The Shelby American (Fall 2021)

bring, a week from the time of this writing. Much of the interest at Se- bring (see race report this issue) will have been focused on Shelby and the Ford GT. This is the story of the car to date. The origins of the Ford GT—basi- cally a sleek, little two-seater manned guided missile as long as a Volkswa- gen, at tall as a tall dog, capable of 100 miles per hour in reverse and twice that pointed the right way—the ori- gins of this car had nothing to do with Shelby. Two nearly-twin concepts strung from two sources separated by the width of the Atlantic. Late in 1962, Eric Broadley, a tal- ented young designer/constructor of racing cars called Lolas, turned his hand to what seemed a promising idea—a GT coupe with a big engine just ahead of the rear wheels. The so- called “midship” placement of the en- gine offered two mail advantages— better aerodynamics and better handling. Broadly rushed a Ford-- engined version to completion in tome for the London Racing Car Show. It was a sensation, and carefully noted by some of the boys in Ford’s Advanced Concepts department who had been thinking along similar lines. Roy Lunn, a displaced Englishmen, who manages this exotic, Dearborn-based group, had designed the midship-en- gined Mustang I in 1962. It was a nice car, but its little Taunus engine didn’t pack much of a wallop and Lunn was toying with the idea of building some- thing like it, only with the Fairlane V- 8. Shades of Shelby! The coupe idea was attractive too, GT cars at 200 miles per hour being all the vogue. So Ford contracted Broadley’s serv- ices for a year, hired away John Wyer fromAston Martin (where he had been racing manager, then general man- ager) and set out to build a GT car. Progress was excruciatingly slow. The basic design was quickly mapped out, but minor errors nagged the effort. First, Broadley’s tiny shop in Brom- ley was much too small and the oper- ation had to be transferred to new facilities at Slough (rhymes with “plow”), 22 miles west of London. In Dearborn, it quickly became apparent that the side-mounted radiators that had worked so well with the Mustang I 1.5-liter V-4 couldn’t get enough air to cool the big American V-8. The FR40 chassis is similar to the Lola’s, with monocoque center section welded up (mostly by penetration welding; its terribly intricate) of innu- merable pieces of sheet steel. It weighs close to 300 lbs. and is one of the stiffest chassis ever built—about 12,500 lbs./ft. per degree (the Ferrari 300/P/2 would be lucky to check out at 3,000). It’s also one of the strongest; two cars have crashed from extremely high speeds and in both cases the cockpit area had remained intact. A very advanced suspension was designed and the wheel angles for given wheel deflection “read out” on a computer—giving rise to the story that the computer did the designing. Basically, the front suspension is an unequal length wishbone system; the rear consists of two trailing arms, an upper lateral link and a reverse lower wishbone. Healthy doses of anti-dive, anti-squat and anti-lift have been de- signed into ends. The first engine was a 4.2-liter (252 cu. in.), 350-horse- power version of the alloy block, pushrod Ford Indy engine, re-tuned for road racing. (For a complete tech- nical description of the car as it was first publicly shown, see June ‘64 C/). Once into the hardware stage, the chassis, suspension and engine have never given much trouble, but almost everything else did. A basic body and several alternative body sections were put through a se- ries of 76 runs at the University of Maryland’s wind-tunnel. Everything seemed fine, so the car was hauled off The SHELBY AMERICAN Fall 2021 55