The Shelby American (Fall 2021)

sort of work we’re doing. They don’t have a Ford Advanced Vehicles in Dearborn. They have the facilities but they are so tied down by an enormous overhead and an enormous procedural system that they can’t react quickly to a situation like we can, being a rela- tively compact group. SMITH: Growing by leaps and bounds... MILES: We’re growing by leaps and bounds, of course. Phil Remington, Carroll Shelby himself – Phil is our chief engineer and makes all of the es- sential decisions; he’s the brains be- hind the operation. He’s here; we have him on hand all of the time and we can work so closely with Carroll and with Remington and with Richie and we can react very quickly to a suggestion. We can do something right now and try it. We don’t have to go through an elaborate procedure of putting through formal design changes. If we decide we don’t like something we can take a hacksaw and cut it off. You can’t do this if you work for a big or- ganization. You have to get approval from higher-ups. This gives us an enormous advantage. You see, we still have the core of the original Shelby American operation. We have an some extremely good craftsman here who are used to this sort of panic opera- tion. They’ve been with us for some time and they get used to this. Practi- cally everything we do is a panic. SMITH: You don’t have any doubts, misgivings or anything else about Shelby taking this thing over and making it work. I mean, it has worked. MILES: Oh, none at all. If anyone can do it, we can. In fact we have a far bet- ter chance of getting it to work than anyone else. We have the background. We ran the Coupe with a Ford engine and anybody who can run a Coupe with a Ford engine is a bit of a genius anyway. Considering that the Coupe and roadsters that we ran was strictly a one-race operation. After each race we disassembled them and welded up all of the breaks on the chassis, strengthened them where necessary and discovered all of the mistakes we’d made and started again. We were doing this twelve times a year. SMITH: Two things. One, what kind of an emotional commitment, or a per- sonal commitment can you people have to a car which you didn’t design and didn’t build? And two, I noticed a marked change in the efficiency of the organization from last year at, say, the Nürburgring where I had the privilege of seeing you guys at work, to this year. MILES: You’ll remember last year at Nürburgring we were operating with a very mixed crew. At Daytona this year we were operating with our own crew on our own ground and it always makes it easier. We’re operating with people who we no longer have to say, “ Look, Jim, you have to get this done, ” and if he doesn’t you give him a good, swift kick in the backside. SMITH: Dave Davis, our publisher, was out for Riverside in the fall and said that the cars, the Coopers, were badly prepared. I don’t know; I sup- pose a lot of that is easily explainable. But the report I got from Daytona, the whole operation was very spit-and- polished. Very efficient. MILES: The reason for this, the Fall race at Riverside, for example, we built the Coopers for that race over a rather long period of time; the work was start-and-stop work on them. They were finally finished off in a tremen- dous hurry because we had the GT program going, we were racing at the same time, and it was a rush opera- tion. The Cooper bodywork, itself, is so flimsy, it’s very difficult to keep the cars looking halfway decent. You only have to touch the car and you have a dent in it. Of the cars we had running there, four of them had been crashed – two severely – before the race and they had been straightened out. They didn’t look shabby. I’ll grant you that, they were cars that had been messed up. SMITH: I remember Dave spoke par- ticularly about the half-shafts seem- ing to bind, coming out of Nine and sounding like motorboats... MILES: That’s a problem we were given with the Cooper, you see.We had a situation, there, where we put this Ford V8 engine into a Cooper Monaco chassis that wasn’t designed really for a Ford V8 engine anyway. In order to get the center of gravity where we wanted it we had to put up with a great deal of action on the axle-shafts. These splines had to telescope a great deal but under a load they won’t. For example, when you’re coming off of a corner the splines will bind up and rear suspension will load up and make it sound, as you say, like a motorboat. We did have plans to remedy this sit- uation but, there again, given the pressure of other work, the ball- splined shafts weren’t finished in time, so we ran with what we had. And we lucked in. SMITH: There isn’t any fundamental change that would account for the dif- ference in the organization between then and now... MILES: No, there’s been no funda- mental change in the organization.We have these Fords and Cobras for Day- tona and we were in a position of not being so totally overwhelmed with work. In other words we could get them done. Also, of course, we took the position, as soon as we started on this program, of putting the shop under a flat, ten-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week working week with overtime over and above that. So, realizing we were going to be faced with a situation where we were going to be... SMITH: The whole group seems to be getting into high gear. MILES: As far as the emotional prob- lems of working on someone else’s car is concerned, I think one of the things that was so satisfying about the Ford GT program is that we took on a chal- lenge which other people tried to meet and failed. We took on this challenge on the understanding that if anybody can do it, we can, and By God we’re going to do it! It was such a tremen- dous challenge and the boys in the shop rose to the occasion and did a hell of a good job. And let’s face it, that thing at Daytona was strictly a team effort. It was the mechanics in the shop who worked very hard on the cars and did a tremendously good job. It was the mechanical inspiration of Phil Remington who is a brilliant tal- ent. He has a personality to instill con- fidence in the people that are working The SHELBY AMERICAN Fall 2021 49