On the day the Maestro hang up his helmet and no longer played the violin at the front of the Grand Prix field, a tough Texan by the name of Carroll Shelby finally made his F1 World Championship debut in the car which Fangio had taken to its first and final Championship crown before it became outdated very soon after. An American original, Shelby looked out of place in the pretty petite French Champagne countryside. Looks deceived, which was frequently the case with Shelby, as he had been no stranger to the European racing scene since teaming up with David Brown and his Aston Martin DB3S sportscars in 1954.
Born in 1923 in Leesburg, Texas, the son of a mail clerk, Shelby immediately marked himself out as a racing talent during his first race in 1952. Behind the wheel of a friend’s MG TC, Shelby not only won his class, but beat the Jaguar XK120s as well. The next year Shelby tore up the whole south-western region of SCCA in Cadillac-powered Allards, establishing along the way a certain sartorial style that would always be identified with him. Due to compete after working on a farm one day, Shelby neglected to change out of his striped bib overalls. He won on that hot, humid day in Fort Worth, Texas, and was comfortable doing it. People seemed to be amused by his racing suit, so a tradition was born.
After changing to a Ferrari in 1953 he first ventured abroad in 1954, racing in Argentina. The event proved to be a turning point in Shelby’s career. Once again racing an Allard-Caddy, Shelby won the SCCA Kimberly Cup as the highest-finishing amateur in a race of international professionals. As with many stories concerning Shelby, the Argentine episode is also remembered for a rather humorous incident. During a pitstop, the Allard’s carburetors burst into flames. In the absence of a fire extinguisher, quick-thinking Dale Duncan, Masten Gregory’s brother-in-law, doused the fire by urinating on the engine…
Shelby’s spirited drive impressed Aston Martin’s John Wyer, who offered a works ride to the Texan at Sebring. Mechanical ills would sideline that effort after only 77 laps. The first seeds of an international career were sown. A month later in England, Shelby finished second in a private Aston Martin to Duncan Hamilton’s C-Type Jaguar. There were several more races on this first European trip, one of which netted Shelby $2,000, his first professional winnings.
At home, Shelby joined Donald Healey, whom he’d met in England, Captain George Eyston, and Roy Jackson-Moore at Bonneville to set more than 70 Class D speed records in Austin Healeys. He was to drive a Healey with Jackson-Moore in the Pan American Road Race but crashed in practice, breaking his arm. Then, with his arm still in a cast, Shelby teamed with America’s other premier racer, Phil Hill, at Sebring to finish a very close – and controversial – second in Allen Guiberson’s Monza Ferrari to the D-Type Jaguar of Mike Hawthorn and Phil Walters. Shelby scored a number of wins at home in 1955, most often in one of the Ferraris owned by West Coast construction tycoon Tony Parravano. It was during a car-buying tour of Italy for Parravano that Shelby got his first ride in a Grand Prix car. “It was him that got Maserati to give me a Formula One,” said Shelby. “I could’ ve driven for the factory, Maserati, in ’56 if I wanted to, but I couldn’t stay over there. You know, I had the kids back in Texas and I couldn’t stay for the whole season.” As it was, he took sixth in the Syracuse GP on board of a 250F.
Driving for millionaire John Edgar, Shelby had wins in cars of various engine size, which probably worked against him winning an SCCA national championship in any particular class. In all, he took an amazing 27 wins during the 1956 SSCA season, 19 of them consecutively. In September 1957, he suffered a terrible crash at Riverside, requiring three vertebrae to be fused and plastic surgery for his face. Nevertheless, Shelby was back at Riverside two months later and despite a first-lap spin, won a classic victory over Masten Gregory, Walt Hansgen, and Dan Gurney.
In 1958, Carroll was tempted back to Europe by the illustrious John Wyer and the Aston Martin team, his best result a third in the Goodwood TT and at Spa, sharing with Stuart Lewis-Evans. There was also an abortive attempt at Indianapolis, where he was to drive a car entered by SCCA racerjack Ensley. Trouble was, Ensley took a driver’s test in the car and when Shelby went to do his, USAC officials stepped in. “That ol’ goofball, Harlan Fengler, made up a rule that two people couldn’t test in the same car. Fengler says, ‘No, you can’t.’ And I says, ‘I’m going to Belgium.'”
On this trip to Europe, staying over from the Monzanapolis “Race of Two Worlds” spectacle, he also agreed to drive for Mimmo Dei’s Scuderia Centro Sud, taking over from countryman, great friend and rival Masten Gregory (see above), and thus made his World Championship debut at Reims. In the by now uncompetitive 250F the Texan qualified 17th out of 21 runners but retired with a blown engine. With Shelby, other Americans Troy Ruttman (also in Europe because of the Monzanapolis race) and Phil Hill made their Grand Prix debuts, taking the tally of US racers to an unseen four (Schell the fourth of the gang). But while Ruttman saw the French race in which poor Luigi Musso got killed as a diversion to his Indy career, Hill and Shelby remained in Europe. At Silverstone, Carroll qualified two places up and indeed managed to get the car home in ninth. Then, at the end of the season, Shelby teamed up with the American Temple Buell team, which sponsored the “Piccolo” car that Fangio drove in his last race: this was chassis 2532 (renumbered by Temple Buell to 2533 for Monza), the first of two short-wheelbase 250Fs to be built for Temple Buell, later sold to Centro Sud and Joe Lubin to race in Grands Prix as late as 1960.
At Oporto Shelby qualified an encouraging 10th but then crashed out when his brakes failed. Gregory took over the car for Monza while Carroll was back in the ill-handling Centro Sud 250F. After its engine expired Shelby took over the Temple Buell car from Gregory to finish an impressive fourth. Sadly, this was the first season shared drives went unrewarded as far as championship points were concerned. Until 1957, both Gregory and Shelby would have received 1.5 point each for their combined effort but as it was, their remarkable co-drive to fourth was the first and only occasion in which a team of drivers fell foul of the new-for-1958 rule.
And so one of America’s most influential racers – in sportscar terms at least – went without a single championship point, his 1959 works Aston Martin assault turning out a complete disaster. And there was so much hope for the new Grand Prix team, as Aston’s sportscars were at the top of their game in the late fifties. At Le Mans, Shelby and Roy Salvadori won the 24-hour race, and shared with Moss and Fairman to take the Tourist Trophy at Goodwood, going on to win the World Sportscar Championship for the Feltham marque – although admittedly the title owed more to the enormous skills of Mr S Moss. Stirling bankrolled his outing in the team’s spare at the Nürburgring 1000kms, which he duly won. After Shelby’s Le Mans win gained through sheer perseverance, Brown had again Moss to thank for their title-clinching win at Goodwood. It certainly had nothing to do with the advanced engineering at A.M.
Which there wasn’t. Being Aston Martins the cars always looked good but then that was usually the purpose of their outward appearance: to look smart instead of having lines that were actually aerodynamically effective. Also, technically, David Brown’s marque was never ahead of the game but sluggishly followed trends set by others. For instance, while Lotus built space-framed sportscars and Jaguar used a monocoque section on its D-Type, Aston Martin were still running ladder-framed cars. In some instances their lack of innovative skill was bordering on the ridiculous, as certainly was the case with Aston Martin’s Grand Prix cars.
Its first plans for a Grand Prix car were already laid out in 1951 when the idea was to mate a derivative of the 2.6-litre LB6 engine with a DB3 sports-racing frame. Apparently the project, when already being underway, was shelved by ex-Auto Union and ex-ERA chief engineer-turned-designer Robert Eberan von Eberhorst. John Heath of HWM took interest in the tuned-down engine but was refused the use by Brown. At the start of the 2.5-litre era a similar idea propped up, with again Eberhorst opposed to the idea. This time a DB3S was narrowed to single-seater size and took on another modified engine, and against the wishes of their German head designer it was finished after Reg Parnell had requested to race the car in the 1955-’56 Tasman series.
Early 1956, the DB3S monoposto finally ran in the New Zealand GP – with the 2.5-litre engine instead of a 3-litre supercharged engine which had blown in testing. That is, it ran, but not in the race itself, as it threw a rod during practice and was withdrawn. In the Lady Wigram Trophy Parnell managed a fourth before the car went on to form the basis of the second RRA (Richardson Racing Automobiles) Special, with Geoff Richardson fitting a 2.4-litre Jaguar unit in the front. He entered it for the 1957 International Trophy and qualified 8th in his heat, retiring from a serious drop in oil pressure.
Meanwhile, Aston Martin had long since embarked on a double sportscar/Grand Prix car project, with the DBR1 sportscar and a new single-seater to be developed concurrently. Having started in 1956, the car finally ran late in 1957. And it simply was a job of fitting an existing engine and gearbox to a chassis that must have been waiting in the wings for ages! To make matters worse, Brown and Wyer decided to put the GP project on ice for another year during which the little Cooper team showed the establishment which way the future would be going.
So, unsurprisingly in a scene which was much more competitive than A.M.’s usual sportscar environment and on top of that was in the midst of a turbulent change to rear-engined designs, the DBR4/250 F1 car was a total flop. At the source of the failure was of course the front-engined chassis layout which also had Ferrari and BRM suffering. At the same time Colin Chapman put himself on a crash course in rear-engined chassis design. While the A.M. cars were undoubtedly beautifully crafted, the concept was obsolete and development slow. Bog slow, to be precise. The DB4/250 were space-framed cars with tuned-up sportscar engines (with an overoptimistically claimed 280bhp) and de Dion rear suspension – the last new GP car to make use of it. In the end, they entered just four 1959 events, its best results two sixths in Britain and Portugal. But what could you expect of a car that was originally penned in 1956, only to debut as late as 1959?
Apart from being based on ideas that were on the verge of extinction the cars were also overweight and, surprisingly, the reliable sportscar engine proved very unreliable in Grand Prix form. A second place and fastest lap for Salvadori in the International Trophy had given false hope since the engine was revving at 8000rpm, a pace it could hardly keep up with. Shelby had retired due to a bearing failure and investigation bore out that Roy’s engine had only just managed to last the distance. After that discovery, the drivers had to limit their revs to 7000rpm which seriously affected their Zandvoort performance (here is Shelby going through the Hugenholtzbocht). Then the problem was easily solved by boring the oil-circulation holes in different places in the crankshaft. This led to temporarily renewed spirit at Aintree when Roy hit the front row while his American team mate lined up 6th on the grid. But during the race their true form became obvious, Salvadori finishing a distant 6th, with Shelby retiring with a faulty magneto. In their two other outings Salvadori and Shelby were severely off the pace to finish several laps down. As we all know, that pace was set by rear-engined Coopers…
And still Aston Martin persevered in their belief – but not before indeed a rear-engined design was sketched out. Don’t get your hopes up, for this was not one from the “What might have been” category. The rear-engined Aston Martin GP car was in fact a DBR4 cut in half with the front part welded to the back… Most effort went into two lighter – front-engined – DBR5s that were raced in 1960, alongside one of the remaining DBR4s, with a poor 11th at Silverstone its best showing, before Aston Martin faded from Grand Prix racing, amidst engine agonies which saw a colossal mistake with the new cylinder heads and, resulting from it, some ill-guided dabbling with fuel injection. In between the two seasons, two modified and much more potent 3-litre cars raced in the 1960 Tasman Cup, with Lex Davison taking second place in the Australian GP and Bob Stilwill even winning with the other one at Warwick Farm.
By that time, Carroll Shelby had given up on his European aspirations, returning home to compete in SCCA events once more. Worryingly, early in 1959, Shelby had had the first hint of heart pains. These got more serious in 1960, and before he quit driving at the end of that season, Shelby had raced more than once with nitroglycerine pills under his tongue. Fortunately for sportscar fans past and present, he never had to bite the bullet. Instead, his retirement from racing started off a new chapter in his life, which would make him even more famous than he had been as a driver.
Within a year, Carroll Shelby had embarked on a course that would ultimately see the development of the British AC Cobra light sportscar creation into a fearsome US-bred powerhorse aptly named the Shelby Cobra, a world-class sportscar that in 1965 would win America’s first World Championship. Concurrently the Texan formed All-American Racers, a Goodyear-funded partnership with Dan Gurney (who today is still heading the team) that would yield three Indy 500 winners and the splendid Eagle-Weslake T1G, America’s first Grand Prix-winning car in 46 years. Finally, Shelby was at the head of a program that would turn around Ford’s GT40 effort and produce the first all-American win at Le Mans.
If today All-American Racers is mainly associated with Gurney, the spirit of those three words are first and foremost embodied by the man who saw his heart condition finally cured by a successful heart transplant in 1990. It has allowed the all-American racer par excellence to travel the world again and renew the passion of his days in SCCA, Grand Prix and World Sportscar racing.
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