Carroll Shelby: A collection of my Favorite Racing Photos

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Review by Wallace Wyss

This book is meant to be sort of a photo album. Nothing more. Nothing less. And in doing that, it does a good job of not only chronicling one man’s life but coming in heavy on nostalgia for a time gone by. Shelby’s life was lived so large that you can’t have all the words and all the pictures so this book just has some of the interesting pictures and very few words.

Fortunate is the reader in the choice of author, or in this case, the curator of the pictures as well. That is partially because the author, Art Evans, is old enough to have been there right at the beginning, racing in ’55 against Shelby; and he maintained a friendship with Shelby for more than 50 years so when it came time to do an album, Shelby was available to contribute pictures from his own family album. The author worked on the book with Shelby right up until the time Shelby became too incapacitated to work on it anymore, but he directed family members to help Evans because he wanted to see it reach print.

The most interesting part of the book is the early pictures, many of which we have seen in other books, even that one of Shelby as a kit in a pedal car. It also shows Shelby when he was an itinerant race driver, always looking for another wealthy patron who could buy a competitive car which in those days were all foreign made, usually British or Italian.

We see Shelby at races on air force bases; at Pebble Beach (when they raced through forests), then his “discovery” by foreign automakers where he is racing in Europe against Europe’s best, driving Ferraris, Maseratis, Astons and Porsches.

A little bit of the Shelby legend emerges here and there; like his wearing locomotive engineer’s overalls, that happened because Shelby was late getting to a race, but he shows up, races in the overalls and gets more attention than the winner, so decides to make that his trademark.

There’s only the occasional hint of the dangers of racing, a shot of a severely shortened Maserati, a wrinkled Austin Healey that Shelby flipped five times in the Carrera Panamericana.

Obvious is Shelby’s affection for other drivers, with many shots of him and a young Sterling Moss, a young Phil Hill, and his really bosom buddy (and even room-mate) Masten Gregory.

Shelby’s personal life gets a spotlight thrown on it here and there. There’s pictures of him with his first wife; Jeanne, the mother of his three children (and a great family shot where he doesn’t look the same as he did later. Evans doesn’t explain he crashed a few years later and had plastic surgery to re-attach his nose). Then there’s shots of Shelby kissing race queen Jan Harrison several times with embarrassingly juvenile captions about “many kisses later.” We get it, Art, that’s high school yearbook stuff. She divorced him after one year of marriage; just before he hit paydirt with the Cobra.

The pictures, in chronological order, show glimpses of Shelby’s future business career as an automaker such as photos of projects tried and abandoned; his Listers powered by Chevy, his Scaglietti bodied Corvettes done in Italy.

The first hint that Shelby had a future as entrepreneur in the inclusion of his Shelby School of High Performance Driving brochure. (Ironically there is a shot in there of his instructor Pete Brock who figured large in the Shelby legend later on).

One of the best pictures, bar none, is the one of Shelby after he won at LeMans in ’59 , champagne bottle in hand, sitting on the car he drove to victory. It’s too bad Evans doesn’t give each photographer a photo credit below his picture. The photographer’s names are all lumped in an acknowledgement page where I would prefer to see such great memorable photographs credited on the page. It might have been the photographer’s greatest picture and he gets no credit.

The book has some narrative but then under the pictures reverts to a pseudo hand written script as in a photo album (a very cornball ‘50s style type font I might add).

The Cobra’s gestation is shown here and there, the first Cobra ever made; how it’s driven in polished-out form at Willow Springs, then its first race against the Corvettes (it lost that first race but for years afterward it dominated the Corvettes). Then there’s a quick segue into the big block Cobra, showing the prototype that was leaf sprung, and damn near uncontrollable. Then then there’s brief pages on the Daytona coupe before Evans brings us to the GT40.

That’s where one of the book’s greatest pictures is, Ken Miles and Shelby at LeMans in ’66 with a GT40 Mk. II, Miles being an English driver Shelby had raced against in the Fifties but who eventually became his most valuable development driver.

Evans goes into the Shelby Mustangs briefly (mistaking a ’66 for a ’65 in one picture) and then gives the Dodge Shelbys three pages though most Ford fans would prefer he leave those out, except of course for the Viper, one car that had the spirit of the 427 Cobra in that it was a no-apologies road terror.

Though Shelby for more than ten years made replicas, oddly Evans avoids the dreaded word “replica” only says Shelby tried briefly to say he had found some old uncompleted Cobras but quit those when the DMV investigated. Evans does show that Shelby moved construction of cars to Nevada and there advertised them with new SN sequences so there was no longer a pretense these were uncompleted cars started in the Sixties. (Still those first few will no doubt come up at auctions in the future; leading to the subject being plumbed again…)

The book also shows a few of his duds, cars that didn’t make it. He leaves out the mid-engined Lone Star completely. There’s a couple shots of the Toyota 2000GTs he ran for Toyota and one shot of the Indy turbine car he pulled from the race. There’s only one picture of his failed attempt at “modern car” (not a copy of something he’d done before) that almost broke him financially –the Oldsmoblle-powered Series I, but no explanation of why it failed (I refer you to Eric Davison’s book on that, entitled Snake-Bit)

The book nears the end showing Shelby in Africa; but no explanation of what drew him to the Dark Continent, then shows Shelby in his final years, when he had a reproachment with Ford and once again there were new Shelby Mustangs being made.

All in all, it’s a pleasant enough trip down memory lane; and even being the author of three Shelby books I learned a lot and appreciated the man’s accomplishments even more. I can safely say if there hadn’t been a Carroll Shelby, American race drivers and American built race cars would never have gained much of a foothold in Europe.

So, though I felt cheated on the skimpiness of information, I feel he did a good selection of photos and you have to know that, if it hadn’t been for Evans and Shelby being personal friends, we as fans might have never been able to see some of these pictures. Count me “in.”

Title: Carroll Shelby: A collection of my Favorite Racing Photos

Authors; Art Evans with Carroll Shelby

Publisher: Car Tech MN

Length: 255 pages

Binding: Hardbound

ISBN: 978-1-61325-322-9

Price; $34.95 (US.)

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THE REVIEWER: Wallace Wyss is the author of SHELBY The Man, The Cars the Legend, a biography available direct from the publisher Enthusiast Books at (715) 381 9755.

More  images from the book below. Click to enlarge,