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Keen on Cobras: Jazz owner to open Motorsports Park

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  1. rshelby

    rshelby ShelbyForums Admin Staff Member

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    Keen on Cobras: Jazz owner to open Motorsports Park
    By Tim Buckley
    Deseret Morning News


    The man speaks, and passion oozes. Words purr, a certain poetry to the flow. No sputter, not a piston out of whack.

    Larry Miller stands beside one of the 11 Cobras that he owns. He says Cobras are "unbelievable" cars.

    Laura Seitz, Deseret Morning News
    It is 6 a.m. on a summer Saturday, and Larry H. Miller is bound to be at the wheel. The canyons are his roadway, and with each passing mile his sense of satisfaction multiplies.

    The ride is a far cry from Miller's very first, a two-tone medium metallic green 1952 Olds with a light-lime and white hardtop that cost him just $20 but had some sort of pesky electrical problem he never could fix.

    Rather, Miller is driving one in his multimillion-dollar stable of high-performance and historically significant Cobras — and he is enjoying it so much that even wife Gail has had to interrogate him on the attraction of the affair.

    "The answer I gave her: 'I deal so much with people, and I have high expectations, whether it's basketball players or employees. And I have a lot of really good ones. But, people are still people," said Miller, the Utah Jazz owner whose ever-expanding business empire revolves around a vast collection of automobile dealerships. " 'You can do all the preparation and training, but you still can't determine the outcome — because they're still people, and there are so many variables.' "

    " 'With Cobras . . . you do certain things to them, and you get certain results. Now is it 100 percent assured? Absolutely not. Things break. But they respond in a very specific way when you do certain specific things. I like that a lot. I like the reliability that you can build into them, and that you get out of them what you expect because of what you put into it.

    You'd like to be able to do that with human relationships.' "

    Imagine going from zero to 100 miles per hour, then stopping — all in 12.7 seconds. That is what Miller recalls Cobras doing in the mid-1960s, and doing it in nearly half the time that it took the fastest Ferrari of the day. That is what the rare Cobra — only 1,011 were ever built — still can do today.

    Larry Miller and his grandson, Zane Miller, maneuver Larry's Cobra back into the garage of the Miller garage in Salt Lake City recently. One of Miller's Cobras is worth $6.5 million.

    Laura Seitz, Deseret Morning News
    "It's just unbelievable what happens with these things," Miller said. "It is shocking."

    For that reason, Gail's query does not slow there.

    Yet Larry drives on, whether it's an occasional joy ride at the drag strip showing off for friends or a 60-, 80- or even 100-mile loop of solitude through the highlands.

    "She'll worry: 'Oh, you're going to get hurt.' I say, 'Most times I go out, I don't even get on it real hard.' She says, 'Then why do you do it?' I say, 'Two things: One is I know what will happen if I do, and it's just neat knowing that. The other thing — and you'd almost have to have something like this in your life to know, but — I hear one of those things start up . . . and just listening to its heartbeat, and just knowing what's there . . . it becomes part of you. It's hard to explain, but it's a special thing.' "

    Sometime late this fall, Miller Motorsports Park will open on 500 acres of property at the Deseret Peak Complex in Tooele County west of Salt Lake City.

    It is being self-billed as one of the most extraordinary race facilities in North America.

    The 4.5 mile road course — longer than any in the United States — was plotted by Alan Wilson, whom Automobile magazine once called "the world's most prolific race track designer." His designs, among many, include Las Vegas Motor Speedway and a chicane redesign at Daytona International Speedway.

    The park will play host to national-caliber car and motorcycle races, including at least one of the vintage auto variety that Cobras participate in today. It will have a 2.2-mile west and 2.24-mile east track, as well as a 3.06-mile perimeter course and a 0.89-mile kart track. A driving school also is planned at the site.

    It all is yet another of Miller's babies, joining, among many holdings, the television station and the basketball arena and the movie theater-and-restaurant complex and all those car lots.

    This creation, though, may be even a bit-more meaningful than the rest. To understand why, one must first come to know Miller's first true love. One must slide into a Cobra, and go for one wild ride.

    Today, Miller owns 11 Cobras and four Ford GT40s. Some are private purchases. Others were bought at auction, including one that required outbidding filmmaker George Lucas ("American Graffiti," "Star Wars," "Raiders of the Lost Ark").

    One of the Cobras is set up as a drag racer, or so-called "dragon snake."

    None is worth less than $250,000, and not one — don't even think about it — is a reproduction.

    "For those of us that consider ourselves 'purists,' " Miller said, "the replicas are . . . the 'ugly stepchildren.' "

    Pride and joy of Miller's collection: A Daytona Coupe Cobra worth about $6.5 million, one of just six in existence. Six-and-a-half million dollars: That's $2 million more than Ford budgeted for its entire racing program in 1965.

    Picture John Stockton on wheels, Karl Malone for a motor. But just like the Jazz before Stockton-to-Malone, Miller did not always have it so good.

    In the early spring of 1962, the same year Miller graduated from high school, a Texan named Carroll Shelby — an accomplished racer himself who set records at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats back in 1954 — birthed the Cobra at a shop in Venice, Calif.

    Internet historians suggest it came some 13 years after a shaky start for Shelby in the chicken-raising business, when his first batch produced a $5,000 profit before his second died of Limberneck disease and prompted bankruptcy.

    But with quiet involvement from Ford, the Shelby American Cobras — their chassis were made in England, then shipped to the United States so they could be fitted with powertrains — were money.

    "Carroll Shelby is a master marketer, and there had been all this hype for (about) a year," Miller recalled. "You couldn't pick up an automotive publication without reading about Cobras in 1962."

    On Oct. 13, 1962, in a Riverside, Calif., race called the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix, Bill Krause was in the Cobra driver's seat. At lap No. 9, his No. 98 car even took over the lead. A mishap ended Krause's ride early. Still, the Cobra had left a heavier, slower but also-new Corvette Stingray — and others — in its dust.

    "They finally had the first car go race in Riverside, and it lived up, absolutely, to its billing," Miller said. "The Corvettes and the Porches and the Jaguars — the Cobra was just absolutely dominant in that Riverside race. It seized a rear hub-bearing, which ultimately led to its losing a wheel. So it didn't finish. But they had sent the signal: 'We're here, and we're real.'

    By January of 1963, legend has it, the Cobras had such a grip on the Stingrays that at another Riverside race driver Ken Miles actually pitted for a drink of water before relapping the Corvettes.

    Cobra went on to Daytona and Sebring in Florida, falling to the more sophisticated Ferraris, but dazzling a fast-growing fan base nonetheless. According to Cobra lore, Ford would not finance a Shelby American Cobra effort at fabled LeMans in France, but Shelby found a way to get two over there as well anyway.

    Then it was on to storied Bridgehampton, a 2.85-mile, 13-turn road course near Sag Harbor on Long Island in New York. Legends drove there in the late '50s and throughout the '60s, including Mario Andretti, Parnelli Jones, Dan Gurney and Roger Penske.

    Gurney would make history in '64 at Bridgehampton, giving Cobra its first international win. By December of that year Cobras would win the United States Road Racing Championship, and in 1965 they won the World Manufacturer's Championship.

    Young gearheads throughout America drooled, Miller among them.

    "Cobras seemed really cool to me," he said. "But to afford one was just out of the question. It was shooting for the moon."

    Reality grounded Miller.

    At the time, Larry and Gail were dating. Money was tight.

    Yet Larry was big into the local weekend drag-racing scene, and road racing, too, so in Gail's name they bought a '63 Falcon Sprint convertible with a 260 cubic-inch V8 — the same basic engine the early Cobras were running.

    "As time went on, probably in '63 and '64, I was racing that car using some Cobra engine components. And I had friends who also had small-block Fords — 260s and 289s in Comets, Fairlanes, Falcons and Mustangs," Miller said. "So there were a few of us that were doing the most we could with Cobra camshafts and cylinder heads and exhaust systems and stuff like that — but it was still a far cry from what the Cobras were doing."

    Production of the Cobras ended in March of 1967, when the last 427 Roadster was built.

    "Cobras are not very aerodynamic," Miller said. "Above 170 miles an hour — 160, 170 — it's like pushing a billboard down the street."

    Welcome to the world, GT40.

    "They were closed cockpit, low profile — much more aerodynamic cars, with pretty much the same powertrains as the Cobras had," Miller said. "So the GT40, basically, not only was the evolution of the Cobra but the death of the Cobra."

    Time passed, Shelby moved on to Mustangs, and Miller's Cobra dream slipped into a coma.

    "We got married in '65 and starting having kids 14, 15 months later," he said, "so that became just something I could no longer afford, and I just put it totally aside."

    Fast-forward to 1978, with Miller by now on his way to becoming what he has.

    "One day, it hit me," he said. "I thought, 'I ought to see what's happened to the Cobra market.' They only had made 1,011 cars — 655 of them had the small blocks, 260s or 289s, and 356 had big blocks, 427s."

    Call what happened from there fulfillment of a teenage fantasy.

    "I started looking to see where they were. You never heard anything about them," Miller said. "Again, only 1,011 ever built. Who knew how many were left in existence 10 years, 11 years later?

    "I found one car. They had actually become just like almost any used car. They were around, when you got looking. . . . I was in Colorado at the time. There actually, that I knew of, had been two of them in Utah. But I couldn't find either one of those, so I started watching some of the enthusiast magazines and found a few."

    Going resale value at the time: About $4,000-to-$6,000.

    Interested buyers at the time, however, would not have been wise to blink. Miller did, and it cost him.

    He, it seems, wasn't the only one rediscovering that totally awesome ride from the '60s.

    "I'm thinking, 'OK, I can buy one for $6,000 — a decent car.' And I'd find one, and it was $8,000," he said. "I remember finding one in Wisconsin that was $8,000 — and it actually was in really good shape, because it had been bought by a kid who went to Vietnam and got killed, and his parents kept the car, and it had been sitting there. It hadn't been driven.

    "They wanted 8,000 bucks — and I thought $8,000 was outlandish, because the market, I thought, was $4,000-to-$6,000. So I passed on it. Then I thought, 'Well, I better go buy that car.' It was gone. It happened about three times. I found a car for $9,000. I didn't buy it. Then I went back, and I was always a day late and a dollar short. Finally, I just said, 'I've got to find a good car and buy it.' "

    As an eight-person business meeting broke up — he was working for Toyota at the time — Miller took a shot in the dark.

    "I said, 'By the way, does anybody know anybody with a Cobra,' " he said. "Now think of the odds of that — if there's only about 1,000 cars that exist."

    As it turns out, someone had a cousin in California who just happened to have a Cobra for sale.

    Miller recalls the trip to Westminster, Calif., as if it were yesterday.

    "I flew down and saw it, but it was 13 grand — $13,500, actually. I was like, 'Wow,' " he said. "It was a good car, never been wrecked. I had to leave about three days later to go Japan (on business), then on the way back I picked the car up and drove it home.

    "Gail flew down from Colorado to meet me, and the two of us drove it home. It took about two-and-a-half days. So, that was the first car. It was just a stock 289 Cobra — just as stock as they come, which is still a pretty cool car."

    From there, the collection grew, each car with its own story and its own personality.

    Fast-forward again, this time to 1998.

    Miller had rekindled his serious interest in road racing, which "had kind of languished in the back of my mind since I was in high school."

    He bought a 1 1/4-mile racetrack located about 20 miles north of Denver, which he still owns. He then purchased 160 adjacent acres, hoping to build a 3-to-3 1/2 mile track there. Only after buying the land, though, did he try to get it zoned to allow racing — not his shrewdest business decision ever, he realizes now.

    Unable to expand in Colorado, Miller set about trying to find land for such a track in the Salt Lake Valley. After two unsuccessful years spent trying to get the requisite approval of regulatory agencies, he turned instead to Tooele. Agreement was reached with county officials there on the undertaking, and groundbreaking was last April.

    Replete with a three-story race control building, a timing stand, sprawling stadium-view grandstands, a multitude of garages and a press center — all structures will have a throwback World War II airfield theme — the facility will host a full schedule in 2006.

    Details — including which sanctioning bodies intend to bring races to the track, with SCCA and even IRL among the possibilities — will come during a Sept. 7 open-to-the-public presentation at the Delta Center.

    "Combined with our reputation and our ability to do what we're going to do when we say we're going to do it, we've got at least four national races coming next year — which shouldn't have happened until '08, if not '09," Miller said. "We're really pleased with that. There's a lot of talk out there about this track, a lot of excitement — not just locally but on a national basis."

    "The Salt Lake Super Track is not your ordinary track," Wilson, who will serve as the track's general manager, said last February. "I've built 20 racetracks in the U.S. and around the world, and this is the one I want to put my name on and have as my legacy."

    For Miller, the project really is one of the heart.

    It's not often, after all, that an entrepreneur with a portfolio like his is less concerned with the bottom line than he is an opportunity to meld a personal playground with a place where others with similar interests can simply have fun.

    "If you consider capital investment as well as operations," Miller said, "there's no way it will make money."

    Collecting Cobras is not about moneymaking, either.

    Rather, it's pure love.

    Like others in his select company, Miller can rattle off the series numbers of his Cobras as if they were his wife's cell-phone number.

    "They all start with CSX, which is Carroll Shelby Export," Miller said. "Almost all. There's asterisks all over the place, because there was not a true production line. They just made a car in this stall, and another team built another car in the next stall.

    "The point is all Cobra owners know the serial number. Small blocks are four-digit and start with 2. So that first racer . . . is CSX2002."

    The first Cobra — Shelby kept it — is CSX2000, initially painted pearlescent yellow and then supposedly repainted whenever a different magazine wanted to take a picture. But it wasn't the first Cobra racer. CSX2002, a Sebring Roadster, was. It's the one that debuted at Riverside, with Krause driving. And Miller owns it, purchased at auction.

    The license plate on the car is 1STRCR — first racer.

    Three of Miller's Cobras are dubbed Sebrings, including one recently bought at auction for $2 million. The so-called "first racer" is housed at the Shelby American Collection in Boulder, Colo., along with other Miller-owned cars.

    There he has a few of his GTs, including one that won the Daytona FIA 24-hour in 1966 and lost later that year in a photo finish at LeMans.

    It's the Cobras, though, that mean the most to Miller.

    Also at the Shelby American Collection is the '64 Daytona Coupe Cobra worth $6.5 million — CSX2299. It is a more aerodynamic version of the 289, an answer — according to its collection biography — to Ferrari's sleek 250 GTO. Just the second Cobra coupe built, it has the best racing history of the six, including a GT win at the 1964 24 Hours of LeMans with Gurney and Bob Bondurant driving.

    "It just absolutely stops my heart every time I see that car," Miller said.

    In 1965, with Bondurant in the seat most of the summer in Europe, 2299 also was one of the Daytona Coupes that pushed Cobra to its manufacturer's world title.

    "The world championships . . . were so dominated in the '50s and '60s by Ferrari," Miller said, beaming as if he had driven one of the Cobras himself back in '65. "No one could ever beat Ferrari. Well, they did."

    Framed pictures of his cars, three of which he keeps at home, are strewn about a conference room adjacent to Miller's Sandy office.

    Of course no Cobra photograph may be more famous than the hot rod appearing on the cover of the album by The Rip Chords featuring their 1964 million-seller hit song "Hey Little Cobra."

    All together now: "Spring little Cobra gettin' ready to strike. Spring little Cobra with all of your might. Hey Little Cobra, don't you know you're gonna shut 'em down? When the flag went down, you could hear rubber burn. The Stingray had me going into the turn. I hung a big shift, and I got into high. And when I flew by the Stingray, I waved bye-bye."

    Miller owns the Cobra on the album cover, No. 15 on its side.

    He looks at a shot of CSX3032, a blue big block that won five times at Daytona. He brags on little ol' CSX2175, his first, that little red one driven back from California. Suffice it to say it's worth well more than Miller's $13,500 investment. Then there's 3202. It's also blue, also a big block — the serial numbers of all the big blocks start with a 3 — and it's parked in Miller's garage. So is a red 427, one Miller said is "a lot more race car than it is a street car" — though he does drive it, once a week or so when it's warm enough, in the canyons.

    "When I first got it, I didn't like it," Miller said of the 427. "I said to Gail, 'This car's too much to handle. It's lurching and bucking and snorting.' But I got it sorted out, and learned how to drive it, and now it's easy for me to drive.

    "But the cars, by the way, have much more capability as cars than I do as a driver. Much more."

    About half a dozen of the small-block Cobras and a few of the GT40s are raced for Miller by Bill Murray — no, not the comedian — and stored frequently at Murray's shop in Longmont, Colo.

    "Going into the shop is like going into a time warp," Miller said. "All he'll work on is Cobras, GT40s and Shelby Mustangs."

    Last year, four of Miller's cars raced at five locales in Europe, including LeMans, Goodwood in England and Spa, Belgium.

    At the 2004 Goodwood hillclimb, as it is known, upwards of 165,000 spectators were on hand for the classic-car motoring event held at the country estate of Lord and Lady March in the south of England.

    Miller traveled, rubbed shoulders with royalty and returned home with lifelong memories.

    "That's where the Cobras and the GT40s had their great victories," he said. "They had some big ones at Daytona and Sebring in their day, but the big ones came in Europe in the mid-60s."

    This year, Miller was asked to send a couple of cars back to Goodwood. Others have been at Watkins Glen already and are scheduled to be at Daytona in November.

    Miller does not race himself these days, though he does get into the dragon snake — CSX2036 — now and then.

    He also drove one of the Cobras a few years back in an exhibition at Watkins Glen, a popular road course in the Finger Lakes region of New York that plays host not only to SCCA events but also major NASCAR races.

    It was 3032, a real big-block beast.

    "I said to Gail after, 'I cannot believe this car,' " Miller said. "You know, they talk about cars smoking the tires uncontrollably, and you don't get traction when you're under power like that.

    "I said, 'In first gear, it felt like I was on ice. In second gear, it still felt like I was on ice. In third gear, it came down to where it was probably just snow, and fourth gear it was just wet.' I mean, in fourth gear you'd be going along 30 miles an hour — you're not even in your power band, not even close — and get on it, and the tires would just break loose.

    "It's just a monster. I mean, it is really fast — and a heck of a rush. . . . It's always amazing to me how skillful the drivers have to be to just handle the sheer power of the car."

    Yet it is not a need for speed, or even power, that drives Miller's affection for his Cobras. Instead it is the simple satisfaction of seeing, and feeling, performance expectations being met.

    "If you got in fast Cameros or Firebirds or Mustangs or Corvettes — you'd say, 'Wow, this is something,' " Miller said. "But you wouldn't be ready for what would happen in a Cobra."

    http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600153563,00.html
     
  2. daltondavid

    daltondavid Well-Known Member

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    Now that Guy is a Success story! Only in America Baby!! Only in the Good old USA!!!
     
  3. 289Cobra

    289Cobra Active Member

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    Nice how he refers to the replica Cobra's as "ugly stepchildren". Guess he kinda forgot where he came from, and that not everybody can afford multi-million dollar originals. If it wasn't for us low-lifes and our "ugly" replicas, the general public would NEVER get to see a Cobra, because guys like him rarely get them out except for wine-and-cheese events. What an a-hole. :grrr:
     
  4. Power Surge

    Power Surge Member

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    I agree with you, but many people who know him claim he's not really like that. Kind of hard to take that statement out of context thought.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 8, 2005
  5. DragonPilot

    DragonPilot Member

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    Interesting story, about a serious Shelby fan. Shouldn't be so harsh on Cobra Replicas, though. Not when he owns sort of a replica himself: CSX2036, the car he keeps promoting as a Dragonsnake. It's a real Cobra allright, but not a Dragonsnake. Never was. I know . . . I happen to own the Dragonsnake he claims to own. See what the Shelby Registry has to say about CSX2036:

    http://www.dragonsnakes.com/saac.html

    Tim Buckley, the reporter who interviewed Larry, may want to set the record straight.
     
    Last edited: Nov 11, 2005

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