[Shelby] Perseverance is the most important thing in life.
Believe in what you want to do and go do that,
and don't let anybody sidetrack you.
[announcer speaking indistinctly]
[engine revving]
[announcer] The 1959 Le Mans race one lap out,
Moss on the Aston leads the two Ferraris
of Gendebien and da Silva Ramos.
And Shelby rides again.
The tall man from Texas is in the saddle.
[engine revving]
Through the long night they drive,
in a solitary high-speed world of sound,
broken only by routine stops to refuel.
[Shelby] Twenty-four hours is a long time.
So it's a lot of luck.
[vehicle rumbling]
[Shelby] First pains I had in my chest,
and I knew something was wrong.
[Baime] This is Le Mans, the biggest race on the planet,
the most grueling race on Earth,
and Shelby has this condition that's a secret even from his team,
that he could literally die at any moment.
[announcer] The leader returns to the race.
[Shelby] I was forced to drive with a nitroglycerin pill.
When I would have the pain in my chest,
I'd pop one of them and slow down for a couple laps.
[Baime] As we get deeper into the 24-hour race,
Shelby's heart condition is getting worse.
If the danger of the race doesn't do him in,
his own heart might.
[light music playing]
[Shelby] I was raised as a Southern Baptist.
Boy, I wasn't allowed to drink a Coca-Cola.
I was only allowed to drink water and milk on Sunday.
My father was a rural mail carrier that drove pretty fast,
and I remember when I was three years old,
I'd stand up and I'd say, "Whip it,"
and he did, and I would say, "Let's go faster, Dad.
Let's go faster, Dad."
I've been interested in racing all my life.
When I was very small,
my father used to carry me to all the races.
He was interested in them.
The only automobile racing we had was on the half-mile dirt tracks.
That was back during the Depression.
He was encouraged in this by his early life,
and he said he always enjoyed that speed.
I think he liked to go fast.
It was something that was on the edge, and he liked to be on the edge.
[Shelby] I got my driver's license at 14 years old,
and the first thing I do is take my dad's '34 Dodge out
and get caught by the cop for driving 85 miles an hour.
[Baime] Shelby grew up during the Great Depression,
so he was used to life being tough,
but when he gets to be a teenager,
the world faces the biggest challenge that it ever has.
[mid-tempo piano music playing]
[Baime] World War II had begun.
[gunfire]
[explosions]
[Baime] After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, he enlisted.
Young and fearless, he wanted to go fight the Nazis.
[military drill music playing]
[Randall] As far as his involvement with World War II,
he was a member of the Army Air Corps back in World War II.
He was training other pilots.
Carroll loved speed, and whether it's in a car or an airplane,
he just loved speed.
He loved flying as much as he loved racing.
[Baime] He was born loving anything that went fast.
The Army also saw that he was a pretty good leader.
The Army recognized Shelby's greatest skills
and utilized both of them.
After World War II was over,
Carroll married his high school sweetheart Jeanne and started a family.
This was life-changing in more ways than one.
For the first time in his life, Carroll Shelby raced a car.
[Shelby] I had a high school friend named Ed Wilkins.
We built a go-kart with a Maytag washing machine engine
when we were in junior high school together.
And the first race car I ever drove in my life
in an organized race was his MG.
It was in Norman, Oklahoma. It was in a little MG TC.
[upbeat race music playing]
I won that race,
and I went to another race in Oklahoma and drove a Jaguar
and won that race,
and a friend of mine had an Allard with a Cadillac engine,
and I started driving his car
and won three or four races in it.
[Aaron] I think he realized then there was something to it.
He didn't make the money back then
that you could make racing cars today, obviously.
It was not very lucrative from a salary perspective,
but he was good at it.
[Patrick] I don't think my dad ever had a real job.
It was just one entrepreneurial aspect after another.
He got in the dump truck business, gravel trucks,
and then the last thing he did was the chicken farm.
[Shelby] I was vaccinating my chickens, and my wife called me and said,
"You're supposed to be in Fort Worth, Texas.
The race starts in an hour and a half."
I jumped in my pickup truck; I didn't have time to change.
I got to Fort Worth just in time to start the race.
[indistinct chatter]
I won it in these overalls, and they put pictures of me
on the front page of the Fort Worth Press.
I thought, "Hey, this is pretty good."
[Aaron] Chicken overalls was a win to start with,
but he realized it gave him a brand.
He really, I think, then continued to do that,
and it built his persona.
And it didn't take but about another year or so
for a couple other rich guys that had cars to call him up and say,
"Hey, we want you to drive our car."
His progression was very astounding on how fast it happened,
but that was due to his aggressiveness.
He could sell anything in the world.
He sold his racing to whoever could afford it.
[announcer] A 4.5-liter Ferrari is the entry of Guiberson.
Carroll Shelby is the driver.
[Baime] Shelby's winning on the track was equaled by his success on the farm.
His first batch of chickens had netted him nearly $5,000,
a tidy sum for that day.
He thought he was on the road to riches.
[Shelby] I was stickin' a needle in these chickens
to keep 'em from getting Newcastle disease.
All the chickens died eventually, and I went broke.
[Baime] Shelby lost 20,000 birds over a two-day period.
He was instantly bankrupt.
[Michael] There was probably one or two little survivors poking their heads out
but not a going business at that point.
It was... they were all dead.
[Shelby] Growing up in east Texas as a kid,
very poor circumstances,
living through the Depression,
you realize the world turns upside-down every day
on somebody that was on top of it.
He didn't really know what he was gonna do from day in and day out.
Particularly after the chicken business went under,
that was a big, big shift for him,
and he was struggling to find something else to do.
I think he had learned, at that point in time,
that he wasn't gonna work for somebody else.
That wasn't really his personality.
He needed to find something that he could do on his own.
[Shelby] I'd always wanted to be a racing driver.
I was 29 years old, and I said,
"To hell with it, I'm going out and do that."
[Baime] Racing came naturally to Shelby.
In 1953, he raced nine times.
He won five races and was second twice.
[announcer] Watch car number 20 take the curve on the inside
and leave the others behind.
That's Carroll Shelby,
and that bit of driving sends him to the front.
[Patrick] My dad never made much money racing,
and he knew that it was the way it was gonna be.
It was lean.
Nobody thought back then of themselves as being poor.
You just didn't have any money that week.
One time, he brought home a pickup truck
full of canned beans that we lived on for a long time.
But when he started racing, he found out he's good,
so that's when he decided that he would make a name for himself
and then use that name to go develop other things.
[Baime] Shelby wanted to parlay winning on the track
into a bankable enterprise off the track,
and by 1954, it was paying off.
He was attracting the interest of the biggest players in the world.
[Aaron] He wound up, in 1954, going over to Europe for the first time,
and raced with Aston Martin at Le Mans.
[uplifting music playing]
He started winning races, and he really made a name for himself.
There was never really a question of, "Could he win the race?"
It was like, "Well, if he didn't win, then the car must've broke."
[Michael] And when they said you could go to Argentina,
I mean, I think he turned Heaven and Earth up
to figure out how to get a plane ticket down there.
Then he came back, and he went to Mexico.
[Shelby] Mexican road race in 1954,
I was driving Austin-Healey.
Panamericana was probably the greatest road race that's ever been.
Started at the Guatemalan border and wound up in Juarez.
It was a couple of thousand miles,
and nobody could learn the course completely.
[Baime] This race paid over $117,000
with a big chunk of that going to the winner.
Shelby knew a win here would take care of his family for years.
The Carrera Panamericana had to offer huge prize money
because it was one of the most dangerous races in the world.
Nine drivers were killed the previous year.
[Shelby] Actually, I was going along pretty good.
I was keeping up with the Ferrari's
and ahead of all the Lincolns in this little four-cylinder Austin-Healey,
and I screwed up.
[somber music playing]
[Aaron] The car flipped over.
Cars could not withstand sudden stops.
Fatalities would happen.
[Michael] No seatbelts in that point in time,
so he was thrown out of the car.
[Shelby] I hit so hard, and the hickory handle,
the knockoff handle, broke my elbow
and chopped up a little bit.
Racing was easily the most dangerous sport in the world at that time.
[Baime] Shelby knew the danger of the sport.
He'd lost many friends already, but racing was in his blood.
The sport killed a lot of drivers for far too many years.
Every year, you would accept
maybe one in four drivers to have a huge accident
and some of them to die.
[Shelby] The Grand Prix, as a circuit, I think they lost half of the stars
of the racing here in the United States that year,
and it was not uncommon for us to lose
four or five drivers a year back in the '50s.
[Jones] Fire is racing's worst enemy,
but you gotta keep goin',
hope like heck some of that stuff don't happen to you.
[Laban] The one group of people who just accepted it
as part of the job were the drivers themselves.
[interviewer] But is it scary enough to stop driving?
[Shelby] No, I won the next race at Riverside.
-[engines revving] -[action music playing]
[Randall] After breaking his arm, he used to drive with a cast on
and tape his arm to the wheel so he could have good grip.
That shows his true grit, that he'd have the broken arm
and still continue.
[announcer] The starter unfurls the checkered flag,
and at the finish, it's Carroll Shelby
blazing past, the winner of the Torrey Pines feature.
Carroll Shelby pushes his Ferrari and is showing the way.
Ten laps remaining, the drivers increase the tempo
and push their cars to the limit of man and machine.
[Chance] Drove big 4.9 Ferraris
and he drove giant 5.7 Maseratis,
and he drove the Birdcages,
and he won, and he won, and he won.
[rhythmic drumbeats]
[Chance] And he wore his bib overalls, and he was a showman.
There was an article in one of the London papers
that talked about the ten-gallon hat man
coming over to challenge the stars.
And here was this big man with his Stetson hat on,
I mean, he looked every inch
the big man in the desert hunting out the baddies,
and everybody sort of was impressed
with the way he drove.
[Shelby] To win, you've got to have a perfect mental attitude every time.
When you go to a race, if you're not mentally up for it,
you're not going to win no matter what car you have.
[Baime] From 1955 to 1957, Shelby drove in 81 races.
He came in first place over half the time.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Baime] He won Sports Illustrated's Driver of the Year Award twice.
As a driver, he was considered one of the best to ever compete.
[Chance] He's the most underestimated winning driver,
both in terms of European fans and American fans, in my view.
He's the most underrated driver.
[Baime] Shelby raced all over the world,
winning wherever he went,
but racing in Europe for him meant something different.
He was studying the cars.
[Shelby] The reason I wanted to go to Europe
was because I wanted to learn how Ferrari, Maserati,
Aston Martin, all those teams built their cars
and ran a little automobile company.
[Laban] Carroll Shelby made two trips to Ferrari
in the mid-1950s, essentially as a customer.
[Baime] Shelby and a partner started a business with the idea of importing
the most successful European sports cars of that time.
So of course he wanted to include Ferraris,
which had dominated the global racing scene for a decade.
Both times, Enzo Ferrari treated Shelby like dirt.
I think Carroll watched Enzo Ferrari pretty closely,
and I think he learned a lot from that.
He may not have particularly got on with Enzo.
When it came to Ferraris, though, Dad was never a big fan.
Enzo wanted nothing to do with him.
I don't think he liked the cowboy hat and the overalls and stuff.
He didn't understand that, Enzo didn't.
So, Carroll Shelby told Ferrari that one day...
he'd come back and kick his ass.
[Baime] Shelby wouldn't have to wait that long
to go to battle with Ferrari.
At the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans,
the biggest race in the world,
Shelby's driving an Aston Martin,
and he's battling with Ferrari for the outright lead in the race.
[Patrick] And it was during the night,
Dad just methodically started moving up.
He certainly wasn't the fastest on the track,
just plugging along kind of like a tortoise and the hare.
[announcer] Shelby now drives Aston #5 through the esses.
And with eight hours still to go,
Ferrari #14 leads Aston Martin #5 by three laps.
Shelby is battling with Ferrari
in the greatest, most grueling 24-hour race in the world,
and he's about to score the biggest victory of his life.
As he speeds his green Aston Martin
around the eight-and-a-half-mile circuit, his heart is starting to fail.
The pain is excruciating.
[Shelby] I knew that I had hereditary problems,
and my father died at 46 years old with it,
so I figured there was nothing that could be done.
[Baime] The pain grew so great,
Shelby would sometimes double over in agony.
The only relief is temporary
and came in the form of nitroglycerin pills,
which he'd place under his tongue as he drove.
By doing this, he was somehow able to continue racing for hours on end.
Shelby and Salvadori kept the pressure on Ferrari,
and as the race wore on, the usually reliable Ferrari
started to break down,
and the Aston Martin was closing in.
[engine revving]
[announcer] Whilst at Mulsanne,
Shelby brings the Aston onto the same lap as the sick Ferrari.
[applause]
[announcer] And now the Ferrari's race is run.
Gendebien brings his crippled car into the pits to retire.
Now the winner pulls in to be submerged beneath a seething mass eager to acclaim
a resounding victory,
a victory as richly deserved as it was long awaited.
[Baime] To do what Shelby did,
be part of a two-man team,
race 24 hours with a heart condition and come out on top
on the world's biggest stage in racing,
this is a feat that will never be duplicated.
[Aaron] It was probably the peak of his career.
Finally his doctor told him, "You can't keep racing cars.
It's gonna kill you."
[Baime] Shelby tried to keep racing in 1960,
but he realized he needed to stop for good.
[Shelby] Race driving wasn't very profitable back then,
and I didn't have any way to make a living.
I'd had a very unfortunate divorce.
I started all over with not a dime.
A race car driver that retires with heart problems,
he's very quickly forgotten about.
[Baime] With his racing career over,
Shelby had already been planning his next endeavor.
[Brock] Carroll was trying several things.
He didn't know for sure what he was gonna do in his life,
but one of the things that he could do
was he thought he would start this school for race drivers,
and I became his first paid employee,
you know, with the driving school.
[Shelby] Most people who enjoy motor racing find the more they learn about it,
the more interesting the sport is to 'em.
I don't know anybody any more qualified
to pass along some of these fundamentals than our own Pete Brock.
[Brock] So Carroll asked me to run his driving school out at Riverside.
During the off time, I started working for Carroll
on a secondary business.
[Shelby] In 1960, the doctor told me I had five years to live, maybe.
I figured, "So what?"
I might as well try to build a car that I dreamed of.
[uplifting music playing]
[Shelby] About all I had was a dream.
It was to build a sport car
that more people could own and enjoy driving;
and second, they could race under American colors
and maybe prod the old established names a little bit.
The Corvettes were winning everything,
and I said, "Carroll, it's never gonna help it."
He said, "Yes, it is."
[Agapiou] Corvettes were the prominent car in racing at that point.
And Shelby definitely-- yeah, he definitely wanted
to beat the Corvettes, there's no doubt about it.
[Baime] He knew if he wanted to make a name for himself,
as a car manufacturer,
he had to build a Corvette killer.
[Aaron] Carroll was an entrepreneur at heart.
He just did what he wanted to do, and he woke up every morning with ideas.
He'd always dreamed about it, even when he was in Europe the first time,
a European lightweight chassis
with a light American V8 in it.
Ray Brock with Petersen Publication
came to me and said, "Ford has a new small-block V8,
and you might put something together with 'em,"
and I also knew that AC had lost their deal with Bristol Engine.
Carroll went over to AC and went in there
with his great ability to sell things and said,
"Ford Motor Company is behind me,
and we're gonna build all these sports cars,
and would you guys supply us a couple of chassis for nothing?"
Shelby was a great character.
He wasn't overburdened with a great deal of honesty.
One of the nicknames we had for him was "Billie Sol Estes."
My dad used to call him "Billie Sol" after Billie Sol Estes,
the guy that sold a bunch of stuff he didn't have.
[Gurney] Billie Sol Estes was another Texan,
managed to sell nonexistent tanks of fertilizer
to the government,
and he made a lot of money doing that.
[Ford III] Carroll Shelby shows up to Ford Motor Company
and knocks on the door and gets a meeting with Lee Iacocca
who was running sales and marketing for us at the time.
[Shelby] I went to Lee Iacocca and said,
"If you'll loan me $25,000,
I'll build you a car that'll blow the Corvette off.
It's all it'll cost you."
He says to Lee, "Listen, I've got these chassis and bodies
from AC Cobra over in England,
and I want to put a Ford engine in 'em,
and I want to go race 'em all over the world."
[Shelby] I didn't have any money, but Ford didn't know that,
and AC Cars didn't know that.
He knew how to connect with people,
and he used that to his advantage.
[Shelby] Between whipsawing both of them,
I wound up with a chassis and four or five engines from Ford.
And he was still talking as they pushed him out the door,
you know, and finally, Iacocca said, "Just get that guy outta here,
give him a couple engines and some money,
and let's see what he can do."
[mid-tempo music playing]
[Shelby] I wanted to build my own car.
The only people in America that could do it at the time
were the hot rodders,
and it started here in California.
Shelby was smart to move to California
and tap into all the hot rodders,
the fabricators, the mechanics,
the welders, the painters.
Everybody had a race car in their garage
or a hot rod or something at home.
[Randall] You didn't want a car just like everyone else's,
so you wanted to customize your car, you wanted to change the wheels
or put an extra carburetor on it.
[Baime] Across the country, people were hot rodding their cars
to make them go faster, to make them look cooler.
Young people were literally marching in their towns
demanding that their town build them drag strips.
[announcer] He's on it, and into the three quarter,
he's really coming on and into the traps
with a top time of 170.45 miles per hour.
[Baime] The epicenter was right in Southern California.
[Shelby] Lance Reventlow had put a group of people together in California
that had built a car that looked like it might be successful.
The first American car that really competed
against the Ferraris and the European cars,
so I decided that I had to come out here.
[mid-tempo music playing]
[Shelby] I got a couple of engines sent out
to Dean Moon's shop in Los Angeles,
and we started working on 'em.
[Baime] The AC chassis had also arrived in Southern California.
The public relations manager for Carroll
asked me to come down to Dean Moon's in Santa Fe Springs
and take some pictures of a car being built.
[tools whirring]
[metal clanging]
I walked in the shop and I go, "What the hell is this?"
Nobody knew if it was running or not.
The chief engineman for Dean Moon
built the engine, got it running...
[engine turning over]
[engine starting]
[Shelby] We started putting whatever carburetor, manifold on it,
and got the engine up to about 265 horsepower.
[engine revving]
[Bondurant] Carroll took it for a spin...
[engine revving, rumbling]
...and said, "Where's the Corvettes?"
[Gurney] I liked driving the Cobra Roadster very much.
It sort of flouted all the rules.
It was still light, good brakes on it,
and the engine had a broad range of torque in it,
and they were just a lot of fun to drive.
[Baime] Across the county in Venice,
Lance Reventlow and his Scarab racing team were moving in the opposite direction.
While the car was competitive,
Reventlow had had his fill of the high cost of racing.
[Holman] If you look at the core of the Shelby American team,
they were the team from Lance Reventlow's Scarab effort.
[Morton] And Carroll took it over when Reventlow quit racing,
and some of the people just stayed with the building.
[Shelby] Out of that came the best guy that I ever ran into, Phil Remington.
I don't think there was anybody that could do what Phil could do.
[rattling]
[hammering]
Remington is one of the few figures in racing
who's become a legend who's not a race car driver or constructor.
Well, the guy was a fabricating engineering genius, self-taught.
He had the ability, when something broke on the cars,
he could build a fix or weld a fix
or machine fabricate it right then and there.
The guy was just amazing.
He had seven ideas, and he only needed one,
but they were all pretty good.
[Friedman] And he taught a lot of the young guys
how to do all this stuff
and fabricate and everything else,
and the guys who worked under him
can't say enough about him.
We all looked up to Remington; we all learned from Remington.
Oh my gosh.
The guy's amazing.
To build up the financial strength of his company,
Carroll wanted to create the impression
that Shelby American was bigger than it really was.
There's a slight problem:
Shelby only has one Cobra.
[Randall] Carroll was a salesman.
He could bend the truth a little bit
in order to get done what needed to get done.
During that whole time, he's building a relationship
with Motor Trend, Car and Driver, Road & Track,
and so when his car was completed,
he had 'em all lined up to go test it.
[Baime] To seem like there were more Cobras than just one,
Shelby had his only car painted a different color
each time a different member of the press came to test it.
[Friedman] So one would have a yellow car, one would have a blue car,
one would have a red car,
and, "Oh, God, we got an exclusive!"
So every magazine would think it got something special.
[Baime] Shelby was really in the right place at the right time.
He had all of these young people,
these hot rodders who knew how to make cars go fast,
who knew how to fabricate,
and he had Phil Remington, who was this technical genius.
All of that together, you had an amazing company.
[Shelby] It was really a very interesting time.
We had a lot of spirit around the place.
[Brock] You gotta realize, we're a very small group.
We're like about eight guys total
which we had a Frenchman, we had a Swiss,
we had Japanese, New Zealand, and Australian guys there.
[Shelby] And all these guys worked together amazingly well.
[Agapiou] They were all a little bit of road racers, hot rodders.
It was a great shop to work in. It was like one big family,
abusing each other. [laughing]
There was a lot of nicknames, yeah.
We hired a shop foreman named Carroll Smith.
"Scatter-Shit" was his nickname.
[Kretzschmar] Ken Miles, we called him "The Hawk."
And some people called him "Sidebite," you know,
'cause he talked out of the side of his mouth.
It was a good day for Ford. I'm very happy for the Ford Motor Company.
I'm very sorry indeed for Dan.
You really had to listen close to understand what he was saying.
Gordon Chance was "Ricky Nelson" 'cause he looked just like Ricky Nelson.
[Chance] "Ricky Nelson," "The Teenage Tuner,"
and isn't this all funny?
Well, Remington, he was twitchy.
His nickname was "STP," "Super Twitch Phil."
That stayed with him, that did.
We were a ragtag bunch of crazy guys, kind of out of control.
I remember they had a cage, like an aquarium, with a live cobra in it,
and a real cobra snake.
He always had fireworks, Charlie did,
so he'd throw fireworks from time to time.
They'd put 'em in the engine room and fire 'em in a pipe there
at the guys working on the engines and shit like that,
and it was really echoing in there.
[explosion]
[Clinard] Ferrari was contentious. He pitted people against each other.
It was not a happy place to work.
At Shelby American, Carroll Shelby was a team leader;
he was a team builder just through his personality.
It was a happy place to work.
Being an employee at Shelby's, back then in the beginning,
it was like working almost in a hobby shop.
It's the kind of job that,
even though it was good, hard work,
you wanted to go to work.
Carroll would come down through the shop, and he would give you a compliment.
"That's a nice weld."
You felt so appreciative.
It made you want to, you know, work harder and even do better.
Guys would come back after dinner, and I'd come back with 'em.
I wasn't gettin' overtime. I wasn't even working.
I just came back to watch.
He knew how to connect with people, all kinds of different people.
It really didn't matter what your background was
or what your profession was.
[Friedman] If he liked you, you could do no wrong,
and if you did your job, you could do no wrong.
If he didn't like you, watch out.
Watch out.
In less than ten months, Shelby created his vision:
a car that would be the envy of everyone on the street
and possibly one that could win on the track.
But Shelby knew, in order to sell these cars,
he had to beat the Corvettes.
[Grant] The Corvette was the car to beat,
and that was our primary challenge with the Cobra.
[narrator] This Corvette was developed by Chevrolet engineers,
headed by Zora Arkus-Duntov,
internationally known designer and racing driver.
Had the first head-to-head competition at Riverside.
Obviously, all the top West Coast Corvette drivers were there,
including Bob Bondurant and Dick Guldstrand and Dave MacDonald.
And Billy Krause shows up in the first Cobra.
[Brock] Billy Krause, one of the top, top road racers
at that time, very, very race savvy.
There were no competitive cars to the Corvettes at that time to speak of,
until the Cobras got going.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Krause] The first time we showed up at Riverside with a Cobra,
nobody knew what to think.
After a few laps, they figured it out pretty quick.
MacDonald and I were up toward the front.
I knew I had to beat him to win,
so I wanted to measure the Cobra against the Corvette
knowing he was gonna drive the heck out of the Corvette.
I didn't have to guess if he was trying or not
'cause I knew he was.
[Brock] Krause, he went out and led immediately,
and it showed that the car was way, way ahead
of whatever Corvette was doing.
[Lerner] As soon as it appears at Riverside in its first race,
it dominates the Corvette, makes it look second rate.
[Krause] Actually, I was surprised how easy
it was to beat the Corvette with the Cobra.
I was at least a half a lap ahead.
Coming out of turn nine, which is a banked turn,
all of a sudden, it went boom,
and then the wheel and tire passed me.
I said, "This is not good."
The Cobra was handily leading the race and broke a stub axle,
and the Stingray won.
[Lerner] But everyone knows that the Cobra is gonna dominate thereafter.
[Krause] The other drivers pretty much avoided me afterwards.
They were jealous, I mean, what else can I say?
My dad was so impressed with that Cobra.
So quick, so light, much lighter than the Stingray,
and he knew the writing was on the wall from that race.
Shelby didn't win the race,
but he proved that the Cobra was going to dominate the Corvette.
[Ford III] It was a recognition that Carroll, along with Ford,
had found something special.
We had our first true competitor in the racing car business in a while.
And like Carroll Shelby the driver, Shelby Cobra started to win.
-[heroic music playing] -[engine revving]
We're running 35, 40 hours on the cars without even overhauling them now,
which is phenomenal. That's even better than Ferrari is.
They've been reputed to be the most reliable cars,
and I think we even got them beat on that now,
so I'm not worried one bit about the 500 miles.
In fact, I wish it were 1,000.
[announcer] Carroll Shelby and his Cobras win the Manufacturers' Championship.
Cobra creator Carroll Shelby has realized his ambition.
We won the Drivers' Championship, the Manufacturers' Championship,
and of course, the USRRC Championship.
He was doing really what he wanted to do: beat the Ferraris, the Corvettes,
the Porsches, and everyone else.
When we were able to run with 'em and actually beat 'em,
it was a huge accomplishment,
and it meant a great deal to Shelby, to Ford Motor Company.
[Baime] Henry Ford II, Chairman of the Ford Motor Company,
knew the value of winning races,
but his desire was to win at the highest level.
That meant competing and winning at the biggest race in the world,
the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
You need to understand the magnitude of winning Le Mans during this period.
It made celebrities out of the drivers who won and the manufacturer.
[Oliver] Major manufacturers get in long-distance racing
because it's an arduous race, and it enhances the brand.
I mean, if Ford can win at Le Mans reliably,
that says something about the engineering.
[Nader] There was a marketing arm of each auto company
that's obsessed with auto racing
as a marketing technique to sell cars.
They would say, "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday."
We didn't have that performance component of our brand
that customers wanted.
[Baime] Ford had the Galaxie, Ford had the Thunderbird,
but when it came to a plausible race car, Ford had nothing.
[Laban] Henry is at a motor race, sees a Ferrari win, and says,
"We need those red cars."
[Baime] His solution to win Le Mans quickly
was to simply purchase Shelby's rival, Ferrari.
Since Shelby's win in an Aston Martin in 1959,
Ferrari had dominated, winning every 24 hour contest since then.
For speed and endurance, Ferrari was without equal.
There was a lot of effort put into making this deal a reality.
And we'll try to accommodate your desires as best we can.
My father thought that this was gonna be a done deal.
Ford Motor Company was gonna walk away with an incredible brand.
But I said, "No, I don't want to sell it."
[Baime] Enzo Ferrari was playing Henry Ford II
so that he could get a sweeter deal from an Italian company, Fiat,
a deal which he would eventually take.
[Ford III] My father was extremely disappointed.
That's when he decided, "All right,
we're gonna beat you, and we're gonna beat you
at your own game, in your backyard."
[Baime] Ford began construction on a race car with an unlimited budget.
The GT40 was being designed for two reasons:
win Le Mans and humble Ferrari.
Shelby had not forgotten about his vendetta with Enzo Ferrari,
and he wanted to take him on at Le Mans, but he knew he didn't have the car.
No matter how good it was for short track racing,
it was not gonna be a suitable car for Europe
'cause it simply didn't have the top speed.
[Shelby] We wanted to go international racing,
and the old 289 Cobra
was about as aerodynamic as a shoebox.
[Brock] The tracks we ran over in this country didn't run over 150,
155 miles an hour anyway.
So it'd run up to 155 miles an hour and just stop.
It was like pushing a brick through the air.
[Baime] Shelby knew that Cobra did not have the aerodynamics
to blast 200 miles an hour
down the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans.
[Shelby] We knew that we had to do something
as far as body style was concerned.
So I had a young man named Pete Brock that had worked at General Motors,
and I said, "Pete, you think we could build a streamlined version of a Cobra?"
I said, "We can design a completely new body
for the existing Cobra chassis,
and I think that we can make 'em go faster."
But I said, "It may not look like anything you've ever seen before."
And he said, "Aw, hell, I don't care what it looks like.
Is it gonna go fast?" And I said, "I believe it will."
[down-tempo music fades]
[hopeful music playing]
[Brock] The actual idea for the new shape of a body
had been developed in the late 1930s in Germany
by a guy named Reinhard von Koenig-Fachsenfeld.
The idea for it has never been really tried in modern competition.
Extending the length, cutting it off,
and fooling the air that was flowing over the back of the car
into thinking that it was gonna go that far.
It might look so different that there'd be a lot of resistance for it,
and I knew that because I knew what the history was.
Builders at that time, including BMW,
they'd had focus groups, and the cars looked so strange
that everybody rejected 'em,
so the idea went away.
World War II comes along.
-[gunfire] -[ominous music playing]
Factories were bombed out.
All of that information was lost.
[gunfire]
But when I was at General Motors,
I found in their library a technical paper on their studies,
and it showed what the aerodynamic improvements were on it.
And I couldn't read all the German, but I could understand the numbers
on the coefficient of drag improvement.
These ideas could be applied to the Cobra.
I presented the idea to the crew,
because they were gonna have to build the car.
All the enthusiasm I'd had stopped completely
because I showed people what I thought the car would look like
with a strange looking car with a chopped off tail.
And the main resistance came from Phil Remington,
who was our chief engineer,
and the guy was my idol.
This is the greatest fabricator, race car builder in the world.
And I thought, "Well, boy, if I get Phil behind this deal,"
you know, "it's gonna be a slam dunk."
I mean, he thought it was a stupid looking car, and it wouldn't work.
And of course all the guys in the shop followed him and said,
"We don't want to work on it either."
[Agapiou] I mean, everyone was abusing him,
saying it wasn't gonna work and this and that,
and especially the upper echelon.
When I looked at the Pete Brock coupe,
I thought, "You know, that thing's gonna be
200, maybe 300 pounds heavier,
and it's gonna bog down the engine,
and I don't expect it to be a big success."
[Agapiou] But he had Shelby on his side,
and that's all that-- that's all that really mattered.
[Shelby] So I didn't really know anything about aerodynamics.
It looked pretty good to me.
Aeronutronic, a Ford defense company,
had some really good PhDs and some people that understood aerodynamics.
They came up and looked at it and said, "Hey, that thing ain't gonna work."
[Brock] Told us if we extend the tail out about three feet to a point
that we'd be much better off.
Common acceptance of what aerodynamic efficiency was
was to have this teardrop-shaped automobile,
but it really wasn't very efficient.
That created turbulence all over the body.
Fortunately, our top driver, Ken Miles,
he had seen what the Germans had done
and knew that they were onto something,
and he convinced Carroll that we should go ahead with the project.
So he said, "OK, go ahead and do it."
I said, "OK, what's our budget?"
He says, "Well, we don't have any money."
He said, "You can have Skip Hudson's old crashed car."
The body was damaged, but the chassis was still OK.
[Baime] Brock had his opportunity, but what he didn't have was time.
Shelby American wasn't just racing.
It was producing Cobras for street use, and demand was high.
Shelby gave Brock a drop-dead date to finish the car.
[Brock] We had a 90-day window to build this car
from the first sketch to the completed running car
to get it ready for Daytona.
Took a jigsaw and just cut out all those patterns
and then put it together like a big ice cube tray.
[ominous music playing]
And made the book so we could really see what the car looked like full size.
As it started taking shape, though, people started believing in the car.
[Brock] Once the car started going,
well, they all dived in, and everybody contributed something
to make the car right.
[Patrick] Phil Remington and Ken Miles
and John Olson and Donn Allen,
they all put together a chassis
and we built the first body.
[Kretzschmar] It looked kind of funny with a chopped-off tail,
and everybody didn't think it would do that well.
[Brock] We got the car done and took it out to Riverside.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Baime] Pete Brock had defied everyone with his design,
and now was the moment to see if it would succeed or fail,
because the stopwatch doesn't lie.
[engine revving]
And it was 25 miles an hour faster down the back straightaway of Riverside
than a regular Cobra.
[Brock] Right out of the box,
the car was three and a half seconds faster than anything we'd ever run.
[Agapiou] Ken was amazed how fast that car was down the straight at Riverside.
[Shelby] It ran pretty well.
It would run 170 miles an hour down a straight
on 350 horsepower.
[Agapiou] Painted it and put a stripe on it.
It was incredible design that Pete had come up with.
Carroll said, "Let's get this thing back to the shop.
We'll try to get it ready for Daytona."
[Baime] Shelby named the car for the race he was preparing it for,
the Daytona Continental.
So, since that day, it's always been known as the Cobra Daytona.
[Brock] When we got down to Daytona,
Carroll had assigned Bob Holbert and Dave MacDonald to drive the car.
The main competition against the Cobra was the Ferrari 250 GTO.
An American car challenging them was unusual
and certainly put some feathers the wrong way
in the European racing elite.
[Baime] Enzo Ferrari and his team knew very little
about the new American race car with a strange body,
but they were about to find out.
When the race started, the Daytona Coupe and the Ferrari
were battling for the lead.
[Brock] Holbert goes out, he's running against the Ferraris,
and he comes back and after a couple laps, he says,
"This is too easy. Christ," he says,
"I can run off and leave these guys easily."
[engine revving]
[Baime] After 110 laps, the Daytona Coupe had built
a ten-minute lead on the entire field.
The Ferrari continued to lose ground.
At that point, we did some testing on fuel.
The car was 25% more efficient than the roadsters.
For endurance racing, the fuel economy was even more important,
because if we could go three more laps each time Ferrari pitted,
that's the way you'd win the race.
The Daytona Coupe was so much faster than anything there, it was just incredible.
There was nothing there that could even go near us.
[engine revving]
[Brock] By the seventh hour of the race down there,
we were so far out in front,
there wasn't any question, we had the race won.
[Agapiou] They came in for a pit stop, put the fueler in,
it burst out the other side, out the vent can,
and ran down and caught on fire.
[explosion]
There was a point there it looked like the car was gonna explode.
[Kretzschmar] One of our boys from New Zealand
was absolutely engulfed in flames.
[Agapiou] We're trying to put Olson out.
Meanwhile, he's screaming, you know,
"I dropped my wallet," so we got his wallet for him.
[Brock] And Carroll was so angry with the whole situation,
and he said, "We're done."
And the mechanics were saying, "Carroll, we can get the wiring fixed.
It doesn't matter. We'll lose all these laps, but the car is so fast.
We can get out and win the race."
[Baime] Shelby puts his foot down and retires the car.
[Brock] So the car didn't win it, but we did set the lap record on it.
And then we went to Sebring.
[announcer] Shelby's Cobras, led by the Number 10 Daytona Coupe,
caused a stir as they moved through inspection.
[Brock] The reaction after Daytona was rather mixed,
because obviously we'd shown great speed,
but the car had also proven pretty vulnerable with it blowing up.
[announcer] The reigning Ferraris. They dominate the prototype class
with two four-liter and two three-liter cars.
They'd been champions of the world already since '62,
and we're already into the beginning of '64.
They'd won everything all through '63.
So they were very, very confident.
I mean, the Ferrari factory team had pretty much ruled the roost forever.
[Baime] When you think of Ferrari and what Ferrari means,
you would think that the founder of that company
would be extraordinarily wealthy, but he never was,
because every lira was always spent on racing.
Carroll Shelby had already decided what he thought about Enzo Ferrari.
[Shelby] I never saw anybody with an equal race car
that I didn't figure that I could hold on with.
It would be great for motor racing
if American cars could beat the Ferraris once.
[referee] Six, five, four...
[announcer] They've broken on five,
earlier than they've ever jumped the gun before.
[indistinct shouting]
[announcer] Penske gets away just in front of Holbert.
[Agapiou] The race started, and we just went away with it.
We're just killing the Ferraris and the Porsches,
and not just GT cars but prototypes as well.
[Brock] It didn't take long for people to understand
that the car was gonna be really, really fast.
[Agapiou] It was absolutely amazing, a group of guys from Venice, California,
who'd come down and beat all those high-end manufacturers.
[announcer] True to his hopes, Carroll Shelby, with the Ferrari GTOs,
taking the Manufacturers' Championship lead at the same time.
Holbert and MacDonald led the GT winners.
[Brock] By the time that Holbert and Davy won at Sebring,
I think Ferrari had some concern.
[Shelby] We dominated.
That's when we decided to go to Europe
when we saw that we could beat the GTO in a 12-hour race.
This was also now starting to be very personal between Ferrari
and Carroll Shelby.
[Brock] I mean, all the American guys wanted to go to Indy.
That was their goal.
Carroll's goal was to go back and beat Ferrari's ass,
because he had been insulted by Enzo Ferrari at one time,
and he wanted to go back and show what Americans could do.
[Baime] And he held a press conference,
and he looked people in the eye, and he said,
this is a quote, "Ferrari's ass is mine."
[Brock] We knew that we had a car that would beat Ferrari,
so we scraped a little money together with a little help from Castrol
and our sales of the Cobra were making a little money,
so we put it together on a very scrimpy budget
and went to Europe.
[Baime] Of all the races in the world, there was none bigger than Le Mans.
To win Le Mans, it meant that you were the best.
[Baime] Since its inception in 1908,
no race was more prized or coveted.
For an automotive manufacturer, it proves their endurance
more than any other race can possibly do.
Commercially, it is the most important race
to win in the world for a car manufacturer.
You win Le Mans, the whole planet knows.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Brock] There was a tremendous amount of publicity,
the fact that Ford Motor Company was gonna enter the Le Mans race.
[Baime] It had taken nearly 14 months,
but Ford's entry, the GT40, was ready to race at Le Mans
and ready to put an end to Ferrari's dominance at this race.
[Brock] Millions of dollars had been devoted to this project.
It was getting tremendous, tremendous publicity,
you know, with the Ford PR campaign.
This title, the GT40 was really representing a big change in motor racing.
My father was surprised about the car.
[Randall] I'm not sure if people had seen a car that was so low.
It was clearly a very dynamic design.
[Baime] Although Shelby was using a Ford engine,
that's where the relationship stopped.
All Ford ever cared about was their entry, the GT40.
[Brock] Nobody was looking at the Cobra,
and we've got two Daytonas in the GT class.
In sports car racing, there's always been a class structure.
At the top of the totem pole is the prototype class.
Anything went,
and you could build as many as you wanted of them
or as few as you wanted.
You could just build one car, and it would just be a prototype.
And the next class down was typically the GT class,
and now it's the so-called production-based class.
The GT class has a lot of value for a manufacturer,
because it's based on the cars they sell on the street.
[Baime] The stage is set for a war of speed.
The Ferrari P Series versus the Ford GT40.
The Shelby American Daytona Coupe versus the Ferrari 250 GTO.
Each manufacturer had poured everything they had into their cars.
Le Mans always had hundreds of thousands of spectators,
but this year, it was overflowing.
Ford's debut at Le Mans drew millions of eyes
to that race around the world.
[announcer] The Le Mans 24-hour race at last,
and three gleaming Ford GTs are present.
At 4:00 p.m. the starter drops his flag and runs for safety.
[Baime] In the opening laps, the GT40 is furiously fast.
There's a helicopter camera car following it.
Its top speed is incredible.
[Attwood] The cars were fast.
Richie Ginther was particularly quick and was challenging the Ferraris,
which was really his job because he was the lead car.
[announcer] Richie Ginther has taken the lead on the second lap
in the white Ford with the blue stripe.
The American racing colors are in front at Le Mans.
[interviewer] Do you reckon you've got anything up your sleeve
that you can pull out a little bit more?
I can pull out 15 seconds any time you wanted it,
but we're trying to finish in 24 hours.
You mean they won't let you pull out for 15 seconds?
[Baime] In the GT class, both Cobras are outpacing the Ferrari GTO
as well as staying with the Ford and Ferrari prototypes.
Shelby American's first showing is going strong,
until an improper starting of a dead battery
leads to the disqualification of car number six.
Only one Cobra remains,
the one driven by Dan Gurney and Bob Bondurant.
Losing one of the coupes is a serious blow to Shelby and the team
and seriously hinders their ability to win the race.
Ford's first casualty is Richard Attwood from Britain.
[Attwood] We'd done maybe two or three hours into the race,
and I saw some flames starting to lick up into the engine bay.
It was burning fairly well when I got out.
There was a "whoof" underneath the bonnet.
[Moss] It's known as the grand prix of endurance,
and I think that this is the thing.
It's a great endurance on the driver and on the car.
And this is a combination that I think wears out
a lot of people and a lot of vehicles.
And this is, I'm afraid, what's gonna happen now.
We're starting 55 cars.
I don't think more than 15 or 20 are going to finish.
[Baime] During the 11th hour of the race, troubles brew for Ford.
Richie Ginther's GT40 is retired.
Thirteen hours into the race, Phil Hill goes also.
[Baime] By morning, with every GT40 broken and out of the race,
the Ford execs were forced to pay attention to the Daytona Coupe.
It was now winning the entire race in both classes.
The Daytona could genuinely beat Ferrari.
[Shelby] When you had long straightaways,
we'd just blow the Ferrari off in the weeds.
It wasn't even close.
I don't think that the European racing world
was expecting much of a challenge from America,
and they thought that they probably had the grandfather rights to dominance
at these prestigious events like Le Mans.
And then the first place car all pulled off.
[announcer] Here's a car that's been having
a good deal of trouble during the night,
the John Surtees, Lorenzo Bandini car.
In and out once more and back on the course. There he goes.
And I was thinking, "Are we gonna win overall?"
[Shelby] We were leading there for a little while overall,
and there wasn't anything that could have beat us.
[Brock] They're competing against one of the lead Ferraris,
and they run those guys into the ground.
[engine revving]
We'd gotten a rock through the oil cooler in the front,
and it had a little pinhole, and it was spitting oil out all over everything,
so they had to drive it really gently.
Now stay ahead of the Ferrari.
We'll use the brakes instead of more RPM.
Yeah, OK.
[Shelby] The thing ran the last four or five hours at 300 degrees.
It never missed a lick. How 'bout that? Amazing.
[Baime] The oil leak prevented the Daytona Coupe
from winning Le Mans outright,
but Shelby and his team still won the GT class, beating Ferrari.
For the first time in history, an American car had won at Le Mans.
[Grant] Carroll obviously was very pleased.
On the other hand, his eye was on the goal,
and that goal was to win the championship.
Until we achieved that goal, he wasn't about to celebrate early.
[somber music playing]
[Ford III] The first time that they raced at Le Mans, cars didn't finish.
The GT40, for a number of mechanical reasons, they weren't strong enough.
[Baime] So once again, Ferrari wins Le Mans in 1964,
first, second, and third.
Henry Ford II is not pleased.
He wanted somebody who had demonstrated that ability to win.
Ford has always known, and the whole industry's always known,
that Shelby's the guy who can get it done.
[Ford III] Carroll Shelby had won Le Mans as a driver,
had won Le Mans as a manufacturer with the Daytona Coupe,
and it was after '64 that he brought in Carroll Shelby
to help develop the cars.
[Shelby] Here's something else that we're excited about.
It's this new Ford GT.
It was designed and built by Ford engineers
as kind of a laboratory on wheels
to test new ideas
and prove Ford's capabilities in open competition.
We've been given the job of testing this new car and racing internationally.
The biggest concern for them was endurance.
These 12-hour and 24-hour races are, you know,
demanding beyond reason.
Carroll Shelby knew the task before them.
[Grant] I can remember one of the two GT40s
actually came into our shop.
They still had wire wheels on 'em, and they were overheating,
and so Phil went to work on that.
Phil Remington was pretty much responsible
for all of our successes in racing over there.
In spite of his reluctance to build a Daytona,
he was still, I think, the most critical guy in the team.
When Shelby got the cars,
the first thing we did was put Halibrand mags on it,
bigger tires, and so that put more stress on it.
But they even had problems with the suspension
even before they put the bigger tires and wheels on it.
Changed the suspension geometry, they changed the engine.
A lot of the subsystems,
braking subsystems and everything was redesigned.
[Baime] Not only did Ford entrust Shelby and his team
with redesigning the failed GT40,
Ford also had an additional product that needed Shelby's attention.
When Carroll was successful with the Cobra,
Ford came to him and asked
about doing something to the Mustang that they had just introduced.
That was the start of the GT350.
[Ford III] The Mustang, when it was first conceived
by Lee Iacocca and everyone else at Ford and my grandfather,
it was really just a way to get younger customers into the showroom.
It was almost sort of a housewives' car in '64.
[narrator] A beautiful day. A Mustang day. Ford Mustang.
Practical enough for this family of five,
yet beautiful enough to be honored with the Tiffany Gold Medal for Excellence
in American Design.
[Ford III] And then, you know, along comes Carroll Shelby.
[Shelby] The Mustang was very, very popular,
but it was a secretary's car, a little six-cylinder engine,
and they wanted to put a V8 in it.
They wanted a sportier version that had wider appeal,
especially to the performance enthusiasts,
and I thought, "Man, you can't make a mule outrun a racehorse."
The Mustangs were a real transformation,
and that was when the shop became really super overcrowded,
and they realized they had to do something and get a bigger shop.
Well, they moved from that small shop at Princeton Street,
and they moved to the airport.
[light music playing]
♪ I've got a destination ♪
♪ And I'm on my way ♪
♪ There's no hesitation ♪
[Kretzschmar] I don't know how Shelby slept.
He had his tire division going,
he had the race shop going, had the assembly line going.
He had a parts division shipping parts all over the world.
There was 250 people working there.
It just got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Guys on the assembly line were 17, 18, 19 years old.
Guys in the parts department were 18, 19, 20 years old.
Guys in the race shop, half the guys were in their 20s.
The oldest guy there was Shelby. He was 40.
[Baime] At this point, Shelby felt he could do no wrong.
From the evolution of the Cobra to the Daytona Coupe
to taking over the GT40 program,
his rise from broke, retired driver
to auto CEO was meteoric,
and Shelby was good at making sure everybody knew about it.
[Holman] Carroll Shelby was a promoting genius.
He took his assets and made the world know about them.
We got tickled because he always had a photographer there to take pictures,
and Carroll Shelby's picture...
-[shutter clicks] -...was to be in the front page
of any paper anywhere he was.
-["Every Little Movement" playing] -♪ Every little movement ♪
♪ Every little thing you do ♪
♪ Is a sleight of hand ♪
♪ That commands my heart to love you ♪
[Holman] He was to do something noteworthy,
and his press agent was to get it in the paper
so that Carroll Shelby's legend moved on.
In Carroll's case,
if another mechanic had their picture in the paper and Carroll's wasn't,
that mechanic could lose his job over it.
He was there to promote Carroll Shelby.
Few people realized, back when all this was happening,
Ford had taken over Shelby American.
[narrator] Ford in California is represented
by these sleek racing cars.
They're the products of Shelby American Incorporated,
builders of the world champion Ford Cobra
and the Mustang GT350 sports car.
[Holman] And it became a division of Ford Motor Company,
and so the other side of it was he was the factory team.
He was their boy.
They owned him.
[Shelby] I was having to build Mustangs, having to build Cobras,
having to try to straighten the Ford GT program out.
It was too much for me.
[Morton] The whole atmosphere changed.
It went from a cool race shop
to a, you know, to a corporate entity.
[down-tempo music playing]
[Marietta] Got a little bit more sterile when we moved to the airport,
because now there were more rules.
It was just a different environment.
Uh... It was so big. We went from 10,000 square feet
to probably like 40,000 square feet,
so things got spread out,
and you weren't as close to the guys that you worked with before.
[Baime] Shelby American was experiencing growing pains.
It was no longer a little shop
filled with badass car guys and hot rodders.
It was a professional operation.
The quality of the work continued to be unmatched,
starting with the reimagining of Ford's Mustang.
[Shelby] This GT350 is a racing version of Ford's Mustang 2+2.
We set the cars up for racing
by installing special components, racing shocks and so on.
We converted the Mustang fastback into race cars.
The bodies came from the factory
and put lighter aprons and Plexiglas windows,
made the cars lighter.
We modified the engine,
and also welded in override traction bars
to make the suspension stronger.
In the assembly line,
they built those GT350s that were strictly for the street,
and we sold them to the customers for $5,900.
And then in the other hangar, they built R models...
and they were strictly for the track.
[engine revving]
Mustangs really weren't a big deal until they started racing them.
That really put the Mustang on the map.
They shipped over more rally cars and race cars
to enter events in Europe in '64.
And the Tour de France, they won the event, first and second.
It was an important victory, the Tour de France, for the Mustangs
because they had, at that point, not won anything in America.
[Baime] The victory proved to Ford brass
that this former secretary's car, the Mustang, could be fast;
it could be a winner on the track.
But Shelby had ambitions elsewhere, and he made that clear.
[Shelby] I don't give a shit about the Tour de France anyway.
It means a lot to a lot of people over there,
but it wasn't as high on my priority list as Daytona...
[engines revving]
[Shelby] Sebring...
...Le Mans.
[Baime] And at the end of 1964,
Carroll Shelby really wanted just one thing.
He wanted to beat Ferrari for the World Manufacturers' Championship.
[Laban] With one race left at Monza,
the Daytona was gonna win the Manufacturers' Championship,
beating Ferrari the way Shelby had always promised he would.
Ferrari had just a couple of points more than we did,
so it all came down to the last race at Monza.
And by then, we had four cars,
so we were gonna go to Monza with four Daytona Coupes.
We would have absolutely crushed Ferrari.
Enzo Ferrari sees the writing on the wall.
There's no way he's gonna let that happen.
Ferrari protested the fact
that he wasn't allowed to run the cars he wanted,
and eventually, the race itself was cancelled.
So no points can be awarded, and the Cobra can't win.
Ferrari wins again.
So, Ferrari won 1964 by politics,
not by being the fastest car.
[Baime] For Shelby, the 1965 season was looking to be
the most stressful thing he had ever faced.
The Cobra and the GT40 are both competing in the same endurance races.
Ford executives are putting tons of pressure on Shelby
to make sure his focus is on the GT40.
Two months before Daytona, the car is not even close to ready.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Agapiou] Ken Miles was the test driver, really.
He basically tested and developed most all the cars.
He was an engineer prior to going to Shelby's
and prior to opening his own business.
[engines revving]
Ken Miles drove it first. He didn't like it at all.
I hopped in, and I drove it, and it didn't handle great.
It was not as aerodynamic as it needed to be.
Remington made new bodywork for it.
They adjusted the ride heights and suspension,
changed the shocks on it,
and stiffened it up.
Then we put a stronger motor on it
so it could go quicker.
Each time that they worked on it,
it got better and better and better.
[engine revving]
[suspenseful music playing]
We have high hopes for all of these cars this year.
We hope that by racing with Ford, we can make this an American year.
Very soon now, we'll be racing these cars
against the best competition in the world.
The Ford GT, after running experimentally last year,
now begins its first full racing season
with its American debut at the Daytona Continental.
[announcer] Forty-three cars, 29 from Europe and 14 from America,
will start the 2,000-kilometer Daytona Continental.
[Baime] So the GT40s show up at Daytona in 1965.
Shelby's had less than two months to turn these cars into winners.
[announcer] The cars move up tight behind the pace car
for the running start.
Number 77 Ferrari, the fastest qualifier on the inside.
Number 72 Ford GT, the second fastest qualifier on the outside.
And the race is on.
-[engines revving] -[suspenseful music playing]
[Baime] At the beginning of the race,
Bob Bondurant in the GT40 flies by Surtees in a Ferrari.
[announcer] Bob Bondurant zips into the first turn,
opening up Number 72 Ford GT.
[Bondurant] By the time we got to turn two,
I was doing 200 miles an hour, and I pulled Surtees 18 car lengths.
That car felt great. I was like, "Yes!"
We fixed it and it worked.
[Agapiou] With all the changes that Remington made,
they got the car moving very quickly.
[Ford III] This race was the first race that GT40s finished.
-[vibrant music playing] -[announcer] The last lap.
The Americans have won.
They've overthrown the Ferraris.
[Baime] This was a magnificent win for Shelby,
and you can say that this victory,
maybe even more than his Le Mans win as a driver,
this is really the win that puts him on the map.
Not only had the GT40 won,
Shelby American cars took the top four spots,
with the Daytona Coupe taking first and second in the GT class.
[indistinct dialogue]
The next race for the factory team was at Sebring.
-[suspenseful music playing] -[engines revving]
[Baime] With the GT40 and four Cobras running strong,
Shelby is delighted with how the team is performing.
[engine revving]
-[Kretzschmar] Then the rains came. -[thunder crashing]
[mid-tempo music playing]
[announcer] It's the worst deluge ever recorded at Sebring.
You'd take a tire off and change it,
and if you didn't grab it, it literally would float away.
[upbeat music playing]
[Agapiou] Phil came in, and he's up to his waist in water
because it couldn't drain out the coupe fast enough.
He was trying to get out of the car,
and Shelby's going, "God dammit, you stay here."
And he's pushing him on the shoulder.
And I had gotten a little hammer and a giant ice pick,
and I'm smashing holes in the floor
to drain the water out.
Meanwhile, Phil was screaming 'cause he thinks
I'm gonna hit him in the balls or something,
'cause I'm-- with the hammer, 'cause I'm right between his legs
with the hammer and the ice pick.
He's yelling, "Watch it, you. You're gonna castrate me."
So he's trying to get out, and Shelby's pushing him back in,
saying, "God dammit, Phil, get back in the car.
He's not gonna hit you where it hurts." [chuckles]
What a funny pit stop that was.
[announcer] Suddenly, the 12-hour Sebring Grand Prix of Endurance is over.
Number 11 Ford GT is first in the Grand Touring Prototype class.
If we're successful at Daytona and we're successful at Sebring,
my family and I will be there in June.
[Baime] By the time Ford is getting its cars ready to ship to France,
suddenly people are starting to describe Ferrari as an underdog.
Ford is expected to win.
[Shelby] Well, we did all right the first couple of times out.
The field of cars were very impressive at Daytona and Sebring.
Now we're getting ready for the big ones overseas.
Monza, Targa Florio, and Le Mans.
In the weeks to come, we hope to continue our string of victories.
[announcer 1] This is the year of Ford's great challenge
and American invasion on the supremacy of the Italian giants.
[announcer 2] The pre-race drama had centered
on the strongest ever challenge from America.
Their declared intention: to beat Ferrari.
[Agapiou] In 1965, it was starting to get really serious.
[Brock] Shelby had won a year earlier in the GT class with the Daytona Coupe,
but Ferrari had still won overall with the prototype.
Prototypes are the cars that compete for victory overall at Le Mans,
and that's all anyone really cares about is who wins the race overall.
Henry Ford II even made the trip to Le Mans for the first time
to watch his GT40s make history.
The car worked fantastic. I was third fastest qualifier.
Ford debuted the GT40 in 1964.
There's a huge audience.
But now in 1965, there's an even bigger audience.
For the first time at Le Mans,
an American car is actually favored to win.
-[suspenseful music playing] -[indistinct chatter]
[announcer] Chris Amon's first away in the Ford seven-liter,
followed by Bob Bondurant, Bruce McLaren, and Surtees.
[engines revving]
[announcer] At the esses, the seven-liter Ford GTs
are pulling away from the Works Ferraris
as the leading Ford sets a blistering pace.
Bruce McLaren in one of the 427s
and Chris Amon in the second 427.
By the time they're at the end of the straight,
the Ferraris aren't even in sight.
[Shelby] Ford had really built some good engines,
and somebody at Ford decided to replace them
just before Le Mans.
[Baime] The night before the race, the heads of Ford's Special Vehicles Unit
ordered Shelby to replace his engines with engines prepared by the Ford factory.
They wanted to be able to tell Henry Ford II
that they had won Le Mans with Ford factory engines,
not the ones from Shelby American.
[announcer] But now the McLaren, Miles Ford, is in gearbox trouble.
Already, the Ferrari grip on the race tightens.
[Shelby] What happened was they got some new head bolts,
and they didn't check 'em out, and all the head bolts stretched.
[announcer] By midnight, with the race only one-third through,
the Ford challenge had been shattered by Ferrari.
[Bondurant] All the cars broke.
Ford made the decision to tell Shelby
to take 'em all out and put in Ford engines.
[Shelby] It didn't work out. That was a disastrous race.
[Bondurant] If I had not have changed the engine,
I would have won.
[Agapiou] Again, the Fords broke.
They made simple engineering mistakes, and Ferrari didn't.
[engines revving]
[Laban] Only one Ferrari prototype finished the race,
but that was enough to win it, and Ferrari also won the GT class,
and they finished one, two, three overall.
Not even Shelby's Daytona Coupes managed to finish the race.
[Baime] The press called it murder, Italian style.
[Ford III] It was the second year for my grandfather of utter disappointment,
and I'm sure he probably questioned, in his mind,
whether this was all worth it.
[Shelby] Henry Ford and Edsel were at Le Mans.
They looked around at their father and said,
"Is that the best we can do?
Ford Motor Company bring 200 people to Le Mans
and fall on our face like this?"
[Agapiou] Ford, with millions and millions of dollars
going down the tube again,
start to look bad.
This was humiliating, and Henry Ford II was pissed.
Despite the GT40s' disastrous performance at the 24 Hours of Le Mans,
not everything is lost.
Shelby American actually has the Cobra Daytona Coupe
in a position to win the World Manufacturers' Championship
if the car can win at the 12 hours of Reims.
[Brock] All of our Daytonas were given to the Alan Mann racing team in England
to run them.
My father got the Daytona Cobras
because Shelby, at that time, had a lot on his plate.
[Baime] The race at Reims started in darkness.
And soon enough, the team of Bondurant and Schlesser
and the Cobra Daytona Coupe were winning the race handily.
No one could keep up with them,
and anyone that tried found themselves destroying their car in the process.
The Ferraris were just outgunned by Shelby's engineering and Brock's design.
Jo Schlesser, my co-driver, we both wanted to win that championship.
We were running nice and strong, crossed the finish line,
and we knew we just won the race
and won the World Manufacturers' Championship.
First time any American ever won it.
That was the last time any American ever won it.
[Baime] Schlesser and Bondurant had carried out Carroll Shelby's mission.
They "beat Ferrari's ass" on his own turf,
and they did it with six races left in the season.
Shelby crushed Ferrari.
[Bondurant] That's the one race,
the championship that Carroll Shelby wanted the most.
He was so proud when we won the World Manufacturers' Championship.
[Kretzschmar] That was a big deal
because that was basically a hot-rodded Cobra,
that was a 289 passenger car motor.
It was a home-built car, and they won the World Championship.
Carroll Shelby finally met his promise to whip Ferrari's ass
and loved it ever afterwards.
[Shelby] When we won it in '65,
it was probably the greatest day of my life up till that time.
Ferrari personally took it very hard
that Shelby beat him with the Daytona.
Reims is the capital of Champagne, so we celebrated immensely.
[laughs]
[somber piano music playing]
[Baime] But there was little celebrating going on back in Los Angeles.
Henry Ford II's dissatisfaction at Le Mans
had reverberations that were shaking the foundation of Shelby American.
The decree comes down from Henry,
"Put that shit to the side and start getting these GT40s done
and do it right now."
And that crushed Peter, clearly.
[Baime] The Daytona Coupe was no longer needed,
and neither were its workers.
[Agapiou] Definitely they got rid of a lot of people,
'cause when I came back, a lot of the crew were missing.
They were gone. I mean, they just weren't there anymore.
Anyone who worked on the Daytona Coupe kind of got their walking papers.
Jack Balch had said, you know, "We don't need you anymore."
And I thought, "Well, they can't do that to me.
I'll go over everybody's head and talk to Carroll."
He just looked at me, said, "Sorry," and kept walking.
[Brock] When I got back from Europe,
there was a total stranger in my office there,
and I could see that there was, you know, not much future for me in there.
Shelby didn't really fire me
but, you know, it was obvious that they didn't need me around there anymore.
[Baime] And there was one more casualty that no one could have foreseen.
My father had five remaining Daytona Cobras
at the end of the '65 season
and had no way of getting them back to Shelby really,
and Shelby wasn't interested and said, "Dump them in the North Sea."
[Shelby] After we won the world championship,
we didn't even think they were worth hauling back from Europe.
We were through.
[Holman] And Carroll said, "They're not worth the freight to ship back.
If you would, just put them on a barge, take a customs guy out with you
and just dump them in the English Channel
because I'm not willing to pay the freight on them."
Once something was done, that was history for him.
He's looking for the next thing that's happening.
[Holman] And Alan Mann couldn't bring himself to dump them
in the English Channel.
[dramatic orchestral music playing]
And so, my father shipped them back to Shelby at his own expense.
[Holman] The cars were loaded up as deck freight,
exposed to the weather and conditions and shipped back to California.
[Patrick] He didn't like it,
but he was ready to move on to something else.
[Holman] Henry Ford II was not the chairman
or the president of Ford Motor Company.
He was the emperor.
He really wanted to win races,
but he didn't care about second place at all.
If you called him up and said, "Well, we got second,"
you might as well not have even finished the race.
[Shelby] I was with Don Frey and Leo Beebe when he called us in,
and he had the name tags made in '65
where it says, "Ford wins Le Mans in '66."
"You want a job next June, don't you?"
Henry Ford had given him a business card
that Henry had written on the back of it,
"You better win."
There was a big Ford meeting in 1965
about how they were going to win Le Mans,
and it was decided that certain teams would have certain responsibilities,
and they would all prepare cars independently
and run them at the event.
Ford decided to expand its operation.
So, instead of just having Shelby American,
they also hired Holman & Moody,
who was already running their stock car operation,
and Alan Mann Racing
which had just won the GT Championship with the Cobra Daytona Coupe.
[Baime] The vice to win was tightening around Shelby.
Not only was his job on the line,
Ford had added two other teams to put even more pressure on him.
So, there's competition all along, not just Ford-Ferrari.
It's Ford within Ford.
Everyone worked extra hard, extra testing
to make everything really work.
If the engine blew, they just lost their job.
[ominous music playing]
We knew we had some brake issues.
A heavier car, you just have to understand
that, you know, it's not gonna stop as easy
and especially Le Mans because of the Mulsanne Straight.
So you got 3.2 miles,
and the brakes would go from 1,200 degrees to zero every single lap.
I don't think they had the material
that would withstand, you know, the repeated cycle.
[Holman] Kinetic energy at the end of that 3.5-mile straight
was so high from the brake temperatures
and so forth that the brakes would have probably lasted two or three hours
and that would have been all.
[Brock] Phil Remington figured out
how to make a quick-change brake setup on the Shelby American GT40.
He changed the discs and the calipers
and the whole braking system on it.
The fact that we could change the brakes in one minute
was the key.
[ominous music playing]
[engine revving]
[announcer] Racing for the flag in the 24-Hour Daytona Continental.
[Baime] Ford had five GT40 MKIIs in the running
led by Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby
and Dan Gurney and Jerry Grant.
[announcer] Miles takes the lead, quashing the last Ferrari threat.
[Baime] For the first time, Ford wins 1-2-3 at Daytona.
[announcer] This is the 12 Hours of Sebring.
Can the Fords win two in a row,
and can Ferrari come back after a rather dismal start
at the beginning of this year?
[engines revving]
[announcer] It's neck and neck now.
Mark, Miles, Gurney close enough to cover with a blanket
as they roar through the Websters.
Team manager Carroll Shelby keeps a paternal eye on the situation,
tells Ken Miles to lower his lap times and catch parts.
[Baime] The GT40s and the P Series Ferraris
battle each other all race...
neither giving in an inch.
[announcer] So, with night full on, it's Ford, Ford, Ford.
Sebring is another 1-2-3 finish for the Ford GT40s.
All that's left is Le Mans.
[Shelby] You'll probably see us around as a competitor at Le Mans
for a long time to come,
and I'm talking about as a real threat,
where it's taken us about three or four years
to get onto the type of racing here
and the type of race that this particular race is
which is the only one like it in the world.
[Patrick] My brother and I, in 1966 summer, were in Europe,
and Dad invited us to Le Mans.
We were not under the impression of the pressure he was under.
If he had lost, he was gonna be in trouble.
[Baime] Shelby knew he had to stay ahead of the other GT40 teams.
And then there was Ferrari, who would do anything to win.
I learned that Enzo Ferrari wanted to meet me.
[ominous music playing]
[Bondurant] So, I went down and met him.
[Ferrari speaks Italian]
[Bondurant] And he said, "Would you like to run with us?"
I said, "Yeah, I would."
[Baime] Ferrari had stolen Shelby's world-champion driver
right out from under him.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Edsel] '66 was a great year for the GT40.
We won Daytona 1-2-3. We won Sebring 1-2-3.
I went to Le Mans with him in 1966.
He had a smile on his face the minute we got on the airplane.
I mean, he was really excited.
He was going over to beat the Europeans
on their own turf.
[Lerner] Even though I'd say they were the odds-on favorite,
they had a history of failing at Le Mans the past two years,
and, in fact, they'd never had a car finish at Le Mans.
[Surtees] We had a strategy,
and we thought the only way we would beat the Fords
would be if we could go along,
and from the very start of the race,
we could drive it like at Grand Prix,
because the drivers in the Fords were all racers,
and they wouldn't just hold back.
They would have a go,
and there's some possibility that we might be able to break the Fords.
[suspenseful music playing]
[cheering]
[Agapiou] Ken and Gurney were the rabbits,
so their job was to go out and break the Ferraris.
When the race started, Ken Miles didn't get his door closed correctly.
He got a terrible start.
And I thought, "Oh, this ended right from the beginning."
[Shelby] Ken Miles, he was the ultimate long-distance racer.
He could go very quickly if he had to.
[engine revving]
[Miles] Race, race, race.
His deal was competition. He just loved to compete.
[Agapiou] The next 20 laps or so were just incredible.
Ken was hauling ass. I mean, he was just going so quick.
He wasn't backing off for anything
'cause it was his job to break the Ferraris.
[suspenseful music playing]
[announcer] The MKII, driven by Ken Miles and Dennis Hulme, is leading,
but it has been a battle all along
between car number one and car number three,
Dan Gurney and Ken Miles,
and the Ferrari being driven by Rodriguez and Ginther.
[Agapiou] Dan Gurney's car died at about the 11th hour.
Ken is still really hauling ass.
I mean, he was just doing a great job.
We're still running away with the race.
[Baime] The Ferraris are dropping out.
[Agapiou] Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon,
they were running several laps back but still running really strong.
A few hours from the finish,
it looked like the car wasn't gonna break anyway.
-Ken was gonna win the race easy. -[engine revving]
[Baime] Miles is now in first place,
and he's lapping at amazing speeds,
faster than they told him he should be going.
Miles has won Daytona.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Baime] Miles has won Sebring.
So, if Ken Miles wins Le Mans, it'd be the Triple Crown.
No driver had won the three premier
long-distance endurance races of the year.
The word came down, presumably from my grandfather,
that he wanted this 1-2-3 finish.
[engine revving]
[Agapiou] A lot of it was people were saying that Miles wins again,
and Ford wanted "Ford wins again."
Henry Ford told Carroll, he said, "You got to slow him down."
[Agapiou] He's leaning on the pit while waiting for his stint on the drive,
and that's when he first told me, "They want me to back off."
[engine revving]
[Agapiou] They talked to the Le Mans officials
saying that we can do a dead heat
which still meant that Ken had to slow down
to let Bruce catch up, which he did.
[heroic music playing]
[Bondurant] Ford won 1-2-3.
And Henry Ford was so happy he beat Ferrari.
[Ford III] It was a relief for a lot of people
because this was a Herculean effort to make this program a success.
[Shelby] I felt wonderful about us winning one, two, and three.
If our people at Shelby American
hadn't developed a way to change the rotors
in 20 seconds, we would have never won the race.
We would have never blown the Ferraris off.
That quick-change brake system was a huge jump,
and that would never have come out of corporate.
They would have never allowed it.
It was a shock, of course, but that's auto racing.
One day, you lose.
[dramatic music fades]
[Agapiou] And when it came to the finish,
it was actually considered a dead heat, but when Ken came out of the pit lane
to head for the circle, they kept waving him off, yelling in French,
and we didn't know what was going on.
And then the FIA got involved and said,
"Well, just so you know..."
[referee] If there is a dead heat across the finishing line,
the car that started farthest back
on the starting line must have covered the greatest distance,
-so number two becomes the winner. -[crowd chatter]
There wasn't gonna be a 1-2-3 finish.
Bruce was gonna win.
[speaking French]
[crowd cheering and applauding]
[Shelby] We made a horrible decision with Ken Miles
and seeing the three cars come over exactly together.
It was good politically for Ford, so I couldn't argue with it.
Besides that, I worked for Ford,
and I'm not gonna go against Henry Ford.
[Agapiou] Ken ended up getting cheated out of it.
[Bondurant] And it broke his heart.
[Shelby] I wish Ken Miles had won it because he earned the win of the race.
I've always felt guilty about that, but you can't change history.
That's what happened and we'll have to live with it.
[Lerner] When they win the race, Henry Ford is asked,
"Well, what happens now?"
Henry Ford says, "Well, we're gonna come back next year and do it again."
[ominous music playing]
[Chance] At the latter part of '66,
Carroll Shelby, Phil Remington,
and the Shelby experts were making a faster, quicker MKII-B.
[Ford III] So my grandfather was determined
to make sure that people knew that this was not some kind of fluke.
And so, development of the cars,
that continued in '66 with the J-Car.
It was a prototype that they had used
this kind of honeycomb pattern.
So, they sent it out to testing.
[engine revving]
[Chance] The car was being tested by Ken Miles.
[engine roaring]
[somber music playing]
[Chance] The car broke.
He was doing 180 miles an hour.
It careened wildly.
It was unsurvivable.
They pointed to where he was laying in the dirt,
and I could see he was in pretty bad shape.
And then I started to go over there, and they said, "Don't go."
[Shelby] I've never had a loss that hit me as hard
as when we lost Ken.
[somber music continues]
[Shelby] Not only a friend but he was a good engineer.
He was a good test driver.
As good a race driver as I ever knew.
And I can't say what a void I felt when we lost him.
[somber music continues]
The loss of Miles was difficult to bear,
but losing Shelby, that would destroy the company.
It was 1966.
This was six years after Shelby was told by doctors
he only had five years left to live.
[Shelby] Jesus Christ, they told you you weren't gonna live
five years in 1960, and every five years,
there's a new pill or a new operation.
He, in my opinion, knew more than a lot of his doctors.
At his bedside, there were stacks of medical journals,
and he would read those things voraciously,
looking for something that could help cure whatever ailment he had.
[Shelby] The doctor said, "You had 40 heart attacks."
I used to get an angina attack.
I'd just sit down and rest for five minutes.
And he said, "You were having a heart attack,
all those... probably 40 times."
[Shelby] And I'm a walking chemical depository.
At this point, Shelby had routinely cheated death,
which was good news for Ford Motor Company
because they needed him now more than ever.
[Lerner] In 1967, when the season began at Daytona,
Ford showed up with, you know, a full array of upgraded MKIIs.
[Chance] Ferrari wanted revenge after '66,
and he-- he brought, like, six cars.
[in Italian] Ferrari came to me and told me:
"Mauro, the P3 lost.
Can you improve the P3?"
[in Italian] If we win, we'll come
to the wrong evaluation
of the factors that determine victory.
If we lose,
the reasons are always very clear.
Every time we lose,
we learn how to build new cars.
Ferrari shows up with a brand-new car. It's called the 330 P4.
It's just... it's beautiful; it looks stunning.
It's got a new engine that's derived from their Formula One engine,
and it just kicks ass.
It's easy to think of the GT40 as being the iconic car of the time,
but the Ferraris that were racing against them
were, in their own way,
the most sophisticated sports cars ever built.
This was gonna be a real showdown and a real race.
-[suspenseful music playing] -[engines revving]
[engines roaring]
Ford had all these entries, and they were all big blocks.
They started coming in one after the other
with broken transmissions.
[Baime] Only one out of six GT40s
finished at Daytona in 1967.
Ferrari won the 24 Hours of Daytona
with a 1-2-3.
[Lerner] Early in the career, they had not been as durable as the opposition.
This is the first time the Ford had ever been slower than the opposition.
Something needed to be done, and it wasn't clear
how to make the MKII decidedly faster
in a short period of time.
[Shelby] Ah, we had a pile of crap.
One of them killed Ken Miles out at Riverside.
They really needed a lot of development,
and we jumped in and did in about three months
what it had taken Ford a couple years to screw up back there.
[Baime] Shelby and his team had to come up with a solution quickly.
There was no wind tunnel at the LAX shop,
but there was one in Dearborn.
Shelby knew what he had to do.
[Lerner] Phil Remington returned to Dearborn
with two of his chief fabricators,
and they took the first J-Car chassis,
and they took it into the wind tunnel,
and they started literally cutting away at the bodywork
to try to improve the aerodynamics of the car.
They came up with a shape
that was so dramatically different than the J-Car
that they dubbed the new car the MKIV.
And they went out and tested that,
and it proved to be faster right out of the box
than the existing MKII.
It was decided to race the MKIV at Sebring,
and if it did well at Sebring,
they would go ahead and take that to Le Mans.
After Daytona, Enzo Ferrari's P4s were so dominant,
he didn't even bother sending them to Sebring.
The competition would be between the old GT40 MKII-B
and the brand-new MKIV.
[announcer] By the Esses, the Fords have gobbled up
the quick starting outfit,
and McLaren has assumed command with Foyt second.
We go out there, and we're running seven
to ten seconds a lap faster.
[Baime] By nightfall, the redesigned GT40 MKIV
is a full 12 laps ahead of the Ford MKII.
[Andretti] We raced it at Sebring the first time and won,
and MKIV became the envy of the competition.
[announcer] It's race week, and along with nearly every Jean Barme
in the south of France
comes the world's finest racing machinery.
[Lerner] It would be the first time that the MKIV and the P4
would face each other on the racetrack.
[announcer] Ferrari has three of their factory P4s
in the top ten, and they finished 1-2-3
in the only other 24-hour race of the season at Daytona.
The candy-colored Fords are the fastest
with six of the top ten starting positions.
-[suspenseful music playing] -[indistinct chatter]
[Chance] And as the race progressed, the Fords took the lead.
The Ferraris were not too far behind.
[engine roaring]
[announcer] Now, from the air, we see Gurney quickly accelerating
to become the leader on the 48th lap.
Foyt begins his two-hour stint behind the wheel,
his first appearance in competition at Le Mans
and with only ten practice laps under his belt.
A.J. Foyt, the rookie everyone was worrying about,
has charged into a seven-lap lead.
Fifteen cars have already dropped out
trying to keep up with the bright red Ford.
[Baime] Ford was ecstatic about the MKIV's performance,
but they kept a watchful eye on Shelby.
[Nowland] Mr. Ford had his sergeants with him,
but they would come through every two or three hours
and that happened all night long.
[Agapiou] I was in the pits performing a pit stop.
I turned around to dart around the other side of the car,
and I bashed into this one guy standing there.
I said, "Move out of the way!"
I went to Al Dowd, our team manager, I said,
"Can you get all these fuckers out of the pits?"
I said, "There's a great big guy down there.
I bashed straight into him. What's he doing standing in our pits?"
-[playful music playing] -Turns out it was Henry Ford. [chuckles]
And I thought, "Oh my God, what have I done?"
So, I went and apologized, and he says,
"Don't worry, son," he says, "It's OK.
I shouldn't have been there. I shouldn't have been in your way."
[announcer] Roger McCluskey and Jo Schlesser,
both in MKIIs,
complete a five-car team of Fords that are leading the way.
At 3:30 in the morning, the whole complexion of the race changes
when Andretti spins his car, bounces off the wall,
and stops in the middle of the track.
Seconds later, McCluskey and Jo Schlesser spin out
trying to avoid Andretti.
No one is injured, but all three cars must be retired.
[Laban] Ferrari hadn't given up,
and Ford did everything they could
to help Ferrari stay in the race.
They lost three cars in one accident.
[suspenseful music playing]
There was only one Ford left, and that happened to be ours.
[announcer] Two factory Ferraris are in hot pursuit,
now in second and third position.
Less than four hours to go, Dan Gurney drives
the number one Ford for his last shift
before turning it over to A.J. Foyt
waiting in the pits, who is scheduled to finish the race.
[engine revving]
[announcer] The Ferraris begin to pick up the pace,
hoping to push the leading Ford into a breakdown.
The Ford was about three miles an hour faster
than the Ferrari.
Even though he was in the draft,
I could walk away from him down the straightaway a little bit.
Ferrari were always fairly close to the pace but never close enough.
[Laban] It was the steamroller again. Ford won.
[announcer] There's the checkered flag.
-[heroic music playing] -[crowd cheering]
[announcer] And Gurney climbs atop the Ford MKIV.
It's an all-American win.
Fully American ethic from tires to drivers to the car.
Gurney did a beautiful job
of not showing Foyt how fast the car would go,
and Foyt did a fabulous job in driving within his limits,
realizing that 24 hours is a long time,
taking care of the engine, taking care of the gearbox.
[Baime] Ford went on to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans again in 1968.
And again in 1969.
[Laban] Only two makes ever won Le Mans in the 1960s.
Ferrari won the first half.
Ford won the second half.
[Baime] In 1968 and 1969, the GT40 won Le Mans
without any factory support from Ford or Carroll Shelby.
[announcer speaking indistinctly]
[Baime] By the end of the 1967 season,
Henry Ford II had achieved what he set out to do:
dominate Le Mans and dominate Ferrari.
Racing hadn't had the effect in terms of sales
that he had hoped for,
which made it easier to terminate the racing program
and everything that was related to it.
[Holman] They shut Shelby down in August of '67.
And when the shutdown came,
Ford just shut his operation off. They just closed it.
[Patrick] So, by 60, late '67,
Dad didn't have any production cars there.
[Shelby] I was out of business at Ford.
It's almost surreal because there was no real activity going on in the shop.
He really wasn't doing that much at all.
[Baime] And then, seemingly out of nowhere,
a new opportunity shows up for Shelby.
The Sports Car Club of America is gaining notoriety.
Major manufacturers are now fielding teams.
Porsche, Triumph, Datsun, Toyota,
they were all in.
Unfortunately, Shelby was a little late to the game.
He had a connection at the Toyota factory team.
The only problem was Toyota had already signed on
with his former employee, Peter Brock.
Peter got the job of running the Toyota GTs.
Shelby got the deal out from under him.
So, Shelby became the Toyota team
with the 2000GT.
[Brock] I was really pretty upset that he had gotten
the Toyota program after they had originally given it to me.
After he'd been rejected by the American Datsun,
Peter approached Datsun Japan
'cause he wanted to beat Shelby's Toyotas.
I ended up running against Shelby.
The competition was so stiff on the West Coast
with the Triumph team and the Porsche team and our team
that Shelby didn't really have a chance
at getting too many points of winning anything
on the West Coast.
He tried to sneak off to Stuttgart, Arkansas,
or someplace else to pick up some cherry-pickin' points
in a region that wasn't too strong,
and my guys in his shop would call me and say,
"We're going to Stuttgart."
And we'd load up and go to Stuttgart to race against him
to make sure that he didn't get any points.
We won pretty much every race that we ran.
[Brock] Shelby didn't qualify for the national championship
in his first year.
And Toyota was so embarrassed, they quit racing.
And then, we went on to win all the championships with the Datsuns.
For Shelby, the racing business had given him so much,
but now all it did was take.
Abandoned by Ford,
humiliated by his old employee, Pete Brock,
and having achieved everything he ever wanted to,
Shelby knew what he always knew
and that was when to move on.
[engines revving]
[Shelby] After we won Le Mans...
after we won the world championship...
I lost all interest.
There weren't any interesting cars you could build.
It just got to be too much.
We were ready to fold our tent.
[Shelby] That little company had a heart and soul
that no company that I've ever known
or seen around racing had.
It's, uh, it was something that nobody was paid a lot of money.
Nobody gave a shit how many hours they worked.
Just get it done.
There will never be another little company like that.
[Baime] With Ford losing interest in racing
and the entire industry focused on emissions
and safety at the expense of performance,
Shelby decided to withdraw completely from racing
for the next decade.
The automobile industry was putting all kinds of demands on safety.
Dad wasn't wild about taking a Cobra
and running it into a wall to see what it would do.
Kind of took the fun out of the game for him.
[Shelby] Uh, you had to fool with environmental problems,
emissions, and so forth that we had to clean the environment up,
but there was nothing to do.
Performance went away.
We were introduced to the dismal '70s.
Shelby's frustration with government interference
in the auto business made him want to take a break from racing.
This gave him time to pursue other ambitions.
Carroll had a propensity for women,
and he liked to be married for some reason.
We don't know exactly how many times he was married,
but it was probably north of seven and south of ten.
Every time my brother and I went out to California
and went into his house,
there was somebody else new there,
and they were all knockouts.
I was the photographer at one of his weddings
that he denied ever took place.
He married a girl in Nassau.
Every time I mentioned it, he said, "Dave," he said,
"I never married her."
But I said, "Carroll, you want to see the pictures?"
I think Carroll was married between five and seven times.
It was probably more than that.
At least, the ladies thought they married him,
if that tells you anything. [chuckles]
He took her to a friend of his, a justice of the peace in San Diego.
He wasn't a justice of the peace.
But she still got a divorce.
[Patrick] Nobody knows how many times he was really married.
When he and Ford split up in the late '60s,
he didn't look back. He was going on to his next project.
As an entrepreneur, he got into many different businesses.
He started the Carroll Shelby Chili Company
along with the International Chili Society.
[Shelby] I had 200,000 acres of rocks down in West Texas that I'd bought,
so I needed to sell it, and I didn't know what to do with it.
I went to a friend of mine
who was in the PR business in Dallas, and he says,
"We're going to have the first world championship chili cook-off."
[Shelby] It was only meant to be a one-time event.
Lo and behold, it took off, and it's gotten so big,
there's chili cook-offs all over the United States.
[Oliver] He was just able to take an idea
and promote it and make it work.
[Baime] Shelby had left the automobile business behind,
but the automobile business had not forgotten about Carroll Shelby.
So, in 1982, an old friend comes calling.
Iacocca decided he needed to jazz up Chrysler a little.
[Baime] In the early 1980s,
Chrysler was desperate for a performance product.
[Shelby] Iacocca called me one day and says,
"Hey, I need some help."
We put this thing together and we sold 8,000
of those things the first year.
[Baime] The innovations that Shelby was making
under Iacocca's leadership at Chrysler
were boosting the company's bottom line.
Shelby and Iacocca were working on what would become
Chrysler's most exciting performance vehicle ever,
but halfway through the design of the car,
Shelby's old nemesis caught up with them.
His heart was failing, and this time for good.
[Aaron] When he was with Chrysler,
his health was going down pretty fast.
And his doctor said he needed a new heart
if he was gonna continue on much longer.
[Shelby] It finally got so bad in about '86
that I have to sleep sitting up in bed
with my lungs filling up, and I was told
that I'd have to, uh, have a transplant if I was to survive.
[Baime] Without an appropriate donor,
this was a man who was coming to grips with the fact
that he was probably about to die.
And here comes the 34-year-old in Vegas somewhere
that falls over with an aneurysm.
He's brain-dead.
[Shelby] My coordinator, she came in and said,
"Shelby, I think we might have found you a heart."
There will never be words
that are any sweeter than that.
[Patrick] So, Dad gets a 34-year-old heart.
Not a 60-year-old, not a 70-year-old.
A 34-year-old gives him a new heart.
[Aaron] And it really just gave him a new lease on life,
and it allowed him to want to go function and succeed
at some other projects that he had in mind.
[dramatic music playing]
[Shelby] We're coming out with a very interesting car
called the Viper that I just drove last week.
-[crowd applauding] -I can tell ya for sure
that it's a worthy successor to the Cobra,
and it's a hell of an automobile.
I think the name Viper was Chrysler's version of Cobra,
you know, a snake.
[Baime] Shelby was healthy again,
and he brought to the Viper the same enthusiasm which he used decades earlier
to charm the world with the first vehicle he ever sold.
Chrysler's homage to Shelby was a hit
and a fitting end to his reunion with his old friend, Lee Iacocca.
[Baime] Back to his old self, Carroll set out to do something
he'd never done before.
Carroll began to dream of building another original car.
[Shawn] He really wanted to produce a car
that had the same kind of impact
that the Cobra did back in the day,
and I think one that he could look at and say,
"I made this. It didn't come from another company.
We produced this."
No one was designing and building their own car
from the ground up as an independent company.
And so he started designing the Series One in the early '90s.
We just put down some designs.
He got a deal with Oldsmobile, so he used their engine.
[Shelby] I went on to build the best sport car
that I ever built out in Las Vegas.
It's a beautiful car, it really is.
It cost him a lot more money than he made out of it.
[Shawn] It's a good example of Carroll putting everything he has
into a project, which he's done, I think, throughout his life.
[Baime] In true Shelby fashion, Carroll put everything he had
into the Series One.
[Shawn] Unfortunately, as can often happen
when you leverage everything that you have towards a particular business,
he faced some struggles that nearly wiped him out.
[Baime] Carroll had survived the pursuit of a dream
that would prove costly.
[Baime] Luck was in the cards for Carroll.
He would have the opportunity to end his career
the way he started it: by returning to Ford.
Edsel Ford was instrumental in that, quite frankly.
He'd known Carroll since the '60s, and they were close.
[Edsel] My father decided that I should work for a summer,
so he said to me, "You know, Edsel,
you've got to figure out where you want to work."
I said, "I want to work for Carroll Shelby."
[Ford III] He hired my dad as like an intern for the summer
'cause I think my grandfather probably made him,
but my dad loved it. And-- And I think, in many ways,
Carroll was like a father figure to my dad.
I reached out to Carroll, and I said,
"You know, we got to get you back in the family."
In 1962, he had to come with them
and sell them the ideas, and he had spent his lifetime
coming to and selling his ideas.
To have somebody come to him and say,
"You've got the name, you've got some of the expertise,"
really kind of put a half a step in his walk.
[Shelby] I never dreamed that I'd still be in the business
and working with Ford again at 82 years old,
and I couldn't be happier.
[Aaron] Ford was introducing in '05 and '06
the new Ford GT which was, again,
a retro view of the GT40 back from the '60s.
And so, you know, Carroll was there for the introduction of that.
And then shortly thereafter followed
the new Shelby Mustang that Ford produced in 2007.
[Baime] Millions of car fans were psyched to see
the Shelby logo on Ford cars again.
[engine revving]
[Edsel] He came back, and I kept on asking him, "Are you happy?
Are you happy with where you are today?"
And he always said, "Oh, yes."
He said, "This is where I always wanted to be, Edsel."
It was always meant to be that Carroll Shelby
would always be somehow connected
with the Ford Motor Company, always.
[Shelby] I couldn't be happier than to be with Ford
and know that I'm going to be there the rest of my life.
[Michael] In the last year of his life, he said,
"I want to drive down to the lake
and the timberland one more time."
And he said, "I want to drive. It's important that I drive."
This was the lake that he had built, a 30-acre lake.
But he drove all the way around that lake
and all the way around the property,
and he got to see a thousand-acre property
and a 30-acre lake.
[somber music playing]
[Michael] Going back to the house, he said,
"This is probably the last time I'll drive down here to the lake."
Every American kid who grew up loving cars lost a giant today,
and for some of us hardcore car guys, he was a hero.
His name was Carroll Shelby.
I really enjoyed... I loved Carroll Shelby; I really did.
He was... he was a magical person, just magical.
This guy is such an icon, such a hero to so many people.
[engine roaring]
[Neale] I think he appreciated the good things
that happened to him, but they weren't given to him.
He sure worked at it, and I admired that a lot.
[Michael] He could bounce back from almost anything.
I saw him do that over, and over, and over again.
And if he had a bad race, it was the same thing.
He'd put it behind him. "You know, you had a bad play, but that's OK.
The next play is gonna work."
Well, I think when you say "Shelby,"
I think you think of the Cobra. That car was so dominant.
[Agapiou] Mainly 'cause it was built from a bunch of hot rodders
into a world championship winning car.
I feel privileged that I was there when it started.
[Chance] He has always given everybody else credit,
and he's never ever tried to take credit for something.
And when he came to the shop,
he was a father and a friend and a fun guy.
[Clinard] An inspiration.
He provided the vision on how things could be done,
and Ford said, "Yeah, we trust you. Go do it."
I just think it's fantastic that the Shelby name
continues to move forward, especially with the Ford brand.
I know that that was one of Carroll's biggest wishes,
uh, before he passed away.
They appreciate the brand
and the man more than that.
[Michael] Come out of a little bitty Leesburg, Texas,
son of a rural mail carrier,
and be a powerhouse in a huge industry...
That's how I'd like to think of my dad from now on.
[Shelby] But I want to be known as someone that loved what I did,
that loved my family.
I think the most important thing in life
is never give up
and never forget how thankful you should be.
[engine roaring]
[tires screeching]
[mid-tempo music playing]