[Bill Wells]

From the Detroit News, 1-4-04 (edited to fit size limit):















GARDENA, Calif. -- The cavernous garage went dead silent as the team from
Ford Motor Co. gathered around the vehicle hidden under a silk tarp.

Then Carroll Shelby, clad in black from head to toe, walked up slowly,
savoring the moment he had thought about for more than 30 years.

And when Ford design chief J Mays whisked the cover off the sleek,
one-of-a-kind, 2004 Ford Shelby Cobra supercar on Dec. 15, Shelby was home
again.

“This is what I have been looking forward to for a long, long time,” Shelby
said in his East Texas drawl. “As the NASCAR boys would say, this ... is ...
awesome.”

Tonight, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Shelby
and Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr. will unveil the new Cobra concept car to the
world’s automotive media.

But as impressive as the 600-horsepower, silver-and-gray Cobra is on stage,
the real star will be the 80-year-old Shelby, the biggest name in American
auto racing in the 1960s and a Ford icon for the ages.



It’s been 35 years since Shelby and Ford bitterly parted ways, ending one of
the most storied partnerships the auto industry has ever seen.




A generation later, it was his son, Edsel Ford II, who brought Shelby back
to the automaker as a special consultant on future products.

The peace was made in the summer of 2001, at the annual Concours d’Elegance
classic car show at Pebble Beach in northern California.

“I said to Carroll, ‘we’ve got to put all this stuff behind us,’ ” Edsel
Ford told The Detroit News recently. “It was very important to me personally
that we put everything aside and looked to the future.”

Since last spring, Shelby has met regularly with the designers and engineers
working on “Project Daisy,” Ford’s top-secret effort to create a modern,
21st century version of the famed Cobra.

The stakes were sky-high. If anything were to punctuate Ford’s corporate
turnaround, it would be a brand-new Cobra. A misstep, Ford executives knew,
would be disastrous.




When Ford brought the finished product to the sprawling headquarters of
Carroll Shelby International outside Los Angeles last month, the circle was
complete.

Shelby, the prodigal son who once sued Ford for $30 million, had returned to
the fold.

“I’ll bet you boys,” he said with a craggy smile, “that we’ve got a hit on
our hands.”




With a $25,000 stake from Ford in 1962, Shelby developed the first Cobra, a
pocket-rocket roadster capable of zero-to-60 in just under four seconds.






“What Carroll did for Mustang in the 1960s will never be repeated,” Edsel
Ford said. “We were ensconced with Carroll. It was unique.”

But Shelby was still an outsider at Ford, and vulnerable to the shifting
politics in the Glass House. Ford’s new president, Bunkie Knudsen, wanted to
bring the high-performance program in-house.

“Iacocca couldn’t protect me anymore,” Shelby said. “I couldn’t get anything
done.”
.”

Ford becomes the enemy

A call from his old pal Iacocca, by then the chief executive of Chrysler
Corp., brought Shelby back to the United States in 1981. He began
customizing dull Dodges, injecting performance and laying the groundwork for
the sports car that ultimately became the Viper.

Ford was the enemy now. In 1986, Shelby sued Ford for $30 million for
alleged trademark infringement when it put the GT350 name on a 20th
anniversary edition of the Mustang. The legal battle raged for nearly five
years before the suit was settled out of court.

His racing associates from the glory days saw the toll the fight with Ford
took on Shelby.

“You know those championships that Ford won in the 1960s didn’t just
happen,” said Bernie Kretzschmar, a former Shelby-American race mechanic.
“Carroll made it all happen.”

Moreover, Shelby was slowly dying. Two heart-bypass operations in the 1970s
failed to correct a hereditary condition. By 1990, his heart function had
shrunk to a frightening 14 percent.

“My doctor decided I better have a heart transplant,” he said. “Soon.”

And in typically dramatic, Shelby fashion, he got his new heart from a
38-year-old gambler who dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage in a Las Vegas
casino. Less than a year later, Shelby was driving the Dodge Viper pace car
at the Indianapolis 500.



But there was always a gnawing sense that he had another chapter left in his
automotive career. The seeds of his return to Ford were planted by two of
the automaker’s top engineers — John Coletti and Chris Theodore.

Coletti and Theodore harbored a dream of building a new Ford GT, a modern
re-issue of the car that won Le Mans. When Ford CEO Jacques Nasser gave the
project the green light, they reached out to Shelby.

“The Shelby name is still pure magic,” Theodore said. “It seemed natural for
him to come back to Ford.”

The deal was struck over dinner at Pebble Beach in 2001. Edsel Ford, who
spent a summer as a teen-ager working in Shelby’s race shop, pitched the
idea personally.

“This is not some ceremonial thing,” Edsel Ford said. “We want to build a
real GT, and we want your personal imprint on it.”

Shelby wasn’t sure at first about the overture.

“You know, for 35 years nobody gave a damn about Le Mans and what we
accomplished,” he said. “But hell, when Edsel came and said they want to
build a real sports car, well, that’s what I do.”

He advised the GT team on technical issues, but his involvement ratcheted up
when the Cobra project got under way last March.

“He’s still full of piss and vinegar,” said Mays, the Ford design chief.
“The thing is, nobody knows what makes a Cobra better than Carroll.”

At one point, Shelby thought the new Cobra’s front end came off as too
flush, too streamlined, and lacking the wide-mouth, menacing look of the
original.

“If I’m honest, I’m not sure the front end looks as much like a Cobra as it
should,” Shelby told Mays.

Changes were made. The final version evokes the raw, performance-first Cobra
heritage in a modern package. For his part, Shelby was more impressed with
what Ford did under the hood.



“We showed the GT as a concept, and we built it,” Mays said. “We showed the
Mustang, and we built it. We’re showing the Cobra, and you can take it from
there.”

For Shelby, the return to Ford is like taking a long-awaited victory lap.

“You know, I don’t kid myself that I’m going to have a big impact on what
Ford does with these cars,” he said. “But it feels real good to be back.”



The day before he saw the finished Cobra, Shelby and his wife, Cleo, drove
down from their hilltop home in Los Angeles to the annual Christmas party of
the Orange County Cobra Club. When he walked into the restaurant packed with
Cobra lovers, the room erupted into a standing ovation.

“He may act like he’s just one of the guys, but he’s our living legend,”
said John Marshall, a retired engineer who owns a Cobra and a GT350. “He’s
our hero. He’s done it all.”

Tonight, at Cobo Center, the legend is rekindled at Ford with a new Cobra,
but the same old Shelby.

“He’s come home again, and that’s pretty fine,” Edsel Ford said. “He has
come home, and he belongs here. He belongs at Ford