[Historybuff]

I heard that the IRS told Reventlow they didn't consider his business a business but a hobby (especially since he wasn't advertising cars for sale, which at least Cunningham was) so he wouldn't be able to continue to write off his expenses of building cars, campaigning them etc. I understand the IRS is more or less the same today-- if you have a business going for 5 years and never turn a profit for five years, then as far as they are concerned, it's a hobby. If you are an IRS employee, let me know if I am wrong.I also believe that Shelby-American never was profitable in the days they built Cobras, that everything was re-billed to Ford. There is an invoice in one of the Dave Friedman books for a Cobra that says right on it first bill Shelby American and then something like "rebill to Ford". Supposedly the reason that Shelby American was set up separately from Ford was sort of to have a "deniability" factor--if it turned out sour, Ford could cancel the contract and let them go off on their own.

There never would have been a need for Shelby American if Briggs Cunningham would have kept building his own cars and had a better powerplant--that Chrysler Hemi was too heavy, and Cunningham, for a sports car guy, didn't concentrate enough on lightweight roadsters, and they cost him too much to make in Italy to have a ghost of a chance of making a profit. But going back to a "promotable personality," Briggs Cunningham was already a multi-millioniare (his middle name was "Swift "as in Swift Meat Packing fortune) so asking him to schlep around to car dealerships and tout cars would have been a stretch, as such might conflict with his yachting or vacation trips to the Continent and so forth. Shelby was poor as a churchmouse so more amenable to signing up for a deal where he would be required to make rounds of car dealerships and car shows and "man the booth," wherever his sponsor required. And that brings us to the Shelby Mustang. If Ford's deal with Shelby had begun and ended just with the Cobra, we would be talking about a smaller footprint in history but when the GT40 came along and he helped reconfigure a dog to be competitive and the Shelby Mustang came along and resulted in a car that could be mass produced in the USA, the Shelby connection began to pay off for Ford. So in sum, he was the right guy with the right idea at the right time and regardless of what he's done since, he is a giant in American auto history.