylinder, front-wheel-drive
cars in its stable. Shelby climbed
aboard, certainly to help out his old
pal, but also to show the automotive
world that while he might have been
out of the picture for a decade, he was
not a washed-up has-been. He still had
the magic touch.
The result was a generation of
Dodge-Shelby models, followed by a
series of Shelby-Dodge cars built by
his own company, Shelby Automobiles,
Inc. based inWhittier, California. Car-
roll Shelby, it turned out, still had the
yen to build another sports car with
his name on it. His experience with
the Cobra had taught him that he
could not go it alone; he needed a very
close relationship with a major auto-
mobile manufacturer. As the Shelby-
Dodge program began to wind down at
the end of the 1980s he was working
on just such a car. As fate would have
it, his health turned south and the
long term prognosis was not good; in
not so many words, his doctors told
him not to buy any green bananas.
The fix was a heart transplant,
but you don’t get one of those
overnight. Shelby’s case was evaluated
by a committee of specialists and after
he successfully passed through that
gauntlet, his name went onto a list. In
the meantime his condition grew
steadily worse. When he finally got
near the top of the recipient list he
was advised not to travel more than
two hours away from the hospital be-
cause a donor heart could come at any
time. It was a waiting game. In June
of 1990 that call did come. Shelby re-
ceived his transplant and the rest is
history. Or so it might seem.
The SHELBY AMERICAN
Fall 2016 35
Carroll Shelby proves that the original Cobra was a tough act to follow - even for him.
— Rick Kopec
T