Interesting is of course, to me at least, that Jensen were at the time they met or just after, testing the 541 with a V8 (SEA 770, see https://www.joc.org.uk/forum/viewtopic. ... 0&start=90" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). Stephen Carter had sent me the minutes of a Jensen board meeting from January 1958 stating that "It was reported by Mr RA Jensen:...Besides GM I went to other companies, trying to peddle this idea. I went to Jensen in England (and what do they have today but a whopping big Chrysler V8 mill that makes this car, heavy as it is, one of the fastest production machines in the world, at any price!). I talked with John Wyer of Aston Martin; I talked to Maserati and to de Tomaso; I argued the point with people in all walks of life and at all levels of the automobile industry—in fact with anyone who would listen, and they all thought it was a pipe dream. Everybody seemed to think I was smoking marijuana! Finally, this thing became a standing joke. «Ha, ha! Shelby‘s gonna build a car. He‘s gonna build the car to end them all. Only thing is, he doesn‘t have any money! Ever heard that before?‘
c) that a prototype 541 "R" series car had been satisfactorily tested and that apart from reasonably favourable prospects in the United Kingdom it was possible that arrangements could be made for sales of this model to the United States for use with a CHRYSLER engine fitted in America."
Jensen had plenty of experience with American engines- Joerg's Early Interceptor and the pre war cars. They were considering exactly what Shelby was proposing to them, and it seems were interested in expanding into the American market. Maybe Shelby was too young, didn't have the financial backing, or the facilities in the US to install the engines? Anyway, interesting to read Shelby's take on the general context in those years. Interesting also, that Shelby was not necessarily only on the lookout for a sports car, but was also considering a GT. Interesting also that he mentions the Healey a few times- I wonder why that didn't happen, even though Donald Healey himself had a 541S with a 327cui Chevy engine a few years later, Francis' car. Maybe a contractual situation with Austin?
The Cobra Story by Caroll Shelby, published 1965
Before we start on the year 1958 and begin another search through the clippings, I'd like to let up on the racing for a bit and talk about something which to me, then as now, was of the greatest importance: my ultimate objectives. Except at the very beginning,I never considered motor racing as an end in itself, but only as a means to something bigger, more important, and more permanent. Racing is a terrific lot of fun, and as I‘ve said and will never get tired of saying, once this virus, or whatever lt is, gets into your blood, then, brother, you have had it. There is no cure known to man, no drug or injection, no therapy, that can get you to give it up willingly. There is always the chance you may get killed, of course, or so badly hurt you‘ll not be able to race again, but I‘ve already expressed my views about that.
Always, at the back of my mind, perhaps not even consciously, was the thought, “If Carroll Shelby can get famous enough in this motor racing game—if he can get known to enough of the right people, then it might lead to something more important.“ Just what, I wasn‘t sure. You can‘t just yank an able-bodied and somewhat successful race driver out from behind the wheel and shove him behind a desk instead. lt doesn‘t work that way. Yet the longer I went on racing and was around the limited-production factories in Europe, the more I realized that America was missing a big bet, a winning bet, and that it was time someone responsible got their eyes open. To put it briefly, that winning bet I’m talking about was the design and production of an all purpose, all-American sports or grand touring car that you could drive to market and also race during the weekend, without having to spend $15,000 or $17,000 or go into hock for the rest of your life, only to own an automobile which, next year, might be out of date technically.
Sure thing, it was a nothing life, this business of living out of suitcases and spending so little time at home, yet I felt that it was the only way to make the necessary contacts, enough of them, and build myself a big enough name to do what I wanted. After all, my father hadn‘t left me a million dollars that might have put me in a nice position to build my own car just the way I wanted it, so these sacrifices, I told myself, were really worth it in the long run because I knew where I wanted to go and felt sure I also knew how it had to be done.
Designwise, to sketch the thing out briefly without going into a mass of technicalities (I want to seil this book!), my idea was to build something around a big-bore American engine, something that would seil at a reasonable price and service at a reasonable price. Nothing very sophisticated so far as the chassis was concerned, because when you get away from parts that are already in production and start to manufacture your own stuff and get too «smart,“ then up goes the price at once. lt goes up so high that you practically eliminate all your chances, right there, of turning the venture into a commercial success. At that time I was faced with an additional problem that was pretty serious, insofar as competing with American iron was concerned. The CSI (International Sportive Commission) had a decree out that three liters, or approximately 183 cubic inches, was the limit of piston displacement for an engine in sports car competition.
Oddly enough, or perhaps logically enough, I had never tried to interest either Tony Paravano or John Edgar in producing the kind of car that was beginning to take shape in my mind, because, let‘s face it, I think I must have been about the only person on earth who seriously thought such a thing could happen. Every time I talked to anyone about this pet idea, even casually, they‘d laugh a big belly laugh. “Ha, ha! Yeh, yeh. Look what happened to Briggs Cunningham who put this big 4000pound monster into production in that nice little multi-million dollar factory of his in Palm Beach. Sending those chassis to Italy to have the body built, and then bringing them back! Know what they lost on each car? Why, heck, if Briggs hadn‘t had the good sense to quit, even he would have gone broke.“
“That‘s not the way I‘d do it,“ I would argue.
“Okay, then. Take Reventlow. He went a lot further for a lot less money with that Scarab. lt really had the stuff in the sports car races. But look at what it cost to build! As for buying one- you‘re just kidding, pal. Seventeen thousand bucks?“
“The kind of car I have in mind doesn‘t have to cost that kind of dough.“
“lt doesn‘t, eh? What are you going to use for raw materials? Old bedsteads, melted down?“
I had to agree that there sure as hell was no mass market at fifteen grand, and that the people who had that kind of money to spend just didn‘t believe we, in America, could ever hope to match the Europeans. As for its being commercially feasible— why that was the biggest laugh of all. There was nobody, but nobody, willing to listen to me with a straight face, except maybe Harley Earl and Ed Cole of General Motors. At least, during 1956 and 1957, they were willing to discuss the idea in its preliminary stages. If these two farseeing men- a vice-president and a chief engineer- had been allowed to have their say, my idea would probably have been a Chevy-based car; but as luck would have it, the people who were running the Corvette and sports car end of GM‘s vast automotive empire didn‘t even want to listen to anything that wasn‘t their idea, or allow anything to be done that wasn‘t their baby. This, I suppose, was understandable, since their minds were cast along regular or orthodox patterns of thinking. And besides, the Corvette wasn‘t exactly standing the world, or even America, on its ear. The first Corvette was a pretty miserable machine with that outdated six cylinder Blue Flame, or whatever they called it, engine and a lot of other timorous features that turned lt into an apology of a sports car. lt was a very different product from today‘s fast and handsome Sting Ray, but for this Zora Duntov deserves a whole lot of credit. He absolutely does. Without him, the Corvette would have been written off as just one of those things- a blunder that cost a few million. Even today, if Duntov had any notions about building a sports car with something Ford in it, I‘m not so sure that I wouldn‘t say, “Come on in and work with me”
That, as a matter of fact, was bis attitude at the time I was talking to Mr. Cole and Mr. Earl. Duntov is a genuine enthusiast who has had one objective in view for years—to create and market sud seil a mass-production American sports car that could hold its own against the European invasion. But he wasn‘t allowed to do what he really had in mind, and he never will be so long as he‘s in the hire of a big Detroit automobile company. Going forward a bit now, that‘s the reason why I think Don Frey and people like him at Ford have been exceptionally weil oriented and have shown a lot of forward vision in permitting us to run our own company with a minimum of interference. Mr. Frey is an academic, college professor type of man who wears glasses and talks softly, but he never says anything for the sake of hearing his own voice. He represents one of the most progressive elements at Ford today. And he‘s not alone, not by any means. I could name more people at Ford who have stood behind my project: people like Dave Evans, Jacque Passino, Ray Geddes, Leo Beebe, Lee Iacocca—it‘s a really impressive list.
But to get back to what you call the bureaucratic mind, there’s a brief story worth the telling, although I’m not sure whether it came from General Motors or Ford or Chrysler. But there was this executive making a speech at a banquet and he said, “You know, we‘re not too afraid of a steel strike, but if they ever had a paper strike that would shut down our companies completelyl“
Now that I‘m standing on the soap box, I’d like to ramble on a bit more, if it‘s all the same to you. I‘m not talking about the Cobra project at all. That came much later. What I’m trying to do is put into words the thoughts that were going through my mind in those days, around 1957 and 1958. Well, it just seemed to make sense to me that if a Porsche, as beautifully finished as it is in every detail, could fetch $5000 on the American market, and a Corvette could fetch $4000 just the way it was, tilting the scales at 3300 pounds or so, then all lt would take would be a simple American engine, a V8 pushrod type with an output of, say, 300 brake horsepower, and gobs of torque, plus a slightly more sophisticated chassis than the Corvette then had, to turn the trick. What kind of chassis? Maybe something like an Austin Healey type of automobile that you could then market for $3500 or $3700 and that would weigh at most 2600 pounds. lt seemed to me there was a market for a car like this and that the American market was starving for lack of such a product.
As I’ve said before, of course, nobody would go along with the idea. Even when you talked about it to a European who didn‘t really have much of an ax to grind, he‘d tell you, “No, boy. It takes a good 1500cc or two-liter engine and a small chassis to do the trick, And if you want proof, don‘t take my word for it. Just look at the way that type of car goes around your bloody Corvette!“
But Texans are hardheaded people, and I just couldn‘t get it out of my mind that there was a definite market for a car like this; and there was also a market for a car that would be even lighter than this—say, a 2000-pound car of very limited production that would compete with Ferraris selling for around $15,000. Something that you could seil with all the options for no more than $6000 or $7000. But another thing that stuck in my craw was this idea that since Europeans were building an awful lot of automobiles beamed at the American market—especially the U.S sports car market—and since they were depriving themselves of cars to sell them to us, why in heck didn‘t they do what seemed to me the obvious thing? The obvious thing would have been for them to take advantage of their much lower labor rates to build some rather more sophisticated, lighter chassis and drop American-type engines into them and sell them here. lt seemed to me they were missing a sure bet—something that was staring them in the face, because American engines cost so little and put out so much more power per dollar and could be serviced so much more easily, without all this waste of time waiting for parts that were three thousand miles away.
A five- or six-liter engine obviously didn‘t make sense in Europe, but for export to the dollar-and-“sense“ market, that was another story. They could have shipped over the complete car or installed the engines over here. And still they would have had something that could also be sold at home, because this type of a chassis would lend itself equally weil to European needs and European engines of two liters or so—V6‘s and V8‘s then in the making—which were so designed that as time went on and the home economy improved, there would be little trouble in opening them up to three liters. Weil, you can‘t ignore that bit about hindsight, I guess, but the fact remains that I did see it clearly, and that everybody I turned to said, «Nope, it can‘t be done. lt just can‘t.“ They didn‘t stop to think that even if Europe did buy our engines, it would be selling them back to us in complete cars.
If you want me to be a bit more specific yet, what I had lurk ing in the back of my mind was something to compete against, say, the Austin Healey that brought around $3500 and sold as many as 7000 or 8000 cars a year in this country and still used an engine that surely must have been descended directly from a 1918-model London bus. lt would have been so easy to get an American Chevrolet V8 or something like that and come up with the same thing at the same price but with a vastly different performance: a car that would have been fifty mph faster with almost double the acceleration.
This was the type of thinking that was going on in my mind. I wasn‘t particularly interested in the idea of building some kind of a “special“ or an out-and-out racing car. In fact, despite the present General Motors policy which pretends to condemn racing as useless in improving the breed, and “dangerous“ to boot, the only reason why I‘m racing today is because from an advertising standpoint it’s cheaper for me to race than take ads in Time and Life or anything of that sort. Racing, aside from the fact that I enjoy it, costs far less—an awful lot less—than a two page spread in a big national magazine, say. And I get more mileage out of racing, or in other words more advertising and sales rub-off for a given outlay.
Looking back now, it‘s a strange thing how an idea can stare people right in the face and they don‘t even see it. Besides GM I went to other companies, trying to peddle this idea. I went to Jensen in England (and what do they have today but a whopping big Chrysler V8 mill that makes this car, heavy as it is, one of the fastest production machines in the world, at any price!). I talked with John Wyer of Aston Martin; I talked to Maserati and to de Tomaso; I argued the point with people in all walks of life and at all levels of the automobile industry—in fact with anyone who would listen, and they all thought it was a pipe dream. Everybody seemed to think I was smoking marijuana! Finally, this thing became a standing joke. «Ha, ha! Shelby‘s gonna build a car. He‘s gonna build the car to end them all. Only thing is, he doesn‘t have any money! Ever heard that before?‘
No, my faster, easily serviced, cheap-to-buy automobile, one which would combine the virtues I already mentioned—the ability to go to market or race at weekends—this, people said, was not “practical“. Let‘s stick with Austin Healey and Triumph and the others, but let‘s not take any chances.
I will say this for General Motors, they did have some cause to feel sensitive because of the big egg that the Corvette had laid. This project at about that time was so groggy that they were uncertain whether to go on with it or write it off. Saleswise, the Corvette had practically no success at that time, and, in fact, it didn‘t really catch on until they began to race it. Racing was the thing that actually saved the Corvette and proved its tuming point. Lessons were learned in racing, even club racing, that could never have been Iearned in a hundred years of proving-ground tests. And so the car was improved and in turn the improvements began to sell it until it really hit the jackpot. Don‘t let anyone kid you. That was exactly how it happened.
At the time I was waging this struggle- this absurd losing battle you might call it- no American automobile had won anything of any importance in racing since Ralph Mulford won the Seventh Vanderbilt Cup at Savannah in 1911 with a Lozier. Perhaps I should correct that to read, “No American production based automobile had won a major international road race“; otherwise I‘ll have all the Brickyard fans on my back! Okay, there was one exception to this: Jimmy Murphy in a Duesenberg won the very first Le Mans road race, but it wasn‘t the Twenty four-Hour grind, for sure! And not enough can be said about Briggs Cunningham‘s efforts with his cars, which did notch a victory at Sebring, you‘ll recall.
I have great respect for those historical purists who keep records to the third decimal place of everything that ever happened to American automobiles since we began to build them; but no one is going to argue with the spirit of what I am trying to say. The American car, so far as international road competition was concerned, was the Cinderella. And I don‘t think I‘m too far wrong in saying it was the Cobra that saved the act!
I wonder if Jensen began development indepedently, or if it was initiated by the Shelby meeting, or even if they did some of the development together.
, and Jensen history would be quite a bit different !!
