Vale an automotive genius, Carroll Shelby

Carroll Shelby, the father of the muscle car and the Ford GT40 that ended Ferrari's dominance at Le Mans, has died, aged 89.

Shelby was a man of many parts -- at various times a chicken farmer, an African safari operator, a diamond dealer and a marketer of a chilli mix he sold to Nestlé. He was married seven times but "didn't count the second one 'cause it happened in Mexico".

Texan Shelby won Le Mans driving an Aston-Martin in 1959 and set land speed records on the Bonneville Salt Flats, but it was as a race and sports car designer and engineer that he was revered.

Shelby created the Cobra in 1962, marrying a sports car chassis and body from AC Ace in Britain to a high-powered Ford V8 engine.

Four years later Ford GT40s finished one, two, three at Le Mans in a monumental triumph for American engineering over the Europeans, especially Ferrari.

The next year a development of the GT40, the Mark IV, won the French 24-hour classic. Lee Iacocca, then running Ford, had already assigned Shelby to produce a high-performance, sportier version of his Mustang to compete with Chevrolet's Corvette -- and he came up with the fastback.

During six decades in the motor industry he also worked for General Motors' Oldsmobile division and for Chrysler, where Iacocca had him create the Dodge Viper. His entry to the car industry had been through a Dallas dealership in which a co-owner was another Texan automotive genius, Jim Hall, of Chaparral fame, and together they created a handful of Scaglietti Corvettes.

Shelby's career ended with a consultancy back at Ford. The 2013 Shelby GT 500 on which he collaborated has the most powerful production V8 engine in the world -- 662 horsepower -- and a top speed of 200mph (320kmh).

Announcing his death, without disclosing the cause (thought to be from pneumonia), Joe Conway, president of Carroll Shelby International, said: "There has been no one like Carroll Shelby and never will be. He is perhaps the only person to have worked at a visible level with all three American automobile manufacturers."

Shelby had survived a heart transplant in 1990 and a kidney transplant in 1996.

In between he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.

"Performance is my business," he used to say. When asked his favourite among all the cars he had created he invariably said "the next one".

Edsel B. Ford said of Shelby: "Whether helping Ford dominate the 1960s racing scene or building some of the most famous Mustangs, his enthusiasm and passion for great automobiles over six decades has truly inspired everyone who worked with him."

But perhaps it was Carol Flake, writing in the Texas Monthly magazine in 1995, who said it best. Flake had been taken for a ride in a 30-year-old Shelby Cobra and said that anybody lucky enough to have that experience "may never feel the same way about cars again".

"It's a little like riding a runaway thoroughbred after trotting around a ring on a pony," she said. "Fear melts into awe."

Carroll Shelby was a man who forever will be held in awe.

More photos of Carroll Shelby at motoring.com.au

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