Go Like Hell

by A. J. Baime

  Iacocca spruced up the line of showroom cars, adding glitz and velocity. The sober Falcon compact became the speedy Falcon Sprint. In the Galaxie, buyers could pay $461.60 extra for the 427-cubic-inch engine that debuted at Daytona. Iacocca toured the country holding press conferences about his “souped up, jazzed up” Fords, from a crowded Hollywood Palladium to Chicago to Detroit.

  On Memorial Day, Iacocca took his seat at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the annual 500. Clutching a stopwatch, wearing a sport shirt with three buttons open at the top, he gazed down at the movable feast—America’s most prestigious automobile race. Ford had partnered with Colin Chapman, the British founder of Lotus, to build two revolutionary rear-engined Indy cars. A reporter spotted Iacocca.

  GM is attacking Ford over its investment in racing, he said. Any comment?

  “If racing sells cars, what’s wrong with that?” Iacocca answered. “It gives a guy who’s going to shell out $3,000 a chance to measure the car’s total performance.”

  He was careful to slip in those two words—“total performance”—Ford’s new advertising motto.

  As the green Lotus-Fords were wheeled onto the track, a hush fell over the crowd of nearly 250,000. A curious murmur followed. The Ford executive in charge of the Indy campaign, Jacque Passino, grabbed Iacocca’s arm.

  “Son of a gun, Lee! You hear that? They’re all saying our name. That’s what it’s all about, man!”

  Iacocca smiled. The excitement was tangible. “Forget all the details,” he told Passino. “I’ll take care of the details. Just go out there and race.”

  At the end of the day, Scottish driver Jimmy Clark took second in a Lotus-Ford behind Parnelli Jones’s Watson Offenhauser in the fastest Indy 500 in history.

  In Ford Motor Company’s accounting department, a bespectacled numbers guy named George Merwin saw his desk towering high with paperwork. Henry II was spending unprecedented amounts on checkered flags those first twelve months, and it was Merwin’s job to keep track of it all. Stock cars, Indy cars, travel expenses . . . Would the investment pay off? All the company had so far was publicity, which didn’t add up in the accounting department.

  Curiously, in the spring of 1963, the company began hearing extraordinary amounts of buzz from hard-core sports car enthusiasts. This struck everyone in Dearborn as odd. Ford didn’t make a real sports car. Not yet, at least. That spring a car called the Cobra was crushing competition in Sports Car Club of America competition. It had a Ford engine in it, and it was built by a man named Carroll Shelby. Ford’s investment in the car was negligible, and yet, Shelby’s car was earning the company file cabinets’ worth of news clippings.

  Iacocca would never forget the day Shelby first walked into his office, a year earlier, in 1962. Ford’s chief engineer Donald Frey made the introduction. Shelby was a tall Texan with a Lone Star accent—a “good lookin’ son of a bitch,” in Iacocca parlance. When they shook hands, Iacocca felt the calloused palm of a man who built cars, who had worked the Texas oil fields, and had competed in some of the most hard-fought automobile races throughout the 1950s. Shelby carried himself like a rich oil man, but as Iacocca would soon learn, he didn’t have a dime.

  The name Shelby didn’t register with Iacocca or Frey. They were Detroit executives, not racing buffs. They didn’t know Shelby was a champion driver, and that the thirty-seven-year-old had retired due to health reasons. That he was way down on his luck. As far as Iacocca was concerned, Shelby was just another would-be auto man showing up asking for money.

  Shelby gave Iacocca the hard sell. By marrying a powerful American V8 engine to a small, lightweight European chassis, he could make a hell of a sports car for little money. “The idea is staring American car manufacturers in the face,” Shelby said. “With $25,000, I can build two cars that’ll blow off the Corvettes.”

  Blow off the Corvettes? Iacocca thought to himself. The undisputed king of American sports cars?

  By the time Shelby was done with his pitch Iacocca was sold. It wasn’t just the idea he bought into. It was the man. Shelby was instantly likeable. He spoke at a high volume from years of trying to talk over revving engines, and he conveyed in his voice a sense of what was at stake in it all for himself—something far more than money. It took one genius of a salesman to recognize another, and there they were, Lee Iacocca and Carroll Shelby staring at each other.

  “Give him the money and get him outta here,” Iacocca told Frey, “before he bites somebody.”

  Ninety days later, Shelby was back in Dearborn with the first Cobra. The chassis came from A. C. Cars of England, a small financially ailing company that made roadsters and wheelchairs for invalids. The engine was a new small-block Ford V8, a cheaply made but wonderful lightweight high-performance power plant. The Cobra had a low profile, with gills on its side, glittery wire-spoked wheels, and a long nose that suggested plenty of muscle under the hood. It appeared to be moving even while it stood still.

  “You know,” Frey said, looking at the thing, “I think you might be onto something here.”

  Shelby’s bills were added to the pile on George Merwin’s desk in accounting.

  Shelby came from a desiccated East Texas dot-on-the-map called Leesburg, population two hundred. He was the son of a horse-and-buggy mail carrier. As a child he spent hours sitting by his door watching the first automobile traffic motor by on the newly surfaced road in front of his house. His father took him to his first automobile race. Shelby’s father told him, “There’s no man born with a drop of red blood in his veins that doesn’t enjoy a race of some kind.”

  World War II gave Shelby his first taste of speed. He joined the Air Corps and was stationed at Lackland Army Air Force Base outside San Antonio, where he learned to fly B-25s, B-26s, and later B-29s. When the war ended he got married, had three kids, and set out looking for a way to make money. He started a dump truck business but it failed. He worked the oil fields. He tried his hand at raising chickens but ended up with twenty thousand dead birds, killed by a case of botulism. One day a friend named Ed Wilkins asked Shelby if he’d drive a car he’d built in a competition. That’s when it all began.

  “Drive it?” Shelby said. “Where?”

  “There’s a drag meet in a few days at the Grand Prairie Naval Station, between Dallas and Fort Worth.”

  “You mean just straight dragging on a strip?”

  “Yeah. It’s a quarter-mile and I’d sure like to see how this baby goes.”

  “You just got yourself a driver.”

  Shelby made the fastest time that day. Winning suited him, and he found himself in the right place at the right time. As expensive European sports cars appeared in the United States for the first time after World War II, a road racing Renaissance took root. Rather than oval speedways, these drivers were racing on twisty road circuits like in Europe. At twenty-nine, Shelby began showing up with sports cars owned by his friends at races all over Texas and Oklahoma. One 100-plus-degree August day in 1953, Shelby was working on his farm and found himself late for a race at Eagle Mountain Naval Station in Fort Worth. He arrived just in time and competed while still wearing his striped farmer overalls. He won the race, but the overalls stole the show. They became his trademark.

  A rich patron named Tony Parravano took Shelby overseas for his first time, in 1955. Parravano, a thirty-something-year-old bowling-ball-shaped man, had made millions developing land in Southern California. Rumor had it that he was connected to the Mob, and in two years’ time he was to disappear forever, his body never found.

  “I’m going to buy another 15 Ferraris,” Parravano told Shelby before they left for Italy, “and I’d like you to drive them for me. Any of them, I don’t care. Take your pick.”

  Shelby spent a month hanging around the Ferrari factory while Parravano negotiated the deal. When Il Commendatore learned that the Texan was one of the hottest talents in America, he requested a meeting. Ferrari spoke in Italian and his secretary translated. He offered Shelby a contract—50 perc
ent of purses plus a few lire a month.

  “You can drive some sports car races,” Ferrari said.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Ferrari,” Shelby responded, “I got three kids at home. I make more money driving in the States.”

  Ferrari was incredulous. No one ever turned down a spot on his team. “What’s this about money?” he said. “You’re at the beginning of your career. You should be honored to drive for us.”

  Shelby faced Ferrari down, then stood up and left.

  Two years later, Shelby rolled the dice overseas with the Aston Martin team. In Europe, he became part of the international fraternity of elite racing drivers. He was so affable, even his competition adored him, and he could drive like a comet. His face appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1957: Sports Car Driver of the Year.

  One morning in 1960, Shelby awoke with a sharp pain that felt “like a knife being stuck in my chest.” He was diagnosed with angina pectoralis, a heart ailment in which the coronary arteries are starved for blood. For the next few months he lived on a steady diet of nitroglycerin tablets, tucking pills under his tongue during races to keep the engine in his rib cage from overheating. He drove his last race on December 3, 1960, placing fifth in a Maserati at the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Grand Prix. At thirty-seven, he found himself out of work. He never did make much money—$75,000 his best year. Good money, but not enough to retire.

  Shelby had three kids, an ex-wife, and dead chickens in the bank. One night he was in Lake Tahoe as a guest of William Harrah, the casino magnate and a real car freak. Shelby met a beautiful brunette named Joan. They sat together drinking. Care for another? She was gorgeous and he “could talk the leaves off the trees,” as one acquaintance put it. He had this idea, he told her, an idea he’d been tossing around for some time.

  “To build my own sports car. . .”

  With a tiny investment from Ford Motor Company, Shelby hired his first employee, his new girlfriend Joan, and got himself an answering service. He built the first Cobra out of the back of Dean Moon’s hot-rod shop in Santa Fe Springs. Iacocca came through with more money, and Shelby moved into a shop at 1042 Princeton Drive in Venice, California, not far from the little house he lived in near the beach in Playa del Rey.

  Ford Motor Company displayed the $5,995 Cobra—with its “Powered by Ford” logo just aft of the front wheel—at the 1962 New York Auto Show. With Ford money Shelby purchased his first advertisement. It was tucked into the October 1962 issue of Playboy, amid news of “The Return of the Ascot” and a new “tart-tongued” Tonight Show host named Johnny Carson. On the racetrack, the Cobra performed the impossible, beating the Corvette Stingrays. The Dearborn suits couldn’t believe their eyes when Road & Track’s June 1963 issue landed on their desks: “It seems that in a ridiculously short time, the Corvette has been clouted from its position of absolute primacy.”

  Chevrolet’s Corvette had been a thumbtack on every Ford executive’s seat since its debut ten years earlier.

  When Iacocca flew out to have a look at Shelby’s operation in Venice, he found an amazing grease-stained facility on a sun-baked back street. There was an open-door policy. You could walk right in. “Hi, I’m Lee,” Iacocca said, introducing himself to Shelby’s employees. They knew who he was. They liked that he didn’t have any pretensions. Iacocca knew better than to wear a suit. He showed up in shorts.

  Shelby took Iacocca around. Racing cars were everywhere, in various forms of undress. Piles of Goodyear tires reached up to the ceiling. There was a dyno room, inside which engines shrieked day and night. In the metal shop, workers were fabricating parts by hand right there.

  Most of Shelby’s employees looked as if they were straight out of high school. They weren’t college types, but they were street smart. Shelby called them “hot-rodders trying to prove that they weren’t the dipshits everyone in the world thought they were.” They knew how to weld, how to fabricate, how to make cars go fast. Walking around the shop, hearing the hiss of air hoses and smelling the sweat and oil, Iacocca knew that Shelby had tapped into something very real and powerful.

  “I’m impressed,” Iacocca said.

  “Shucks,” Shelby said, “I’m not an engineer. I’m not even very smart. The only thing I understand is human nature. I just like to bring the right people together and see what happens. I think I’ve put the right people together at Shelby American.”

  In the summer of 1963, one year after Ford Motor Company backed out of the Detroit Safety Resolution, racing drivers turned the nation’s tracks into action-packed advertisements for Ford cars. Dearborn began to hear buzz from the dealerships. Cars were rolling out of showrooms at a speedy pace. As the economy started to look up, Americans went on a car-buying binge, setting a blistering sales pace that threatened to beat the record year of 1955. Sunday after Sunday, Ford and “Powered-by-Ford” Shelby Cobras claimed more trophies, and each Monday, Iacocca followed the numbers on the upswing.

  As the summer ended, the New York Times made it official with a story about Ford’s soaring sales. It appeared on the front page. “Does winning automobile races sell cars?” the article began. “You bet it does.” The piece called the success of racing as a marketing tool “immediate and remarkable.”

  Outside Henry II’s corner office window, the stacks of the Rouge spewed smoke at full bore. But Henry was not in his office. Many executives noticed he had been spending far less time in the Glass House. In fact, the Deuce had set his sights on something far more ambitious than anything on Lee Iacocca’s radar.

  On a drizzly June afternoon, Henry II landed in a chartered jet in Engl and and arrived at the Ford factory at Dagenham outside London. When a reporter asked about his visit, he answered, “I came to Europe to see what was becoming of our investments, which between 1960 and 1964 will have totaled $800 million.”

  Followed by an entourage of company board members, Henry II disappeared inside Dagenham’s fiery belly. What the Rouge was to America, Dagenham was to Europe—an industrial metropolis, the largest factory on the continent. Its belching stacks towered over the River Thames about eight miles east of London’s city center. Henry II could remember standing on this piece of earth back in 1928 and surveying the horizon, seeing nothing but desolate marshlands. He was eleven years old when he watched his father Edsel break ground at Dagenham with a ceremonial shovel, inaugurating “the new Detroit of Europe.”

  Now, thirty-four years later, the plant had been expanded and modernized. Its 170 gigantic presses turned 600 tons of sheet metal into car bodies every day. Roughly 1,200 Ford Cortinas were rolling off the assembly line every 24 hours, headed for the artificial rainstorm facility, where they were tested for leaks before being shipped to dealerships all over Europe.

  Twelve hundred Cortinas a day. The numbers were staggering, but Henry II knew it wasn’t going to be enough. Projections pointed at an incredible upsurge in demand for automobiles in Europe. Unlike the United States, Europe had staged most of World War II and its economies and infrastructures had been devastated. Finally the continent had caught up. What occurred in America in the 1950s was about to happen in Europe in the 1960s—a crystallization of the middle class and all that came with it. A booming economy was going to fuel a car-buying binge among a huge population, many of whom had never owned an automobile before.

  That spring, Henry II was overseeing the most ambitious expansion project in his family company’s history, and almost all of it was in Europe. A plant in Halewood outside Liverpool would be operational by October with eleven thousand workers. A new foundry was in the works near Dagenham with a power station strong enough to supply electricity to a city of 160,000 (such as Modena, Italy).

  Henry II envisioned a world in flux. His industry no longer had borders. For the first time, foreign cars posed a major threat to his market share in America, from expensive Jaguars to cheap Volkswagens. (He is rumored to have called the Volkswagen “a little shitbox.”) And in Europe, American car companies were battling for c
ustomers like never before. Both Chrysler Corporation and General Motors were investing wildly in the market overseas. Henry II upped the ante, spending hundreds of millions to buy back shares of European Ford subsidiaries in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, France, Britain, and West Germany. He was consolidating power.

  Even then, as he toured Dagenham, he had in his mind an idea: to launch the first ever pan-European automobile company, a highly coordinated company that would produce and sell affordable cars in noncommunist nations from England to the border of Russia. He knew the day would soon come when Ford Motor Company stood to profit as much in Europe as it did in America. Maybe more. He needed to send a message.

  Ford cars were the best in the world.

  Since his earliest days, Henry II’s father Edsel had opened his eyes to what the continent had to offer. Europe was a place of beauty, romance, fantasy. Through all his suffering until his death, Edsel Ford had found in Europe his escape. He adored the old world’s sense of aesthetics and its luxurious automobiles. The home he built for his family in Grosse Pointe was a monument to Europe. The roof’s stone tiles, stained glass windows, and much of the furniture came from Europe. The main staircase where Henry II first learned to climb steps had been shipped across the Atlantic.

  Like his father, Henry II found himself seduced by Europe. Only in his case, it wasn’t cars or masterworks of art that hooked him. It was a woman. Far from Dearborn, where his every move and every shift of the stock price were scrutinized, Henry II was living a secret life.

  Her name was Cristina Vettore Austin. She was a thirty-six-year-old Italian divorcée living in Milan. Henry II had met her at Maxim’s in Paris. With his wife and children, he had been invited to a party in honor of Princess Grace of Monaco. He spotted Cristina: an exquisite woman with green eyes, earthy dark blond hair, and a model’s figure. She was mingling that night among Europe’s inner circle of wealthy jet setters. Henry II switched the place cards at the dinner table so his was next to hers. She spoke English with a charming Italian accent.