The Shelby American (Summer 2022)

the fun of it, they took it to Monza in 1971 and seriously raced it. The car, at that time, had the hardtop grafted on to replace the fastback. Kienen also re- membered that it was a very special Shelby and that they had searched for it earlier. He mentioned independently from the others that it was 5R539, not knowing that I had already heard about the car from his friends. Upon asking him why he did not want to research it further, he said they had tried to find it in the ‘90s but had no luck. The wrecking yard was no longer in business and the three friends just wanted to remain friends and not argue about who was respon- sible for losing a car of this value. For them it was water over the dam with no regrets or looking back. They had just been having fun over the years with one race car, a bit clapped-out but well maintained by their mechanic, who was still around with them at the time of our first meeting at the Nür- burgring. I later received more pictures of the car from Rolf Kienen along with better copies of the documentation to keep just for the record. We did some nice articles about the car for our Mustang club magazine here in Germany and everything seemed to fit with Shelby race history. I kept SAAC’s ‘65-’66 Shelby registrar Howard Pardee up to date about our findings. That went smoothly, until one day a racer in Bel- gium arranged a coming-out of the original 5R539 at a 2004 LeMans clas- sic event with Claude Dubois himself driving. I was stunned. How could this be? The car had been brought to a wreck- ing yard in 1989 and now another car was suddenly appearing from the ashes? All I could determine was that Claude Dubois declared it to be the original one and that he was excited to drive it at the 2004 event. The car was scheduled to do some testing in Zolder, a track in Belgium. I went there, but had no luck in finding the car. There were many race cars around, but no trace of the Shelby. Unfortunately the big coming out at LeMans did not take place as Claude Dubois had expected. The car wasn’t set up for actual com- petition and the owner demanded that Claude drive slowly so as not to risk damage to the freshly-assembled en- gine. The car did not perform well, at least to Claude’s expectations. He de- scribed his return to LeMans in the car to his friends as a disaster, due to the shortcomings of the car’s inade- quate preparation. Both the car and its owner quickly vanished back to a hidden garage in Belgium. No glory The SHELBY AMERICAN 5R539 at Spa, 1968. Photo by Arjan Nugteren. 5R539 at Mainz-Finthen (photo by Jutta Fausel-Ward). Rolf Kienen at Monza, 1971. Salzburgring, Austria. Photo courtesy of the AT-Museum, Vienna. DMV Rhein Cup, 1970. Summer 2022 54