The Shelby American (Fall 2021)

firm level on each ingredient and measure it into a potential winner. ” The early car last year wasn’t very successful. I think there was some credit due, in the end; in as much as in ten months from putting pencil to paper, analytically, we had a car racing which demonstrated performance po- tential was there. The weak link in this whole effort was the durability factor. SMITH: I had heard that the problem was primarily due to a part which was outside of your control. MILES: It wasn’t outside of our con- trol; it was the time factor that didn’t allow things to go exactly the way we wanted to. In some cases we had to take whatever was available: trans- missions were a good example. The thing is, having got over that first bridge, without killing any drivers or anything like that, in that first year we now have a basic car from which to develop the entire program from. SMITH: That’s what Shelby Ameri- can is now concentrating on. MILES: They’re taking the approach that racing and preparing the present car and producing some results will, in turn, provide some conclusions. As we get something proven, race-proven, they will pick it up and do another batch of cars and bring it forward. In other words, the prototype is the fore- runner of the cars which will be ho- mologated. SMITH: I’m sorry to see that the FIA plays such a role in dictating how the company has to go about it. MILES: We have no objection to them playing this role. The only thing I think we have an objection to, the thing that is very favorable to Ferrari, are the constant rules changes. I think it would be better to keep the rules consistent for four years and have the people obey them. You can have a de- bate in the beginning when the rules are made up but regardless whether you agree with them or not, there are special rules there. I think that it’s nice to have a fixed target to develop against instead of having the target move all of the time. I think this is keeping a lot of manufacturers out of the game. You can spend a lot of money on that car over there and shake your head when you see the power that it’s got. Right now, the pre- miere car is the GT. But the sports cars are being developed the same way. SMITH: That wasn’t modified by de- sign, it was by accident. At Bridge- hampton they overlooked the fact that the sports racing cars ran with the GT Prototypes and then that became a precedent. Bridgehampton was some little, outlier track in the middle of the sand dunes on Long Island but all of a sudden there it was. MILES: We don’t care whether it’s a sports car or a GT. Let it be one or the other. The interesting point there, coming out too, because the present modified sports car as raced in Amer- ica – most of them don’t meet FIA reg- ulations anyway. SMITH: Not even Appendix J? MILES: No. I like the more rigid en- forcement of the regulations because everybody is suffering under the same rules. We’re taking the somewhat highly analytical, scientific approach to the problem. People say that big en- gines aren’t the answer. You go back four or five years in sports car racing; at that time the hot cars in sports car racing were running about two to two- and-a-half liters. Within the next four years engines went up to five liters and people said, “ You’re out of your mind. You’ve got all that power and you won’t be able to use it. You won’t be able to get around the corners .” But the state of the art of getting the power to the road is improving at a hell of a rate. We don’t know where power-to-weight and know-how of get- ting that power to the road will go over the top at any one time. We almost have to do a series of experiments to find this out. It’s not basically a calcu- latable thing. And it’s different on each car. SMITH: I suppose as an all-out thing, you could use the 427 single-cam with Webers or fuel injection or something like that... MILES: We could get that in the car, too, but at this stage we don’t know whether it would do us any good. It would put up some weight, and we don’t know whether it would be some- thing we could handle. So we will do experiments with large engines with high power, and lighter weight engines with a lot of power... SMITH: I guess you guys have the sit- uation well in hand at this point. MILES: It’s a lot of work. SMITH: I wish everybody great suc- cess. I think it’s great, the whole effort is wonderful and I very much enjoyed seeing the cars win at Daytona. The SHELBY AMERICAN Fall 2021 43 Left to right: Phil Remington, John Morton, Richie Ginther, John Ohlsen, unidentified.