#99 Carroll Shelby (My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Shelby, the name itself conjures up immediate visions of Cobras, GT350s and GT500s, pounding around an historic road course with throaty horsepower coming from under the hood and tires on the edge of adhesion.
But for me personally, the Shelby name will always mean much more.
I have been blessed to have known Carroll since I was a teenager, walking the pit road with my father at LeMans during Ford's first major assault on Ferrari in 1966 By then, he was already a legend in my eyes, having had great success as a race driver for companies like Aston Martin and Maserati during the 1950s and being named Sports Illustrated Driver of the Year in 1956 and 1957 So when I first met Carroll LeMans as his Shelby American race team was preparing the GT40s for the Ford Motor Company, I was thrilled to meet the man who has since become a lifelong friend. Subsequently, I worked for him during a summer break while I was in college.
He gave me the opportunity to spend some time with him, taking in the wisdom that is truly Carroll.
The name Shelby means so many things to so many people, but to me, Carroll is an innovator. He is a man who was always ahead of his time, who has created, designed and developed performance products that have been second to none.
The fact that most of them have been with and for Ford Motor Company is a personal point of pride for me.
Carroll is passionate about performance vehicles, but he's also passionate about life, his family, his many, many friends that he has made in the 60-plus years he's been involved in our industry.
I am proud to be counted among them.
So those words were written by Edsel Ford II, which is the great-grandson of Henry Ford, and they appear in the foreword of the book that I read this week and the one that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Carroll Shelby, The Authorized Biography, and it was written by Rinsey Mills.
A little while back, I was listening to an author who had just completed a biography, writing a biography on Winston Churchill, and he was talking about the process of writing biography. That's why I was listening to it. That's what I was interested in. And I found it fascinating because he talks about, you know, Winston Churchill, like why does the world need another biography of him? He has, I think the author said over 1,100, definitely over 1,000 biographies have been published about the life of Winston Churchill.
And he brought up like, how do you bring something new to it? And he said a word that I wasn't familiar with, and it's hagiography. So I had to look that word up. He basically was talking about what he was trying to avoid when he was talking about Winston Churchill. And all that word means is it's essentially, it's just a biography that idolizes its subject. Another term is its autolatory writing about another person. That's what this podcast is gonna be about. I wasn't expecting to read the biography of Carroll Shelby anytime. I don't even know if I was gonna read it in general. But the last few weeks, as I started doing research for Enzo Ferrari, for the Ford versus Ferrari, I was introduced to this wonderful character that is Carroll Shelby.
And I became absolutely enthralled with him. And so there's gonna be a lot of times where I'm reading you sections of his biography, and I'm just gonna have a big fat smile on my face. So I just wanted to tell you that upfront. I'm completely biased. I love everything about this person. I like the way he thought. I like the way he lived his life. The book I'm holding in my hand, it tells a life story that's almost unbelievable. It's almost unbelievable all the different events and things that could happen in one human lifetime. So I don't want to waste any more amount of time. This book is extremely long. Carroll worked with the author a few years before he died, and he lived to 89 years old, and he used every single year that he was alive on the planet, as we'll see. So let me just jump in. I want to start with a story from early childhood and talk a little bit about her personality, because I think the reason I picked this section to start is because you're going to immediately understand who Carroll Shelby was, just based on a couple different stories from his early life. All right, so let me go to the book. It says, Shelby was a little runt, and he didn't get to be six foot tall until he got out of high school. But let me tell you, he's now, this is, I should have gave you some context there. This is a friend of Shelby that went to grade school with him. And he's going to tell a story about Shelby's, like his persistence. So he says, but let me tell you, I saw a guy whip his butt three times at lunch one time. I said, Shelby, leave him alone. You can't whip him. So there's going to be a lot of like, a very, my poor, like Texas accent that I don't have, my imitation of a Texas accent that might come out on this podcast, because that's where Shelby's from. He has a lot of people that are from there. So that, I found myself when I was reading, like slipping into like this fake Texas drawl. I have no idea why. So he says, I saw a guy whip his butt three times at lunch one time. And I said, Shelby, leave him alone. You can't whip him. Hell I can, he says. This was in high school. Shelby took him on three times in that 30 minute lunch break, and that guy knocked the hell out of him. The guy was pretty well built and a hell of a lot older than Shelby. Three times he whipped him.