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The SHELBY AMERICAN
Fall 2016 9
SUBMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL . . .
At Monterey’s annual car week, auction companies engage in intense com-
petition to get historical or interesting cars. They use the top ones as headlin-
ers, to get attention and draw people to their event. The cars they line up in
advance are used in print ads and appear prominently in their catalogs. Others,
which are consigned as the events near, are often used in email blasts. We got
one such email from Russo and Steele that showed a 1959 Tojeiro California/
TCAL59 Barcheta. If the name Tojeiro has a familiar ring to it, you might recall
that the original AC roadster was based on a two-seat sports car designed by
John Tojeiro in the early 1950s.We thought there was something familiar about
this 1959 one-off race car that Russo and Steele was advertising.
The first race car was the only one
created from a clean sheet of paper.
Every other one following it were vari-
ations, in one way or another. Designs
and ideas are often “shared,” with or
without attribution. That’s accepted
with race cars. Some of the features in
Tojeiro’s race car were obviously bor-
rowed by the fabricators who created
the Flip-Top Cobra. And Tojeiro’s ideas
had been, no doubt, borrowed from
some other race car before it.
Look for all of them to be on dis-
play, fender to fender, on a large used
car lot out near the edge of town, and
at the edge of...