The Shelby American (Fall 2021)

high in the body the upper two-thirds of the glass is just useless. The only place that was an advantage is Day- tona when you’re up on the banks. SMITH: Does it have to be clear glass? REMINGTON: It can’t be blanked out completely but it can be tinted to help. SMITH: Could you say something about the design of the car? What you think of it as a designer? I know you’ve been involved in the design of some great cars. REMINGTON: I think basically the design is very well done aside from being a little overweight from the orig- inal plan. It is very practical car and sophisticated to the point where it is quite hard to work on, but anything you make light and compact is bound to get complicated. SMITH: Is there any other car or ma- chine that you can compare it to? Does it remind you of anything? REMINGTON: Other than the Lola. SMITH: The Lola GT. REMINGTON: The prototype that Broadley built. The basic difference is there is that he used a complete fiber- glass top where these are steel. On his cars he used individual tanks; the rocker panels, themselves, being tanks and they had sealing compound in the joints, where we used rubber bags. SMITH: How have they worked out? REMINGTON: We haven’t had any problem with them. The only problem is trying to get a valve between the two tanks. As it is now, the car is so cluttered up in the cowl area that you can’t get a big valve in there with a special-type filler. It’s a distinct disad- vantage as far as quick filling. You have to fill from two separate tanks rather than filling from a common filler. SMITH: Is there anything else you can think of, that America should know? REMINGTON: Other than some of the points the drivers made. The four drivers at Daytona felt they were very comfortable with the car. They felt that it if had a little more horsepower and some of the aerodynamics were cleaned up, and put some more relia- bility in the gearbox it would be very competitive. SMITH: One thing: right now you’re running two of them. These things are being built all the time.Would you like to plan on just running two or would you like to run three? Or would three be too many? REMINGTON: Three would be about all we could handle at any one time with our other commitment to the Co- bras and the 427 Cobra. SMITH: Would it get to the point where the Cobra program was so well organized and so self-sustaining and so reliable that you could afford to back off and run three Daytona Coupes and three Ford GTs... There again, I’m putting words in your mouth. REMINGTON: Actually, I wouldn’t think we’d want to go that far. What we’re trying to do, really, is get out of racing itself and let the customers do the racing. Support them to a certain extent, with parts and equipment. I think Carroll’s plans are for the cus- tomers do more and more the racing. SMITH: And the plans, I gather, for this season are not finalized. REMINGTON: No, our plans for now are to run Sebring with the same six cars we had at Daytona. We’ll take the two GTs to England from Florida to be prepared to race in Europe. SMITH: There aren’t any definite plans now to run all the GT Prototype championship events. REMINGTON: Not unless it looks like we have a pretty good chance of winning the championship. Then it would be a possibility, depending on what we do at Sebring and Lemans. SMITH: One final thing. What is the system for assigning mechanics to the cars? How many guys work on each car and who is responsible? REMINGTON: On the GTs we have two mechanics plus one project engi- neer per car. And one engineer super- vises those two cars. On the Cobras we have two mechanics per car plus two engine men for four cars plus an over- all team manager or project engineer. SMITH: And who calls the shots dur- ing the race? REMINGTON: Al Dowd and myself. The SHELBY AMERICAN Fall 2021 53