The Shelby American (Fall 2021)

Shelby. “It’s a really big difference... things are happening rather than just being discussed. There’s a sense of ur- gency and necessity that’s rubbing off on everybody.” Miles added, “One of the things that is so gratifying about our Ford GT pro- gram is that we took on a challenge which others had tried to meet and had failed. The boys in the shop rose to the occasion and did a hell of a good job. Let’s face it, Daytona was no fluke—it was a team effort.” Mechanically, Shelby American’s chief engineer Phil Remington is the key to the success of the GT at Day- tona, as well as being responsible for the performance of the Cobras for the past several years. He’s the one man who seems to know everything. He makes all the little bits and pieces come together to function as a working machine. It’s said that he laid out the last of the Scarabs, the rear-engined Mk IV sports/racing car, on the floor of Reventlow’s shop...without so much as a blueprint. Miles says of Remington: “He’s an inspiration. He’s not only a brilliant cut-and-try engineer, he also has a personality that instills confi- dence in the people working for him.” Thus imbued with the spirit of Shelby American, we went to watch the cars being reassembled for Se- bring. Dismantled, they looked like stripped-down fighter planes being overhauled. The first thing Shelby had done when he received the two GTs in January was to repaint them in his team’s colors: a deep, royal blue and twin white stripes. Then the cars were taken to Riverside for a shake-down run. Surprisingly, “the handling was atrocious,” said Miles. “They had been taken apart and put back together so many times that the design settings had gotten lost. It’s a highly sophisti- cated and extremely complicated piece of machinery, and because of that, it’s extremely susceptible to minor errors in assembly. So, when we re-set the suspension to the original specifica- tions, the cars improved enormously. This was our first job—to get the car back where it had started from.” This done, three more inter-related problems raised their heads and begged for solutions: aerodynamics, weight and brakes. “The aerodynamics,” both internal and external, reported Miles, “were ex- cruciatingly bad.” Aerodynamically the car had been rather too imagina- tively engineered from the beginning. First there had been a misguided at- tempt to draw radiator air in from the sides of the car. Then there had been the little problem of 1100 lbs. of lift at the front end of the car when running flat-out at a 15° yaw angle. Then the lack of a spoiler that sent Schlessler off the road at LeMans. On paper, or standing still, the aerodynamics looked great. There was very fancy ductwork running all through the car, supposedly delivering the right quan- tity of air wherever it was needed. Even the backs of the seats were “air conditioned” with ducts leading to the inside of the upholstery. Unfortu- nately, little or none of it worked very well. The Ford Advanced Vehicles crew kept fiddling with the nose shape, try- ing to find a configuration that would stabilize the car but still have a low drag factor. The wind tunnel test had not incorporated internal aerodynamic ducting, and it was only later discov- ered that 76 horsepower were being burnt just trying to ram air through the car. “The aerodynamic problems we had with the car,” Miles told us, “were es- sentially ones of air flow within the car being affected by external details. For example, we were getting very lit- tle airflow to the brakes, although they had huge ducts ostensibly directing vast qualities of air at them. In fact, the brakes were overheating badly. The engine was getting too hot. The engine compartment itself was getting too hot. The cooling water was getting too hot. The engine and gear-box oil The SHELBY AMERICAN Clockwise, from the front suspension with the Shelby ducting: the new—and hitherto un-tested GT40 roadster; the Shelby-modified nose ducting; the 1964 version (compare this with the radiator air entry and inlets above); the engine bay of the Shelby Daytona car with the transaxle oil cooler (right) and engine oil cooler (left), 289 cu. in. engine and reworked suspension. Fall 2021 57