Carroll Shelby: The Legendary Driver and Designer (1923–2012)

Born on January 11, 1923, in Leesburg, Camp County, Texas, Carroll Hall Shelby was a famous automobile driver and designer and, prior to his death, one of the world’s longest-living heart transplant recipients. He was the only son of Warren Hall Shelby and Francis Etoise (Lawrence) Shelby and older brother to Lou Ann “Anne” (Shelby) Ellison. His father was a U. S. postal worker and car buff who did his rounds by automobile. As a child Shelby sometimes accompanied him on these post rounds as well as to local auto races. He spent his first seven years in Leesburg and then moved with his family to Dallas. At a very young age Shelby was diagnosed with a heart murmur and was required to take daily bed rest for most of his childhood.

Upon graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas in 1940, Shelby enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he entered the aeronautical engineering program, but never completed his degree. He enlisted in the U. S. Army Air Corps on April 11, 1941. Shelby completed his basic training at Randolph Air Force Base and was posted to Kelly Field (later named Kelly Air Force Base), Cuero Field, Perrin Army Air Field, Ellington Field, and Childress Army Air Field. He served as a flight instructor and test pilot for the Beechcraft AT-11 Kansan and Curtiss AT-9 Jeep. In 1942 Shelby graduated as a staff sergeant at Ellington Field. Later that year he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He left the service in August 1945. Two years prior, on December 18, 1943, Shelby married his first wife, Vivian Jeanne Fields, who mothered his three children, Sharon Anne (born in 1944), Michael Hall (born in 1946), and Patrick Bert (born in 1947). Shelby and his wife divorced sixteen years later in February 1960. By the time of his death, Shelby had married at least six other women: Janet R. “Jan” Harrison (in 1962), Sue Stafford (in 1963), Sandra Brandstetter, Cynthia Psaros (in 1989), Helena Dahl (1990–97), and Cleo Patra Roberts (1997–2012).

In 1949 Shelby went into business raising chickens. His first batch of chickens gave him a $5,000 profit, but a subsequent batch was devastated by disease and bankrupted him. In January 1952 Shelby entered his first race, a quarter-mile drag meet in which he drove a flathead Ford V8-powered hot rod built by Ed Wilkins, a friend from high school. Later that year Wilkins drove up to his home in an MG TC and invited him to drive the car in a drag meet in Norman, Oklahoma, where Shelby won two races. On November 23 Shelby won the Texas Region of the Sports Car Club of America race at Caddo Mills. In August 1953, during a race at Eagle Mountain National Guard Base near Fort Worth, he drove in a pair of striped bib overalls, which became his signature outfit. In January 1954 he drove the Mil Kilometros de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, sponsored by the Automobile Club of Argentina, where he caught the eye of John Wyer, the team manager of Aston Martin. Later that year Shelby drove DBR3s for Aston Martin in several races, including the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. In November 1954 he was badly injured during the Carrera Panamericana in Mexico. He continued to drive in early 1955 with his arm in a cast and his hand taped to the steering wheel.

From 1955 to 1957 Shelby won more than half of the eighty-one races he entered, set multiple records, and traveled the world. In 1956 he was sponsored by John Edgar, for whom he drove Ferraris and Maseratis. In both 1956 and 1957 Shelby was featured as Sports Illustrated magazine’s Driver of the Year. In early 1957 he partnered with Dick Hall, a former sponsor, to open Carroll Shelby Sports Cars of Dallas. That September, while driving Edgar's 4.5-liter Maserati 450S during practice for the Riverside International Raceway in California, Shelby spun it into a dirt embankment. After the accident he had to have plastic surgery on his face and three vertebrae fused in his neck. In November he memorably won the 100-mile race at Riverside, after having spun out on the first lap and gone all the way to the back of the field.

In 1958 Shelby again joined the John Wyer and the Aston Martin team in Europe, where he drove a DBR2 at the Belgian Sports Car Grand Prix. He then drove Maserati 250Fs in five other Grand Prix races, three for Mimmo Dei's Scuderia Centro Sud and two for Temple Buell. In June 1959 Shelby and Roy Salvatori co-drove an Aston Martin DBR1 to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Shelby was the second U. S. American-born driver to win this race, after Phil Hill in 1958. However, by this time his heart problems had reemerged, and he suffered from acute chest pains (angina pectoris). He began racing with nitroglycerin pills under his tongue to relieve the pain.

Due to his heart condition, Shelby had to retire from racing in 1960. Earlier that year he had moved to La Mirada, a suburb of Los Angeles, California, and launched a Goodyear Racing Tires distributorship. In 1961 Shelby opened the Carroll Shelby School of High Performance Driving with fellow driver Pete Brock. In 1962 he founded Shelby American, a high-performance car company in Los Angeles, which became one of the most successful independent sports car companies of its time. Shelby built his famous Shelby Cobra using an AC Ace chassis and a Ford Windsor V8 engine. The prototype debuted at the New York Auto Show in April 1962. The aluminum body made the car much lighter than the Chevrolet Corvette and thus more competitive for touring. The Cobra proved to be able to compete against Ferraris, Maseratis, and Jaguars and won the 1963 United States Road Racing Championship. In 1963 the band The Rip Chords released the song “Hey Little Cobra” about Shelby’s creation. In 1964 the Cobra finished fourth at Le Mans, ahead of two Ferraris, which had dominated the race since 1960, and in 1965 an evolution of the Cobra, the Shelby Daytona, designed by Pete Brock, beat the Ferraris to win the Fédération Internationale de I’Automobile’s International Championship for GT Manufacturers in the large engine category. Shelby American was the first American manufacturer to win the title.

In 1964 Ford vice-president and Ford Mustang developer Lee Iacocca asked Shelby to develop variants of the Mustang. The results were the Shelby GT350 (which debuted in 1965) and the Shelby GT500 (1967). Ford hired Shelby American to take over the company’s GT40 project in 1965. In need of more space, Shelby American moved its headquarters to a pair of vacant hangers at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The following year Shelby American-designed Ford GT40 Mk. IIs took the top three places at both the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It was the first American car to win the competition at Le Mans and broke Ferrari’s six-year winning streak. GT40s again won at Le Mans in 1967, 1968, and 1969. In 1970 Ford, having ceased production on the Shelby Mustangs the previous year, ended their racing agreement with Shelby. In 2003 Shelby again partnered with Ford to develop new lines of Shelby Mustangs. This second partnership lasted until his death in 2012.

Shelby published his autobiography, The Carroll Shelby Story, in 1967. That year Shelby American’s operations were divided across three subsidiaries—the Shelby Automotive Company, the Shelby Racing Company, and the Shelby Parts Company and moved out of the LAX facility. By 1971 these subsidiaries had ceased operations, and Shelby had retired from the automotive industry. A life-long chili enthusiast, he co-founded the World Championship Chili Cook-off in Terlingua, Texas, first held in 1967. In 1969 he launched Carroll Shelby’s Texas Chili Mix, which he sold to Kraft, Inc., in 1986. In 1973 he founded the Shelby Dowd Wheel Company with Al Dowd in Gardena, California. The company manufactured aftermarket specialty wheels. In 1975 Shelby provided the seed money for his son-in-law, Larry Levine, to found the Chili’s Bar & Grill restaurant chain, originally opened in Dallas. For much of the 1970s Shelby lived in Botswana, Angola, and the Central African Republic, where he ran a safari company and traded in diamonds.

In 1982 Lee Iacocca, now chairman of Chrysler, invited Shelby to build performance models of the Dodge Charger. In addition to the Shelby Chargers, Shelby helped develop the Dodge Viper. In 1990 he became a heart transplant recipient. Having successfully recovered, Shelby drove a Dodge Viper as the pace vehicle at the Indianapolis 500 in 1991. That same year he founded the Shelby Heart Fund (later the Carroll Shelby Children's Foundation). The foundation provided financial assistance to young people for coronary and kidney disease care and transplants. Shelby received a kidney transplant from his son Michael in 1996.

Shelby was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1986, the International MotorSports Hall of Fame in 1991, and the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1992. By the time of his death, he owned homes in Bel Air, Los Angeles; Las Vegas; and Pittsburg, Texas, where he raised miniature horses and African cattle.

Carroll Shelby died at the age of eighty-nine on May 10, 2012, in Dallas and was buried at Leesburg Cemetery in his hometown of Leesburg. Shelby was portrayed by Matt Damon in the Academy Award-winning 2019 James Mangold film Ford v. Ferrari, which depicts the Ford-Shelby American victory over Ferrari at the 1966 Le Mans race.