Shelby as Corvette pilot

[bitzman]

I found a list of Shelby's races from the beginning
and was surprised to see two Corvette races on the list of his drives

Hammond LA 5 May 57 SR-2

Maybe Mansfield LA 19 May 57 regular Corvette?

3nd place finishes both times
sponsor: Rose

I thought the SR-2s were pretty special (the original was created as a present from Harley Earl to his son Jerry Earl to persuade him not to buy a Ferrari) and am surprised that a private citizen not connected with GM could get them. I suspect the second race was in an SR-2 as well as it happened only a couple weeks later with the same sponsor. I am kind of tuned out of Corvettes and was wondering if anybody else has ever heard of Shelby racing the plastic pachyderms?

[daltondavid]

the only Vette involvement I recall ever reading about was that he allegedly was hired by Chevrolet to do some R&D work on them. He had 3 cars getting aluminum Bodies and when Zora found out he was in the mix, He stopped his(C.S.) invovlement. I never heard of the Race car driver of Vettes though when you look through his HIstory I am not surprised to see him willing to get behind the wheel of anything as long as there was some kind of Race happening!

[bitzman]

I have since found that Shelby raced Corvettes twice both times in May '57 . I have seen a fuzzy picture of him standing next to one that was black with a rose inset panel.
He finished second in both races, the second in Cumberland Maryland. I have not found out what cars beat him at either event but probably Maserati or Ferrari, more developed cars than Corvettes at the time.

[shlby66]

There is the possibility that Shelby may have raced other Corvettes as
well. I recall seeing a race poster in early 1960, advertising a Sports Car
race that featured pictures of not only Shelby, but other drivers that eventually became Cobra drivers. The race sponsor was Don Steves Chevrolet, La Habra, CA. It seemed Shelby may have raced for
Don Steves who was the biggest Corvette dealer in SoCal at that time and was heavy into racing.
shlby66

[bitzman]

The three Corvettes with Italian bodies were not because Shelby was hired by Chevrolet to build them. It was an independent venture with Texas oil money paying the bills. An Italian coachbuilder built them. I guess they didn't set the world on fire. Shelby was cut off from further chassis purchase by Chevy so that's why there weren't more than three.

[daltondavid]

Originally Posted by bitzman

The three Corvettes with Italian bodies were not because Shelby was hired by Chevrolet to build them. It was an independent venture with Texas oil money paying the bills. An Italian coachbuilder built them. I guess they didn't set the world on fire. Shelby was cut off from further chassis purchase by Chevy so that's why there weren't more than three.

I thought GM had behind Zora's back snuck Shelby in the back door on the project and Duntov blew a gasket when he learned of it. Shelby was sent packing in a "Me or Him" resolution. so where are those car bodies today and what is the story with them??

[bitzman]

all three of the Scaglietti Corvettes are around and restored and one was even raced at Laguna Seca by the radio show host Len Frank. Of the ones put up for auction, none seem to have fetched outsize amounts.At least not like old Cobras.

[bitzman]

In the Monterey Historic program a few years ago they had a list compiled by Jim Sitz and Michael Lynch of every race Carroll Shelby was ever in as a race driver and buried deep on that list was a race in a SR-2 Corvette. The SR-2 was a "dream car" created out of a regular Corvette for Jerry Earl, the son of Harley Earl, who wanted to go race a Ferrari but his father would have nothing of it, and had Styling create a race car out of a stock Corvette.(one of the designers was Robert Cumberford, a columnist at Automobile magazine). At first the car had a low fin but I think a higher one was added later. I believe there were three of them made, and I recently saw a website with a shot of one on a racetrack back in the Fifties but it was from the rear so I couldn't tell who the driver was but I was wondering if anyone ever saw a picture of Shelby with the car or driving the car? The track might have been Mansfield LA and the owner of the car Ebb Rose, who later on was either an Indy car racer or owner of an Indy car. Today there is an incredibly well detailed cobalt blue SR-2 running in the Monterey races almost every year by Rich Mason from Reno. That may have been the car Shelby drove, maybe Rich knows.

In my pictures from the Monterey Historic, I discovered a shot of the red car , I think that was the Bill Mitchell commissioned one with the high rear fin (and at one time a bubble plexiglass top for the driver only) and also the Rich Mason owned blue one. My question is: back when Shelby raced the SR2 in Mansfield, LA does anyone know what color the car was or which one of those two cars it was? I gather that the Mitchell car was more souped up than the car Mason owns. There's three SR2s in all, and occasionally they are all brought together for display at some Corvette event.

[roddster]

Concidering the current "thing" between Shelby and SAAC, wouldn't it be funny to get T-shirts made up with that photo??

[bitzman]

History is funny. If Shelby would have won in the SR2, and been loaned the car for other races, maybe he would have boomed the Corvette's popularity, and become known as "Mr. Corvette." Except for the fact that Zora Arkus-Duntov was kind of a publicity hound himself and wouldn't have wanted his driver (even though by that time the cars were out of GM's hands) to become too famous. What is interesting is that, at that point in time, Ford didn't have a good small block engine so Shelby was thinking Chevy for the car he would put together with a foreign chassis, at that point Austin Healey Chevys were a popular conversion

[bitzman]

Now a Corvette website has posted two pictures of Shelby with a Corvette he raced way back when he was a free booter taking any ride he could get.

One picture is here

http://forums.corvetteforum.com/show....php?t=1997152

the second picture is on the same site somewhere, but you can't tlel it's Sehlby, it is so far away. In the background of the first picture is a red SR2 Corvette with a high fin which I thought was Bill Mitchell's tall fin SR2 but maybe Jerry Earl's SR2 got a Fin job and got a taller fin as well (original fin didn't go above the cockpit line).

So now I know the track (Cumberland) the car owner Ebb Rose, but there's three Corvettes, the white one, the black one and the red SR2 though I thought he only raced two Corvettes in two races in his entire racing career. Maybe after someone looks at the pictures they can give their opinion.

At least you know it's Shel, he's got the striped locomotive engineer's overalls.

[DeLa1Rob]

Interesting color combo Black/Salmon


robin

[bitzman]

Gotta be Shelby in those overalls. But that Corvette looks pretty stock to me where the '56 SR (Sebring Racer?) Corvettes had plexiglass wraparound windscreens for the driver, side exhausts, etc. etc. so I wonder if that is the one he actually raced? Also I don't know if the second Corvette he raced, the SR-2, was the one owned by Bill Tower now (red) or the one owned by the fellow in Reno (the blue one). And whether or not that was the car that, while it was in dark purple livery, raced as "The Purple People Eater" (a '50's comedic song--you had to be living in the '50s to understand the mania for UFOs)