The Shelby American (Fall 2021)

helped because you get to see a lot of cars, especially top-flight cars, in one spot instead of having to travel all over the country to see cars one at a time. DISHER: Absolutely. I encourage owners to do that when they have questions about their own cars. Obvi- ously, seeing as many cars as you can gives you a much better perspective on what is right and what is wrong. SAAC: Concours is a high-stakes ac- tivity, today more than ever. Some peo- ple don’t realize that until their car gets judged. They don’t know what going under the magnifying glass re- ally means. DISHER: It can get frustrating, espe- cially when you have the feeling that some people may be working against you. SAAC: In the early days of the club, concours cars were restored by their owners. But as more became known about how the cars were assembled, and the level of workmanship and au- thenticity increased, owners began re- lying on professionals to restore their cars. And professionals didn’t come cheap. Occasionally hooking up with the wrong person who did substan- dard work could destroy someone’s en- thusiasm and once that happens, they usually opt out of the hobby. It’s hard to get them back. DISHER: Today the work is almost entirely done by professional shops. It’s a rare exception when someone re- stores their own car. SAAC: Among the other arrows in your quiver, aside from serving as s concours head judge for a couple of years, you have a working knowledge of the Conelec fuel injection system. In fact, with the passing of its inventor, David Long and Shelby’s Chief Engi- neer Fred Goodell, you may be the only one with this repository of infor- mation. How did you become the Con- elec wizard? DISHER: I had restored several cars and I believe at that time, it was after I had started my website. SAAC: We should note, here, that your website www.thecoralsnake.com is one of the best and most complete Shelby websites on the Internet. It contains facts and details about spe- cial paint, the 1968 engineering cars and Conelec fuel injection, as well as articles about Shelby dealership histo- ries, many of which are sourced from people with original connections. There is also an archive of all 1968 SAAC concours winners. It is nothing if not thoroughly researched. DISHER: The genesis of my website was some of the stuff we discussed earlier. I really felt you shouldn’t have to pay for basic information about the cars, and there should be things that everyone agrees are correct. There are some small details that nobody will agree on, but there are some things that everyone agrees are correct. So I started the website and the goal was to put out some basic information on the 1968s that was acknowledged to be correct. We needed a starting point. I had done several restorations at that point, some of which were featured on the website. I got a call one day from a guy in Michigan who said that he had a very unique car and he had a lot of questions about it. I was happy to try to answer them and we started with the car’s serial number. You always start with the serial number. It was a GT500 convertible, #8T03S110676- 00056. I immediately recognized that it was an engineering car. That was the point where I started becoming in- terested in the engineering cars. I had already done a half-dozen ‘68 concours restorations and they were all incred- ibly similar. Once you start doing things a certain way, it’s easy to keep doing them that way. They were suc- cessful cars, and they won a lot of tro- phies, but I was getting kind of bored. I was looking for other things within the hobby that would be interesting to me and one of them was the engineer- ing cars. There wasn’t anything out there about them, and #56 was an in- teresting car. The owner said he had several Shelby “experts” look at the car. One was confused; another one thought it wasn’t real because there were some discrepancies with the VIN numbers. I said that most of them could probably be explained. He said he had contacted the Shelby club and he though the 1968 Registrar had been less than cooperative. I said there may be a reason for that and that I would look into it and see what I could find. I spoke with Vincent Liska and found out that he was withholding some information because he wasn’t convinced the guy really had the car. Registrars get a lot of people fishing for information, usually because they The SHELBY AMERICAN Fall 2021 37 Conelec fuel injection system on ‘69 #1088. The photo was taken in Elmira at Long’s house during the install in 2012.